Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced additional funding of £102 million to combat homelessness. This comes after the first policy Burnham announced as prime minister was the allocation of £330 million ($447 million) to tackle homelessness.
Meanwhile, questions have arisen about how Burnham can help people stop living on the streets across the UK if he failed to fully solve this problem during his nine years as Mayor of Greater Manchester. Now, Burnham is reinforcing this policy by announcing additional funding and writing in The Guardian that he wants “everyone to be home for Christmas.”
This policy is part of a series of initiatives by Burnham’s new government, which mostly involve gradual changes, can be implemented through direct government decisions, and are popular among ordinary citizens. Among them are reductions in energy bill taxes and for pubs, as well as granting local councils additional powers to block “dubious” shops on main streets.
“Politics of Trying” Approach
The prime minister’s advisors dismiss criticism that these measures are populist and do not address deep-rooted problems. They characterize Burnham’s approach as a “politics of trying”: instead of ignoring the problem or explaining why it is too difficult to solve, Burnham takes immediate steps to demonstrate the direction of his government. This also explains why he often talks about possible political solutions, even when the government has not yet made a final decision, for example, regarding the reduction of the basic income tax rate.
For now, this approach seems to be working. According to Bloomberg’s tracker, the Labour Party has overtaken the Reform Party in public support ratings for the first time in over a year. YouGov shows that Burnham’s personal approval rating is the highest among all prime ministers in the past decade, except for a brief period during the pandemic. This also makes political sense given the government’s difficult fiscal position, which has limited opportunities to increase spending without raising taxes.
However, Burnham’s promise on homelessness tests this strategy to its limits: its visibility means that society will immediately see if it fails. And given the complexity of the problem, the risk of failure is significantly higher than with other political initiatives he has announced previously. “No one should be sleeping in doorways or near stations,” Burnham said, announcing the additional funding on Wednesday. “But we have seen this for so long that it seems Westminster has started to accept it.”
Luke Tryl, a polling expert from More in Common, noted in a post on X that “homelessness repeatedly emerges in focus groups as one of the most visible signs of ‘Broken Britain’ and community decline.” He added that “the feeling that we cannot provide people with a roof over their heads is a very grim sign for many people about the state of our country.”
Manchester Experience and Future Challenges
The prime minister is delegating the implementation of this promise to local communities, leaving mayors and councils with the task of finding housing. “Local communities across the country will decide how best to do this,” Burnham wrote in The Guardian. This aligns with his much broader decentralization agenda but also complicates the distribution of responsibility.
Burnham was elected Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017 with a promise to end homelessness. His “A Bed Every Night” program successfully reduced the number of people sleeping on the streets by more than half between 2017 and 2021. However, this progress was largely reversed: the number of people sleeping on the streets more than doubled between 2021 and 2025, increasing every year during this period.
Officials point to a number of factors that hindered the program’s implementation, some of which were beyond the city’s control, including the freezing of housing benefit levels and the strain on the asylum system. Some argue that the success of Burnham’s initiative attracted more homeless people to Manchester seeking the city’s support. Housing Minister Angela Rayner told i Paper that the government is “learning the lessons of what happened in Greater Manchester.”
The reduction in homelessness during Burnham’s first term as mayor was also bolstered by a nationwide decline in this indicator during the pandemic. Burnham points to the response to Covid-19 as proof that it can be done again, although this was aided by the fact that hotels were mostly empty. The difficulty often lies not in finding housing but in finding sufficiently decent housing that homeless people will choose over sleeping on the streets. After the pandemic, the level of homelessness across the country rose to a record high.
Getting homeless people off the streets by Christmas is one thing, but keeping them off the streets in the long term is another. This will also require the involvement of healthcare, housing, and asylum systems, and in these matters, the “politics of trying” will not be enough.
Source: Bloomberg
