In January 2017, the then mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, promised to end rough sleeping in the region by 2020 – a bold, frankly absurd promise that inevitably didn’t materialise. Nearly a decade later, shortly after becoming prime minister, Burnham promised to end rough sleeping again, only this time for the whole of England. So why should we believe him this time around?
We shouldn’t, of course. Because he's just as big a liar as the unlamented Starmer.
I have interviewed Burnham several times over the past decade. At the end of 2019, when it was clear he had not lived up to his promise, I asked him if he regretted making it in the first place. “I wasn’t making what you would call a traditional target,” the mayor said. “I issued my commitment to make it more of a wake-up call to the system. And I think it has had that effect.”Burnham’s advisers had told him to tone down the pledge, but he resisted. “The team here said I should have said: ‘End the need for rough sleeping,’ because you can’t force people into a shelter … In retrospect, if I had said ‘end the need for’, that probably would have been a wiser thing to have done. But I wasn’t in the space of wanting to play semantics with it.”
A lot of verbiage to say, ‘Oh, damn, you caught me out!’, eh Reader?
Official figures showed rough sleeping decreased by two-thirds in Manchester during his first five years as mayor. There are reasons I can quibble with this claim. First of all, it doesn’t pass the eye test. Just walk through the city centre in the early hours, and you’ll find people still bedding down in their dozens. Second, the statistics on rough sleeping are based on single-night snapshots, which involve council representatives walking around counting the people they find rough sleeping. The problem with this is obvious.
Government statistics are lies? Gosh, you don't say...
Burnham’s government would also need to reverse 16 years of austerity. This is all quite spendy, and to fund it would require higher taxes, more borrowing and aggressive nationalisation of natural monopolies. An upheaval of the economy of such magnitude is unlikely to happen when so many Labour MPs have their fingernails firmly embedded in the market. If there’s even a suggestion that Burnham intends to depart from turbo capitalism, then he will be out of SW1 faster than you can say Liz Truss.
Ha ha ha he things we had 'austerity'. What a comedian!
His priority should be triggering a nationwide Housing First programme. Housing First, a policy pioneered in Finland that effectively eliminated rough sleeping, gives people a home with no preconditions, then tailors support to their individual needs.We know this works because we did it ourselves, only with a different name. The Everyone In campaign, established during the Covid-19 pandemic, virtually ended rough sleeping overnight by emergency block-booking hotels. Surely we can do the same thing again.
That was a measure for a short time event, not a permanent solution, there's a difference. And how can the government block-book hotels, when they are already being used for boat people?
There are about 300,000 long-term empty homes in England. Housing people in some of these dwellings might be a good idea; capping rents at an affordable rate would be another, as would fast-tracking asylum applications and enabling asylum seekers to receive benefits and temporary work visas while their claims are processed.
We have a housing crisis, according to yoy, and you want to increase it by increasing the population?
I’m not confident that Burnham will do any of these things. Not because I think he doesn’t care or lacks the political will, but because government apparatus is smothered in molasses, and most Labour politicians are Tories in all but name.
What in the student politics...?!?
