“Everyone in by Christmas”: Inside Burnham’s Effort to End Rough Sleeping

A belief I strongly hold is that rough sleeping in the UK is a political choice. There is absolutely no reason why anyone should be sleeping on the streets in a country as wealthy and resourced as Britain.

Official portrait of Andy Burnham via Parliament Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Homelessness in Britain is pervasive. But homelessness and rough sleeping are not interchangeable terms. Someone can be homeless while living in temporary accommodation, staying with friends or family, or moving between insecure forms of housing. Rough sleeping is the most visible and extreme manifestation of homelessness: people sleeping on streets, in doorways, tents, vehicles or other places not intended for habitation.

It is rough sleeping that Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made the immediate focus of his new national campaign.

And the timing could hardly be more urgent. In autumn 2025, an estimated 4,793 people were sleeping rough on a single night in England, the highest figure since the government’s current snapshot system began. It represented the fourth consecutive annual increase and was 171% higher than in 2010. (GOV.UK)

At the same time, 134,210 households were living in temporary accommodation at the end of 2025, including 85,800 households with children. (GOV.UK)

This is the backdrop against which Burnham has made his promise: everyone in by Christmas.

What exactly is Burnham promising?

Burnham’s ambition is not, technically, to make homelessness disappear by Christmas. His immediate target is to ensure that everyone sleeping rough who wants help has a route off the streets this winter.

The announcement comes as the first major stage of his wider commitment to end rough sleeping in England. In July, Burnham announced £340 million for new support and settled accommodation for people who have experienced long-term rough sleeping. In August, he added a further £102 million, bringing the package to £442 million. (GOV.UK)

The money will fund both emergency routes off the streets and longer-term accommodation. More than 1,000 settled homes are expected to be delivered over the next three years, alongside intensive support for people facing the greatest barriers to leaving rough sleeping behind.

The government has also promised a national summit this autumn, bringing together councils, charities, businesses, health organisations, faith groups and other community leaders.

The message from Burnham is therefore relatively simple: the state will fund the response, but local communities and organisations will be expected to help deliver it.

How does he intend to achieve it?

There is a striking familiarity to Burnham’s approach.

As mayor of Greater Manchester, he launched A Bed Every Night, an emergency accommodation programme designed to ensure that people sleeping rough had somewhere safe to stay. He also backed Housing First, an approach which provides people experiencing entrenched homelessness with a home alongside intensive support rather than requiring them to overcome a series of conditions before being housed.

Greater Manchester says its combination of interventions has contributed to a 67% reduction in rough sleeping over four years, although the region has not eradicated it. (Greater Manchester Democracy)

The national programme follows a similar philosophy: get people off the streets first, then provide the housing, health and practical support required to prevent them from returning.

And it is important to acknowledge that distinction.

A bed is not a home and a hostel place is not long-term security. Simply getting somebody indoors for Christmas does not mean that they have escaped homelessness.

The government’s own programme therefore separates immediate “routes off the street” from settled accommodation and intensive wraparound support.

Why does this matter?

Because the numbers are moving in the wrong direction.

The 4,793 people recorded sleeping rough in autumn 2025 represented a 3% increase on the previous year and a new record high. The North West experienced the largest regional increase, rising by 20% to 441 people.

And even these figures do not represent every person experiencing rough sleeping. The government’s own methodology acknowledges that women are particularly likely to be underrepresented because their rough sleeping can be more hidden, transient and intermittent.

Rough sleeping is also not simply a question of where someone spends the night. It is associated with substantially worse health outcomes, exposure to violence, sexual assault, exploitation, and difficulty accessing services.

As Crisis notes, the average age of death among people experiencing homelessness is just 45 for men and 43 for women.

If the state can intervene before somebody dies on the street, the question becomes less about whether we can intervene and more about why we have allowed the situation to reach this point.

But didn’t we already prove this could be done?

This is perhaps the most awkward question for Burnham’s government.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government’s Everyone In scheme demonstrated that large-scale emergency intervention could rapidly reduce rough sleeping. Councils were instructed to bring people sleeping rough into accommodation, with hotels, B&B's and other temporary options used to provide shelter.

The number recorded sleeping rough fell dramatically during the pandemic. In the autumn 2019 snapshot, 4,266 people were estimated to be sleeping rough. In 2020, that fell to 2,688 and in 2021 to 2,443. It has since risen every year, reaching 4,793 in 2025.

Burnham himself has pointed directly to this precedent.

“We did it in the pandemic. We can do it again,” he said when launching the Christmas campaign.

And arguably, that is the strongest part of his argument.

The pandemic did not magically eliminate poverty, addiction, poor mental health or the housing crisis. What changed was the political decision about what constituted an acceptable response.

When rough sleeping became an emergency, accommodation was found.

When the immediate public health emergency passed, much of that response disappeared.

The fact that rough sleeping has subsequently climbed back to a record level suggests that emergency accommodation alone was never going to be enough.

The criticism

That is where the scepticism surrounding Burnham’s pledge comes in.

Charities have broadly welcomed the funding and the ambition, but there is concern that providing somewhere to sleep is not the same as ending rough sleeping.

Lifeshare, Manchester’s oldest charity supporting people experiencing homelessness, has warned that Burnham’s plan must go beyond simply providing a bed and learn from the shortcomings of A Bed Every Night. (ITVX)

There is also a question over whether the funding is sufficient. Burnham himself has acknowledged that government money “may not fully be enough” and has appealed to charities, faith groups and community organisations to contribute. (The Guardian)

Notably, Burnham has also pledged 15% of his Prime Ministerial salary to homelessness causes, a pledge that he also made in 2017 when he became Mayor of Greater Manchester. It is a striking, but respectable personal commitment, particularly given that his political career has repeatedly been intertwined with promises to tackle rough sleeping. 

That raises an uncomfortable question: if ending rough sleeping is a responsibility of the state, how much should it depend on the generosity of civil society?

And there is another problem. Burnham has made ambitious promises about rough sleeping before. In 2017, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he pledged to end rough sleeping in the region by 2020. That deadline passed without the problem disappearing. (Greater Manchester Combined Authority)

His record is therefore both his greatest asset and his greatest vulnerability.

He has demonstrated that intervention can work. He has also demonstrated that intervention alone does not necessarily end the problem.

What happens after Christmas?

This is ultimately where Burnham’s plan will be judged.

Getting everyone indoors by Christmas would be an important achievement. But if people are subsequently returned to the streets, the government will have treated the symptom rather than the crisis.

The long-term answer has to be housing.

That means more genuinely affordable homes, more social housing, stronger homelessness prevention and action on the conditions that push people into homelessness in the first place. It means confronting a housing market in which millions can be one rent increase, eviction or lost paycheck away from instability.

Burnham’s £442 million programme acknowledges part of that reality by funding settled homes alongside emergency accommodation. But more than 1,000 homes over three years is modest against the scale of Britain’s wider housing crisis.

“Everyone in by Christmas” is therefore best understood not as the end of homelessness, but as a test of political will.

Britain has already shown that it can move thousands of people from the streets into accommodation when it decides that leaving them there is unacceptable.

The question now is whether Burnham can turn that emergency response into something permanent.