Homes For Rough Sleepers: Andy Burnham Backs Housing First

 

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has previously called for ‘change’ in the Labour party. What does he want that change to look like? The Big Issue speculates.

Andy Burnham might have found a new route to parliament after Makerfield MP Josh Simons resigned to give the Greater Manchester mayor the opportunity to challenge Keir Starmer for Labour leadership. As Starmer’s popularity continues to plummet, some Labour MPs are reportedly looking for an alternative leader. Such designs have long-centred on Greater Manchester’s mayor, who has previously called for “change” in the Labour Party and openly criticised Starmer’s leadership. But the two-time leadership candidate would need to return to parliament first.

It was thought that Andrew Gwynne’s departure from his Gorton and Denton seat would offer Burnham the chance to become an MP again but Starmer and the National Executive Committee blocked him from standing. That decision saw the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer take the seat. But there are no such practical hurdles to stop the so-called ‘King in the North’ plotting a Westminster return this time around after Starmer confirmed he wouldn’t stand in Burnham’s way. Announcing his intention to stand, Burnham said: “There is only so much that can be done from Greater Manchester. Much bigger change is needed at a national level if everyday life is to be made more affordable again. This is why I now seek people’s support to return to parliament: to bring the change we have brought to Greater Manchester to the whole of the UK and make politics work properly for people.”

In the spirit of said speculation, we at Big Issue have asked experts: What would Andy Burnham’s Britain look like? Here are some of the key policies he’s implemented in Manchester, and how they could be rolled out elsewhere.

Burnham’s flagship homelessness policy is Housing First: giving rough sleepers a permanent home immediately, with wraparound support, rather than making housing conditional on sobriety or other criteria. Since Greater Manchester’s pilot launched in 2019, more than 450 people have been housed, with an 88% tenancy sustainment rate. Rough sleeping in the city has fallen by more than 57% since 2017, bucking the national trend.

“I started using the phrase housing is a human right, when I’d come back from Finland,” Burnham told the Big Issue in a 2023 interview. “People kept talking about Housing First and I kind of thought it was a project. But it actually came over to me when I was there that housing first is a national philosophy in Finland. If people talk about prevention, if you want a true prevention policy for the country, you give everybody a good, secure home. So, it’s not an unrealistic policy, I think it’s a very realistic policy and I’m really committed to it.”

Gideon Salutin of the Social Market Foundation says the numbers back Burnham up. “It’s one of the rare homelessness interventions with a very strong evidence base,” he tells Big Issue. “Internationally, tenancy sustainment rates are consistently above 80%, and Greater Manchester’s results match that. The costs of providing housing and support are outweighed by savings to health services, criminal justice and emergency accommodation.”

But a national rollout would be a major undertaking. In 2021, the Centre for Social Justice estimated that there were 1,995 Housing First places available in England, with between 16,450 and 29,700 places required. “If Burnham were prime minister and made Housing First a national philosophy, as Finland has, we could dramatically reduce rough sleeping within a decade,” Salutin says. “But it would take serious long-term investment and a coordinated building programme – without that, the model can’t work at scale.”

On housing more broadly, Burnham has called on the government to borrow £40 billion to build new council housing. “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” he said.