Joe Donohue says we can draw inspiration from the success of Tony Blair’s Rough Sleepers Unit and the Greater Manchester experience
1998 would turn out to be a year which sealed my fate in a number of ways.
As part of an English assignment looking at empathetic language and metaphor, I chose to write a series of terrible poems on rough sleeping. Cramming in as many emotive phrases and florid similes as I could, I explored the experience of someone sleeping rough from a first-person perspective.
We had free rein over the subject matter, so I can’t quite remember why I chose to write about street homelessness specifically. However, it was surely no coincidence that this was shortly followed by the launch of the Rough Sleepers Unit by the then Blair Government.
Building on progress in the mid-nineties, the unit sought to take a targeted, mission-based approach to tackling street homelessness. The foundations established from the previous (admittedly London-centric) programme in the early nineties were good: sustained investment in rough sleeping over a number of years yielded early progress, there was a growing pathway of off-the-streets accommodation and an involved and motivated Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise (VCFSE) sector playing a key part in the national drive. But progress had plateaued. Sounding familiar yet?
The initial efforts to get people off the streets had bumped up against a number of structural barriers. Getting a roof over people’s heads is just the start and much of the off-the-streets accommodation at the time was simply inaccessible to people experiencing complex health and social care issues. Equally, inadequate investment in prevention meant that the programme was responding to failures in the system elsewhere and unable to stem the flow of people onto the streets. Or, to quote Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
The subsequent work of the Rough Sleepers Unit and the seismic reductions in rough sleeping it drove during this period are well documented. We should draw optimism from this: mission-based approaches can work, national government, local authorities and civil society can achieve social change by working together, and we can make progress on problems that once felt intractable.
This, and the former mayor of Greater Manchester’s steadfast commitment to tackling homelessness, has inspired the development of a substantial infrastructure to respond to rough sleeping in the city-region since 2017. Our ‘A Bed Every Night’ offer supports over 2,000 people sleeping rough every year and our efforts to continually improve it have inspired the development of a significant portfolio of prevention services. This includes targeted support for people most at risk, including women, non-UK nationals, people leaving the prison system and young people. It also includes specialist support for people experiencing long-term homelessness and multiple disadvantage. This includes long-term accommodation programmes like Housing First, specialist supported housing services and growing health and social care provisions as part of our ‘enhanced’ offer under our Live Well place-based public service delivery model. We are seeking to get truly upstream of the factors causing homelessness and, in the process, generate substantial evidence to inform our dialogue with government through our Prevention Demonstrator approach.
The ambition of national government through the Rough Sleeping Programme is welcome and clear. Not least because it recognises that getting people into accommodation is just the beginning and that we need to invest in longer-term solutions.
Whilst we can draw learnings from similar efforts in the nineties, we should also be clear that copying and pasting this approach in 2026 is not enough on its own. We should examine the conditions which enabled this progress to be sustained into the millennium: the ability to provide rapid routes into genuinely affordable housing, a welfare system which enabled effective homelessness prevention and the launch of the Supporting People programme in 2003 which provided supported housing and tenancy sustainment support for people at risk of homelessness. Or, to put it another way, a reorientation of the state around universal homelessness prevention.
We also need to recognise the enormous pressures that local government and the wider public sector are under. If we’re to truly tackle rough sleeping and homelessness, we need to reckon with the extreme financial and operational trade-offs facing the public sector.
Back in 1998, my precociousness reached critical mass. Perhaps buoyed by my newfound passion for social justice, I jumped onto our dial-up internet and loaded the newly minted council website, firing off a complaint about underinvestment in our town and in social development more broadly. I think often about the poor local authority officer who kindly and compassionately wrote to me, addressing my concerns and thanking me for being such a diligent citizen.
The pressures local authorities have faced in tackling homelessness in recent years are extreme and well-documented, not least the rising use of temporary accommodation. In Greater Manchester, we agreed a plan of action in 2023 to support a whole-system response to the temporary accommodation emergency and, since, we have:
- Developed a mature data analysis capability
- Coordinated our approach to out-of-borough placements across the region
- Launched an ambitious programme to get empty homes back into use for families who would otherwise be in unsuitable temporary accommodation
- Launched a free bus ticket scheme for thousands of children in temporary accommodation to ensure that they can continue to attend school
In addition to driving better outcomes for households across the region, this programme also aims to tackle the financial challenges local authorities face as a result of temporary accommodation pressures. Our local authorities spent at least £77.5 million last year on the cost of renting temporary accommodation. This is nearly double Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s homelessness programme budget and the historic homelessness prevention grant to local authorities is a fraction of this expenditure.
So what does this have to do with rough sleeping? Well, we know that early experiences of housing instability and poverty in childhood are very good predictors of future homelessness and rough sleeping risk. It is likely that the homelessness of many of the people sleeping rough actually began in childhood. When you throw other compounding risk factors into the mix – including trauma, experience of the care system, physical and mental health issues and disability, racial inequalities and transitions from public institutions like the asylum and prison systems – then we should be very worried about the 135,000 households and 178,000 children in temporary accommodation nationally.
Here, too, history tells us that progress can be made. With the right combination of welfare policy, housing supply, significant investment in local authority homelessness prevention and a pragmatic, target-driven approach, temporary accommodation placements halved between 2004 and 2011. We have also seen recent successes in driving down the number of families in bed-and-breakfast temporary accommodation in the last year, which give cause for hope.
So perhaps my childish optimism in ’98 was not completely unfounded. Nevertheless, the challenges we face in preventing homelessness are enormous: the numbers of people experiencing rough sleeping and in temporary accommodation are substantially higher now.
However, we have a government that is committed to tackling homelessness and rough sleeping in the long term and willing to back that ambition with investment. Devolution, too, can unlock creativity in how homelessness is prevented locally, as Greater Manchester and other mayoral strategic authorities have demonstrated in recent years. If we can harness this ambition and investment to achieve a true pivot towards homelessness prevention, then everyone will benefit.
Joe Donohue was the Strategic Lead for Homelessness, Rough Sleeping and Migration at Greater Manchester Combined Authority, now on secondment at Crisis and leading the development of their services in Edinburgh, Merseyside and Newcastle.
