Following a six-month campaign, backed by charities, eight MPs – and most importantly Manchester Evening News readers who signed our petition – the mayor has announced a massive policy change.

Andy Burnham has committed to giving 8,000 homeless children in temporary accommodation free school travel in massive win following a Manchester Evening News campaign. Following six months of campaigning, the mayor has announced his office will pay for free bus travel to and from school for children placed in temporary accommodation from later this year – a huge step forward for the lives of Greater Manchester’s 8,000 children in temporary housing. Under current government transport rules, youngsters are only eligible for free travel if they live more than two miles from class (three miles for over-8s) and no ‘suitable school’ is nearer. But it’s almost impossible to be further than two miles from a school in the city. That presents homeless families in desperate circumstances a horrible choice: Pay for buses they didn’t need to before, or move a child away from a support network when they need it most.

It’s a choice schools hit out at. It’s a choice the Manchester Evening News believes homeless families shouldn’t need to consider. Now, it’s a choice they don’t have to make. After three major charities, eight Greater Manchester MPs, and hundreds of residents got behind the initiative, Burnham confirmed on Thursday (February 5) free Bee Network bus travel to-and-from school will be available for children from later this year. He said: “I commend the Manchester Evening News for highlighting the issue and am glad we can do something about it. Temporary accommodation is a symptom of wider housing and inequality issues up and down the country. It’s amongst the most ambitious in the UK and we are working hard to reduce homelessness, with better support, early intervention and, critically, more high-quality, affordable homes. Part of that is reducing the need for families to be in temporary accommodation.”

He added: “Using our locally-controlled Bee Network buses to support families when they need it most is the right thing to do. A move into temporary accommodation is often a massive upheaval for families and can be a worrying time. With this measure, the cost of travel to school will be one less thing for families to worry about. It will mean parents and carers don’t have to choose between an extra demand on their household budget and keeping their children with friends and teachers they know and trust.”

Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) has confirmed money is set aside for the scheme in its budget that is ready to be approved next week. Should it get the green light as expected, TfGM said it will work with the region’s 10 councils to finalise details on eligibility and implement it ‘later this year’. While an exact date for implementation has not been given, if the programme is in place for the new academic year, it will mean the campaign has gone from dream to reality in a year. After the Manchester Evening News learned schools were frustrated with the current transport rules, with some even in a bizarre situation where they would use grant funding from the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity to buy Bee Network bus passes for their homeless children, we decided to step in.

Formally launching the campaign and petition on August 10, high-profile Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey came out in support of the move a day later, saying: “These children need stability. They need access to their school, their teachers, their friends. A free bus pass is a small step that would make a big difference.” By the end of that week, momentum began to build. Hundreds of people signed our petition, three charities — Wood Street Mission, Shared Health, and Resolve Poverty — supported the move, as did another MP, Christian Wakeford. Pressure really ramped up by the August bank holiday weekend, as more MPs followed suit, namely Yasmin Qreshi, Afzal Khan, Lisa Smart and Tom Morrison, who revealed he’d been homeless himself as a child.

Graham Stringer echoed the calls on August 26, so by the time the mayor made his first public appearance of the autumn, he couldn’t ignore the issue. “These are kids, who I guess will feel a bit forgotten,” Burnham said on September 1. “What I can say today is we’re going to look carefully at it to see if we can do it. But I’m personally sympathetic to what [the M.E.N. is] saying. I think the vast majority of people in Greater Manchester would be as well.” While the mayor took away the proposals, new data emerged in October suggesting 5,397 children in temporary accommodation in Greater Manchester could benefit from reform. Updated estimates later revised this to around 8,000.

Another MP, Debbie Abrahams, came out in support of the move following the autumn reshuffle, being the eighth to do so in early December. Around the same time, the mayor revealed for the first time the plans were being seriously examined. He said on December 3: “What might open the door is we are moving to a more interventionist space as a combined authority when we signed off using 400 empty properties to reduce the bill in temporary accommodation. We are looking at all of it. I am sympathetic.” In late January, more support came when the Green Party proposed Manchester council formally back the campaign, and when ruling Labour councillors got behind it, they agreed to write directly to the mayor urging him to act.

Hours after the vote, Burnham said the ‘case was clear’ change was needed, sparking an anxious few days’ wait to see if money would be set aside in the new budget. On Thursday (February 5), Greater Manchester got its answer: There is. That’s a victory for the council, three charities, eight MPs, and hundreds of Manchester Evening News readers. But most importantly, it’s a win for 8,000 children.

Council leader Cllr Marion Atkinson has welcomed the announcement by the Government of new funding and flexibilities that will provide thousands more families in the UK with quality social homes, reports MySefton News.

Cllr Atkinson said: “We have said repeatedly that individuals and families need safe, secure homes to thrive, so I am glad to see the Government announce these new measures to increase construction of new homes and reduce the numbers of families and children in temporary accommodation and on housing waiting lists. In Sefton, we have shown our commitment to this through a number of measures.”

“In the coming months, we will be getting the keys to 18 newly built apartments at Buckley Hill in Netherton, which will be Sefton’s first new Council housing since 2006. The brand-new homes will be let to local people through the Property Pool Plus housing allocations scheme, which means that those in housing need and with a connection to the local area will be given priority. And just recently, we announced our new Sefton 2030 partnership with The Sovini Group to build 1,000 new, social and affordable homes for local people, by 2030.”

Sefton Council is identifying land it owns such as former schools and community sites, that can be pooled with The Sovini Group’s development pipeline. If approved, construction will start on 400 homes across sites in Bootle, Netherton, Southport, Seaforth, and Formby. This will be alongside Sovini’s plans to deliver 600 additional homes by 2030 through its own developments.

Cllr Atkinson added: “Sefton Council has been successful in securing grant funding through the Government’s Council Housebuilding Support Fund. “The Fund is to support councils in the delivery of new social and affordable housing, and we are using it to pay for a range of work to help get our new partnership with The Sovini Group underway as soon as possible.”

More than 100 people were threatened with eviction from their homes to make way for asylum seekers after companies linked to a prominent GP started running migrant hotels, reports the BBC.

Firms connected to Dr Faisal Maassarani became landlords of Serco hotels in 2022 when asylum applications were almost at a 20-year high. But soon after a hotel in Seel Street in Liverpool owned by one of the firms was found to be unsuitable, people in one of their Liverpool housing complexes were told they had to move out over “urgent” fire safety issues, unaware that 116 asylum seekers had seemingly been lined up to replace them almost immediately.

Maassarani, whose involvement with one of the firms was hidden behind a complex structure of companies and trusts registered in the Isle of Man, said he had no part in the day-to-day running of the buildings and did not authorise any communication with tenants. Maassarani operates several GP surgeries in Knowsley and Sefton and in 2009 set up the social isolation charity Care Merseyside. Between 2021 and 2022, a company he had founded, Schloss Roxburghe Holdings, acquired about £5m of freeholds on buildings that were originally owned by property developer Elliot Lawless before his companies went into administration.

In August 2022, when some of Maassarani’s business associates bought the Waverley Hotel in Whitehaven in Cumbria, Serco moved asylum seekers into it within a week. In November, one of Maassarani’s companies then spent £3.5m buying the King’s Gap hotel in Hoylake, which had been running as asylum seeker accommodation since 2020. At the same time, asylum seekers were moved into the Seel Street hotel as the firms’ relationships with Serco and the Home Office expanded. And the BBC’s investigations suggest it was the use of that hotel that directly led to dozens of people almost losing their homes in an alleged illegal eviction attempt.

A tenant of Parliament Place in Liverpool told the BBC he came home from work in March 2023 to find a letter from Schloss Roxburghe Holdings (SRH). Andrew Lewis said he was left in “disbelief” at what the letter said. The letter told tenants they needed to move out because the building required urgent fire safety works. Lewis, 47, said: “People were afraid, panicking… and didn’t want to be evicted.” The IT worker added: “They put it vague enough to make us assume we could come back in again. It wasn’t until someone emailed the management company and said what happens after this four-week period that they said they were going to terminate our leases. And that’s when we thought, we’re not standing for this.”

The tenants did not know about plans to move asylum seekers into their homes, nor that the plan had been under discussion for up to three months. Those the BBC has spoken to also said they did not know that the buy-to-let landlords who owned the flats they lived in had been directly approached by an “agent” of SRH promoting the asylum deal to them. In February 2023, an email was sent to some of the private landlords of flats in the building telling them a deal with “the United Kingdom Home Office” would give them a guaranteed £435 a month per flat, potentially for up to seven years. The email said the Home Office had “undertaken a full survey of the building” in December 2022, and had then issued a “heads of terms” for a contract to use it from March 1.

The BBC understands the unsigned and undated “heads of terms” was actually a draft proposal, and that no agreement had been made. But at the time, the Home Office and Serco were facing pressure from Liverpool City Council about the use of the SRH-owned Seel Street hotel as asylum accommodation because its location in the middle of the city centre’s nightlife district made it unsuitable. The timing suggests it was likely it was these asylum seekers that were destined to move into Parliament Place. Liverpool City Council said it had visited the building “informally” in February 2023 “to check room sizes for intended occupancy” and whether the fire alarm system was suitable. It is understood that not all of the building’s private landlords were told about the plan, and that when some were, they objected to it.

The tenants were then contacted directly by letter by SRH and told they had to move out for fire safety works to take place. Liverpool City Council said it had never suggested anyone needed to move out of the building. Lewis, whose own landlord was not aware of the move, said he “100% believed” that the fire safety claims were a ruse to clear the building. SRH shelved the asylum seeker plan, and was reported in the Liverpool Echo at the time to have withdrawn from the plan when it became clear the “upheaval to tenants was too great”. The tenants did not have to leave, and, to their knowledge, the fire safety works never took place.

Maassarani set up SRH in 2018 in the Isle of Man. Its directors were all professionals from other Isle of Man or British Virgin Islands-based firms. And because the shares in the company are owned by a foundation, there is no publicly available information linking Maassarani to it. The GP said the revelation of his involvement in the company was not in the public interest, that he derived no financial income from it, and that while he had been told about plans to move asylum seekers into Parliament Place, he was not involved in the day-to-day running of the company. The trust which owns SRH was founded to pay for education and training for his family, and Maassarani has a personal business history with people believed to have been involved in both running SRH and managing his interests in asylum seeker accommodation.

The agent who wrote to Parliament Place landlords promoting the asylum seeker deal signed off the correspondence as ‘Mike Murphy’. The BBC understands this to be Michael Murphy, at the time a partner at major Liverpool law firm and Everton stadium sponsor Hill Dickinson. The BBC have asked Murphy about his alleged involvement, and he said he could not respond because of client confidentiality. The BBC has found that as well as having acted as a solicitor for both Maassarani and Lawless, Murphy had personal business links to both men in relation to property deals worth nearly £2m.

He is also the son-in-law of one of the directors of the firm that managed the Waverley asylum seeker hotel in Cumbria, 76-year-old former building firm boss David Lloyd. Lloyd is now the sole director of SRH, which in recent months has faced fresh illegal evictions allegations in relation to another of its Liverpool buildings, Queensland Place. In November, leaseholders there secured an injunction against the firm to stop it changing the locks on some tenants’ rooms as part of a row over ground rent payments, with the company warned its assets could be seized and its director jailed if it was breached. Maassarani and Lloyd are both currently directors of a firm called Optimus Hotel Management, which has recently taken a loan out against the £3.5m Wirral King’s Gap asylum seeker hotel. Solicitor Murphy acted as a witness to the application.

The Wirral hotel remains asylum seeker accommodation, but the Cumbria hotel was closed in December 2023, owing more than £170,000 to unpaid staff and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It had been operated through a company that did not have its own bank account, and its liquidation fees were paid by another firm of which Maassarani is a director. Murphy – who resigned from Hill Dickinson last April – declined to respond to any of the BBC’s questions, citing “client confidentiality”. Hill Dickinson said it could not comment on “the matters of any individual organisation or the private interests of existing or former partners”. Lloyd has not responded to the BBC’s enquiries.

In a statement to the BBC, a spokesman for Dr Maassarani said he was “a local GP with over 20 years of NHS service to thousands of patients and their families across the Merseyside area” and “holds senior leadership positions within the NHS”. The statement added: “He is not in any way involved in the running or management of Schloss Roxburghe Holdings, neither does he benefit financially from it. As such he had no knowledge of, and was not involved in or responsible for, any communications with tenants at Parliament Place or Queensland Place.” It added he “is neither a party, defendant or respondent” in the injunction proceedings relating to Queensland Place.

Liverpool Riverside’s Labour MP Kim Johnson said the incident at Parliament Place raised questions about how asylum accommodation deals were done, and rejected Maassarani’s suggestion there was no public interest in knowledge of his link to SRH. She added: “It’s not good enough. I think there needs to be more investigation and scrutiny of how contracts are awarded and the whole procurement process. More due diligence is definitely required.” The Home Office – which the BBC understands has to approve all accommodation looking to be used by Serco – has declined to comment on its providers’ commercial relationships.

The Harbour Project is a Housing First programme designed to create a community and tackle social isolation. The pan-London project has caught the attention of the Labour government and offers a vision for how homelessness could be addressed in the future, reports the Big Issue.

Darren Rowe has lived in a shed and seen stabbings in hostels while experiencing homelessness in London. But now he is training to get back into construction jobs and rebuilding his life through an innovative new initiative. The Eastender has been living in one of the 23 self-contained flats at Your Place’s Harbour Project in Canning Town in the borough of Newham, East London, for the last six months.

The pan-London project is a Housing First model with a difference. Like traditional Housing First models, the Harbour Project offers individual homes alongside support for as long as people need. But where the project differs is its use of a congregate shared housing model. The accommodation features communal spaces and a kitchen where people can live together in a shared community. It is intended to tackle social isolation and loneliness.

For Rowe, 53, it has already been transformative. “When I opened the door to my flat, I had no expectations. I really didn’t. I knew it was going to be better than other places, God it couldn’t be much worse, but I opened the door and started looking round and I was like: “Is this mine?” he said. “I’m touched because I’m thinking about where I’ve come from the last four years from being on the streets and in godawful places to this. That day I moved in was fantastic. I felt like I’d won the lottery. We shouldn’t have one of these places in every city, we should have one in every town. Just one of these places in every town, the amount of difference it could make.”

Your Place opened the Harbour Project back in May last year following research from London Councils, funded by the Greater London Authority, that identified gaps in the capital’s homelessness services. That uncovered an issue where people were staying in hostel accommodation for long periods – sometimes multiple years – because there was no suitable move-on accommodation. The problem came down to people struggling to live independently when they got a place of their own.

“So a lot of people who had some social needs, or perhaps some concerns around social isolation, poor social skills,” said Amanda Dubarry, chief executive at Your Place. “They were kind of maintaining day-to-day life because they had the staff team but as soon as they lived on their own, they would become very isolated, very depressed and very anxious. And in all likelihood, they would go back to that street family.”

Your Place operates accommodation services with 153 bedspaces at its Canning Town base but the charity saw the chance to launch the Harbour Project last year after successfully bidding for funding. The new congregational Housing First model has proven popular with more than 100 referrals for its 23 flats, which are assured short-hold tenancies with rent of £110 a month including bills. Your Place is currently evaluating the project as it goes but, when Big Issue visited eight months after it opened, Dubarry insisted she was “blown away”.

“On Christmas Day I was messaging with one of the team that was on duty and she was sending me WhatsApp videos of the residents just having their Christmas dinner and dancing and just hanging out together,” said Dubarry. “I’m not much of a crier but I think two or three times I’ve got emotional about the Harbour Project when I’ve talked to the residents and they’ve shared the overwhelming positive experience and life-changing experience and sense of safety. It’s huge. You can’t really express in words how significant that is for the individuals involved.”

The Labour government has taken notice too. The homelessness strategy published at the end of 2025 did not feature the national commitment to rolling out Housing First that some, including Crisis and Homeless Link, had called for. There are three government-backed Housing First pilots in England – located in Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region and the West Midlands. They have been operating for around eight years and government evaluations show the projects have been successful in tackling homelessness. While there are many other non-government-backed Housing First projects, Labour’s strategy did not commit to making the model a big part of its plans to halve rough sleeping by 2029.

But the Harbour Project was one of the featured projects detailed in the strategy. “I’d like to think that although Housing First still hasn’t got a commitment from the government to be any farther than a pilot, I’d like to think that this kind of longer-term model is something that will begin to embed in the future and will be rolled out in other areas,” said Dubarry. “We can’t just keep churning people through sausage factories. It works for some people. It doesn’t work for everyone. You know, no model works for everyone. But this seems to be a new model which is working for, you know, a group of people right across the capital for whom other services have failed time and time again.”

The Harbour Project has certainly made a difference for Rowe. The loss of his father and sister and alcohol addiction saw his life unravel. “Me and my ex-partner used to help out at Crisis over Christmas and one year I was there and the next year I was living on the streets myself. I lost it all. I took the wrong path in life,” he said. Before moving to the Harbour Project Rowe had lived in a hostel for three years, living in conditions that left him feeling unsafe and, at times, “wishing he was back on the street again”.

But his six-month spell in his own flat has given him the platform to take on courses to get his CSCS card so he can work in the construction industry once more. “I’m really looking forward to getting back into work,” he told Big Issue. While not everyone who is lifted out of homelessness will be able to rejoin the workforce, Rowe’s experience at the Harbour Project demonstrates how Housing First could contribute to the government’s homelessness and employment goals.

“I want to stand on my own two feet again,” said Rowe. “I work in the building game so it’s like this you’ve got your ladders and you’re climbing them. You need support at the bottom or someone holding the ladders. Now, I’ve never had that before. I wouldn’t have even bothered when I was in Ilford, I wouldn’t get on the ladders. Now I’m near the top, but I don’t have to look down no more because I know that someone from here is down the bottom looking after me. So what I’m trying to say is I’m near the top. Don’t ask me when I get to the top where I’m going. I know where I want to go but I’m near the top of the ladders and I just don’t have to look down no more because these guys are holding it for me.”

Families living in temporary accommodation have accused a south London council of making “intimidating” unannounced home visits which they say left them fearing eviction, reports the BBC.

Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL) said some families have had unannounced visits from Lambeth Council’s housing officers, while others received unexpected emails about being moved far outside London. The housing campaign group claimed the council’s efforts to reduce the temporary accommodation costs have created a “confusing and stressful” environment.

Lambeth Council said it had a duty to visit families in temporary accommodation to inspect housing conditions and to help them find long-term, stable homes.

In November, the council announced that most homeless households would need to be placed outside the borough, and often beyond the south east of England, due to a lack of suitable accommodation locally. The move followed a major review of its Placement Policy, which had remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. The cost of temporary accommodation in Lambeth has risen to more than £100m a year, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS). The council must find £183m in savings over four years. It has so far identified £99m, with a further £84m still to be found before March 2026.

The number of homeless households supported by the council has increased by about 50% in the past two years, with more than 4,600 households now being housed in temporary accommodation each night. Two homeless households spoke anonymously to the LDRS about their experiences. One resident, who has been a member of HASL for three years, said the council contacted her to say she and her family had to leave their temporary accommodation and find a home in the private rented sector. The woman said they were given 56 days to secure a private rental, leaving them feeling “stressed and under pressure”.

Another resident said she believed she was being forced to leave her temporary accommodation after what she described as “intimidating” visits from housing officers. She said: “If Elizabeth Wyatt from HASL was not with me, I would be really, really scared, I don’t know the law, I don’t know anything but because of Liz and the group I don’t feel scared like before. I’ve been bidding for nearly eight-and-a-half years – what is the point in taking me from here to somewhere outside of London? I think that’s what they want to do with us. I asked the council why would you want to do that? They told me it’s very expensive here, it’s very expensive in London.”

In October, HASL staged a protest outside Lambeth Civic Centre and attempted to deliver a letter calling on the council to stop making what it described as “unannounced and intimidating visits”. The group claims the council refused to accept the letter. Wyatt from HASL said: “We were shocked when we heard reports of housing officers making unannounced visits to our members in temporary accommodation.” She said members were “left believing they would be imminently evicted” while another family was told by email they would be sent to Dover. She also criticised the council’s use of what she described as “private sector discharge” – where homeless households are given mandatory offers of private rented housing. “This policy, which Lambeth Council has never used before, creates a cycle of homelessness and undermines vital homeless rights,” she said.

Lambeth Council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for housing, Danny Adilypour, said the authority was working “compassionately” to support homeless families. The Labour councillor said the council was “doing what we can” to build new affordable homes on council-owned land but the “scale of the crisis means that is not enough” after decades of falling social housing stock. “This crisis is a tragedy for every family affected and is placing unsustainable pressure on council budgets,” Adilypour said.

He said the council was prioritising the limited social housing available in Lambeth for those with the greatest need, but in most cases had to look outside the borough for permanent homes. “Despite the challenges we are determined to give homeless households the stability and security they desperately need by giving them longer-term placements in areas that will meet their family, cultural and community needs,” he added.