Prime minister's drive to end rough sleeping by Christmas must include building more council homes

Last Wednesday, new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, pushed forward with the pledge he made on entering Downing Street a month ago: to end rough sleeping at the earliest opportunity.

This time, he went further: the aim is to get everyone sleeping rough off the streets by this Christmas.

The £340m announced in July has been boosted by an additional £102m. This brings the total funding for the new Rough Sleeping Programme to £442m over three years. This is made up of £178m capital funding: £255.5 revenue funding for emergency accommodation and support, and an additional £8.4m for the Ending Homelessness in Communities Fund, which supports small to medium-sized voluntary, community and faith sector charities to provide services.

The new programme will be led by mayoral strategic authorities and local authorities, which last week received funding allocations. Subject to local confirmation, funding can be used in line with the programme requirements.

This is a game-changing move and exactly the kind of bold leadership needed to end the housing emergency we’ve been experiencing in England for years – which has been damaging the economy, damaging the nation’s health and stifling the hopes and dreams of people across the country.

What will the new funding deliver?

The new Rough Sleeping Programme combines:

• a ‘route off the streets’: everyone sleeping rough will be offered a route off the streets this winter, with offers of both accommodation and support. This will include helping people into more permanent accommodation in the private rented sector, social housing sector and supported housing sector or into settled accommodation.

• settled accommodation with intensive ongoing support: funding to deliver more than 1,000 settled homes over the next three years, alongside intensive wraparound support to help people rebuild their lives. This is backed by £178m of capital funding (in 2027/28 and 2028/29) to support the acquisition, leasing, repair or refurbishment of existing homes as well as limited new-builds (where these are deliverable in time). The homes must be suitable for people who’ve been rough sleeping long-term. It’s expected that the homes will be charged at social rent levels.

We’re particularly pleased by the capital funding for over 1,000 suitable settled homes. The answer to homelessness is a permanent, genuinely affordable social rent home, which provides a settled foundation to address physical and mental health problems and look forward to the future.

Learning lessons from previous initiatives

It’s vital we learn the lessons of the ‘Everyone In’ initiative: the emergency response during the pandemic. This was hugely successful in getting people off the streets very quickly and undoubtedly saved lives. But our research showed that without a permanent, genuinely affordable home to move onto, such initiatives risk leaving people stuck in emergency, temporary or fixed-term accommodation, unable to feel settled because they know they’ll have to move on again.

Our research found that by February 2021:

• less than one in four people (23% or around 8,800 people), out of the 37,000 the government claimed had been helped under ‘Everyone In’, had moved into settled accommodation

• more than three-quarters (77% or around 29,000 people) remained in some sort of temporary or short-term accommodation

• more worryingly, almost one in four (23% or around 8,800 people) were no longer accommodated. Some people were likely to have returned to the streets

The problem was that the same barriers that led to people becoming homeless in the first place remained (difficulty in accessing a suitable social or private rented home), making it very difficult for councils to help people move into a settled home.

Similar problems have affected the prime minister’s A Bed Every Night initiative in Greater Manchester. Since its launch in November 2018, it has reportedly supported more than 14,000 people. The number of people sleeping rough in Greater Manchester has certainly reduced from its 2017 peak of 268 people, but the initiative hasn’t entirely eradicated rough sleeping: in 2025, 197 people were recorded as sleeping rough in Greater Manchester. The prime minister argues this is because 'we were the only place providing that level of support, and understandably, people then travelled to Greater Manchester to access that support'.

However, access to a suitable home has been a problem for people helped by the scheme:

‘Perhaps the most severe challenge facing the A Bed Every Night (ABEN) programme is its limited capacity to enable those accommodated on an emergency basis to access more suitable move on accommodation. Almost all ABEN users we spoke to want self-contained accommodation – a home of their own – but the obstacles to achieving this are substantial. Access to social housing for this group appears to be extremely difficult in some boroughs, and almost impossible in others.’

'Almost all participants were keen to move-on to a home of their own as soon possible, expressing a preference for self-contained, non-shared accommodation where they could enjoy greater privacy and spend time with friends and family, particularly children.’

- A 2021 evaluation by Heriot-Watt University

“A flat would do, anything, to know that's mine, my place where I can see my kids… anywhere, do you know what I mean?”

- Female, 36-55, staying in a hostel

There are also lessons to be learned from the December 1999 government target to reduce rough sleeping in England by two-thirds by 2002. A Rough Sleepers Unit headed by ‘homelessness tsar’, Dame Louise Casey, was tasked with delivering the target. The RSU met the target a year early in August 2001, having reduced the number of people sleeping rough in England from around 1,600 to the mid-500s. But although the number of people rough sleeping went down, people became stuck in hostels because of problems with accessing a long-term, settled home.

Homelessness cannot be eradicated without access to a suitable, permanent and genuinely affordable home, combined with the level of support needed, for as long as needed, to prevent repeat homelessness.

PM needs to build on this strong start

The signs are encouraging. The prime minister says he wants to deliver 'the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period'. It’s vital the government gets on with delivering these homes by removing the barriers that hold councils back from building.

People sleeping rough are the publicly visible 'tip of the iceberg' of record homelessness. Last week, government statistics revealed another record-breaking high: almost 178,000 children in England are now without a home: hidden away in unsafe, insecure temporary accommodation with their families. That’s over twice the child population of Leicester. They’re also facing a Christmas without somewhere to call home.

At least 104 children have died since April 2019, with their temporary accommodation indicated as a contributing factor to their vulnerability, ill-health or death. Conditions are often cramped, unsafe and stressful.

We urge the prime minister to apply the same unwavering ambition to ending family and child homelessness. At this Autumn’s budget, we need a transformational shift towards council building homes for their communities. To bring back hope into housing, this budget must relieve councils from their housing debt, give them access to low-cost loans, change borrowing rules and bring forward investment from the social and affordable homes programme.

These changes would supercharge the social housing revolution the government has promised.

Do you want to make a difference?

We know the government is thinking about how to get councils building, but we need big, ambitious action to fix the housing emergency. That’s why we’re asking councillors across the country to add their name to a letter to the chancellor, urging him to cancel billions of debt that’s holding councils back from building new social homes.

• email your councillor today and ask them to add their name (you could make a huge difference in 30 seconds)

• please donate today to support families to find a permanent social home