Late at night in a Twickenham park, two outreach workers from Spear, a south London homelessness charity, sweep their torches through the bushes. What they find tells the whole story. Sleeping bags, airbeds, toilet rolls, plastic bags crammed with belongings. A rough sleeping encampment that appeared from nowhere in just the past 48 hours.
Scenes like this play out every night across England. And it is exactly this kind of crisis that Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor turned key Labour figure, has put at the centre of his political mission. The pledge sounds bold: end rough sleeping. But people working on the ground say the reality is far more complicated than any policy announcement can capture.
‘This is generations of decline,’ one outreach worker told us, standing outside a makeshift camp in the early hours. ‘You cannot fix that with a headline.’
Burnham has long been seen as one of the most credible voices on homelessness in English politics. His work in Greater Manchester, where he pushed the ‘A Bed Every Night’ scheme and championed a more joined-up approach to getting people off the streets, earned genuine respect from charities and frontline staff alike. When he talks about this issue, people in the sector tend to listen.
But listening and believing are two different things.
The scale of rough sleeping in England has grown sharply over the past decade. Funding cuts to local councils, the collapse of affordable housing, rising rents, mental health service gaps, and the lingering damage done by years of welfare reform have all pushed more people onto the streets. Charities say that by the time someone ends up sleeping rough, they are usually dealing with a tangle of problems that took years to build up. A single policy pledge, however well-intentioned, does not unravel that overnight.
Outreach workers across England broadly welcome any renewed political focus on homelessness. They are exhausted, often underfunded, and dealing with a problem that keeps growing. But many are also deeply cautious about promises they have heard before.
The Conservative government made its own pledge to end rough sleeping by 2024. That target was quietly dropped. The numbers never came down in the way ministers promised. Trust among frontline workers took a hit.
What Burnham is proposing, according to those familiar with his thinking, goes beyond just putting a roof over someone’s head for a night. The approach he has championed focuses on what is sometimes called ‘Housing First’, getting people into stable accommodation quickly and then wrapping support services around them, rather than making them jump through hoops before they qualify for help. Evidence from across Europe suggests this model works. But it requires serious, sustained investment and genuine coordination between housing, health, and social care.
That coordination is where things tend to fall apart in practice. Local councils are stretched thin. NHS mental health services are under enormous pressure. Drug and alcohol support has been cut in many areas. Outreach charities are often plugging gaps left by the state, running on tight budgets and relying heavily on volunteers.
‘We find people, we build relationships with them, we try to get them into services,’ said one Spear worker. ‘But if the services aren’t there, or there’s a six-month waiting list, what do we do? We keep visiting them in the park.’
For Burnham, the political challenge is just as steep as the practical one. Homelessness is not a simple vote-winner. It requires long-term thinking in a system that often rewards short-term results. It demands money at a time when public finances are tight. And it means confronting uncomfortable questions about housing supply, land use, and planning that touch powerful interests.
Still, those on the frontline say they would rather have a serious politician pushing on this issue than nobody pushing at all. The outreach workers in Twickenham will be back in that park tomorrow night, and the night after that. They are not waiting for a policy announcement to tell them the problem is real.
The question is whether the political will, the funding, and the joined-up thinking can finally catch up with what people like them have been dealing with for years.