Andy Burnham has gone further than any of his predecessors have in years in attempting to address rough sleeping in Britain. A large sum of money and a focus not just on housing but also some of the underlying causes of homelessness is as good as this kind of policy usually gets. Alas, even this attempt by the Prime Minister is doomed to fail, as it misses a critical ingredient: what to do about those rough sleepers who refuse help.
Some rough sleepers are fairly well-organised, some are coerced into crime by gangs, some are able criminals in their own right
Though only a small proportion of those classed by the government as ‘homeless,’ rough sleepers are still fairly numerous, and visible beyond their numbers. Almost eight thousand people slept rough at some point over the month of March, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). That number has been rising year-on-year since 2021, when the Tories’ drive to end rough sleeping – something they promised in the run-up to the 2018 election – seemingly lost momentum.
Worse, the true number of rough sleepers is likely far higher due to the government’s inadequate data collection methods. In fact, over the course of 2025/26, there were probably around 13,000 rough sleepers in London alone. The England-wide number is plausibly three to four times that.
