Burnham’s rough sleeping pledge buries the death toll
A record 4,793 sleep rough and 169 died on the streets in 2024. Burnham's day-one answer is Corbyn's policy at a fraction of the price.
Rough sleeping deaths claimed 169 lives on the streets of Britain last year. Eleven of them were children. Six were under the age of five.
That is the country Andy Burnham inherited when he walked out of Downing Street on Monday as the seventh prime minister in a decade. On his first day he made ending long-term rough sleeping his first pledge, and put £340m behind it. The dead did not get a mention.
Rough sleeping deaths: who the official count misses Start with the number, because the number is the indictment. On a single night last autumn, 4,793 people bedded down on the streets of England. That is a record. It is the fourth year running the figure has risen. It is up 171% since 2010, past the old 2017 peak, and it happened under Conservative and Labour governments alike while both told us they were fixing it.
Behind the snapshot is the death toll the government does not publish. The Dying Homeless Project counted 1,611 homeless people dead in 2024, 169 of them sleeping rough. Successive ministers have known these figures. They chose the streets anyway.
So when Burnham says, as he did on Monday, “This is something a government can fix if it chooses to. Today, I’m choosing to,” the honest response is: then who was choosing not to, for sixteen years, while the count climbed and the coffins filled?
A borrowed policy, priced down
Here is the part the launch coverage skated over. The Guardian reported it in a single clause: ending rough sleeping was the policy “which the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had planned to announce if elected prime minister.”
That is not a footnote. That is the story.
In June 2018, as Labour leader, Corbyn pledged to personally lead a cross-government task force to end rough sleeping, and to buy 8,000 homes immediately for people coming off the streets. The Labour machine spent the years since purging him and everyone near him. On Monday that same machine reached for his signature policy on day one.
And it shrank it in the process. Corbyn: 8,000 homes. Burnham: 1,200 homes, and support for 3,000 people over five years. The £340m is spread over three years, which is £113m a year, and it is drawn from what the housing department calls “unused parts” of its own budget. It sits on top of the last government’s £3.5bn homelessness strategy, the one that was supposed to halve long-term rough sleeping and did not. Steve Reed, the housing secretary who ran that failed strategy, was sacked on Monday as Burnham built his cabinet.
To be precise about the money, because scale is the whole argument: this is not nothing. The government’s own sums put a year of rough sleeping at £20,128 a person and prevention at £1,426. Spent well on prevention, £340m buys real help. The problem is not that the sum is zero. The problem is that it is a fraction of the plan Labour buried along with the man who wrote it, aimed at a crisis that is now bigger than it has ever been.
Give the man his due, then read the record
Burnham is not a con artist, and this paper does not deal in cheap shots. His record in Greater Manchester is real. “A Bed Every Night” and “Housing First” cut rough sleeping by two-thirds in his first five years. The method worked: share data across councils, curb evictions, drag the agencies into one room. It is more than most politicians manage.
But read the rest of the record, because it matters. Rough sleeping in Manchester has risen in each of the last four years. It now stands at roughly three-quarters of the 2017 level. His own team will tell you why, and they have a point: the national rise followed Westminster killing off the pandemic “Everyone In” scheme, and a regional mayor cannot outvote an austerity budget. That is a fair defence. It is also the argument for judging this pledge by what it is willing to spend, not by the mood of the launch.
The Tories, predictably, want it both ways. Shadow housing secretary James Cleverly says Burnham is “taking money from local projects to fund this announcement.” He may even be right that the “unused” budget lines belong to someone, though nobody has yet itemised which schemes lose out. But a party that presided over a 171% rise and a record death count has forfeited the right to lecture anyone about homelessness. We note the raided-budget question. We do not take the sermon.
Choosing, and what it costs
Burnham said a government can fix this if it chooses to. He is correct. The choice was available in 2018, costed at 8,000 homes and a prime minister who would run the task force himself. The establishment chose instead to spend a decade destroying the person offering it.
Now it has the policy back, without the man and without the money, launched as if it were new. A record 4,793 people are still on the streets tonight. If Burnham means what he said, he can prove it with the one thing that was always missing. Not a speech outside Downing Street. The homes.
