Rough sleeping epitomises Britain’s failing state. Can Andy Burnham really end it?

In an alcove outside the Shakespeare pub in the London borough of Westminster, a 37-year-old man is sitting wearing an elaborately embroidered jacket, a red cravat and a tricorn hat. “I get things from bins. People throw away some good s--t,” he says. His front teeth are missing because someone attacked him one night while he was trying to sleep at Victoria station. “I used to use the station to go to work.” James* has been sleeping there for the past three years.

He has been on the streets for five. “It was Covid. I lost everything. I lost my stone masonry business. And I lost my home.” James is one person in a terrifying national tidal wave of rough sleeping. Official figures show the number of people sleeping on the streets in England has nearly tripled since 2010, hitting a record 4,793 on a single night last autumn. The latest monthly figures show 8,748 people slept rough in June this year, the highest total for this month since the dataset began in 2020.

In parts of central London, rough sleeping has become the most visible embodiment of Britain’s failing state. A lethal trifecta of a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis and a mental health crisis is pushing people to the edge. Prisons, hospitals and the asylum system are ejecting people with nowhere to go, and public services lack the resources to catch them. Drug addicts live on the streets and defecate in public, tents have become commonplace in parks and on pavements, and the number of people dying on the streets has doubled since 2013.

Enter Andy Burnham, who has made tackling rough sleeping a key priority in office and has staked his political reputation on a promise to fix it. As he walked into 10 Downing Street in July, the Prime Minister said his “first instruction” was “to end rough sleeping in our country”. In August, he announced “a national drive to get everyone in for Christmas”. John Healey, the Chancellor, promised in the Budget last month to “keep that offer open for the rest of this Parliament”.

They have committed nearly £900m in funding to do so. But beyond rough sleeping, Britain faces a much bigger, unaddressed homelessness problem. The number of households in temporary accommodation – those which local authorities have a legal obligation to prevent from becoming homeless, generally because they have dependent children – hit a record 135,580 at the start of this year. There are now 177,530 children growing up moving between B&Bs and hostels.

As Britain grapples with a youth employment crisis, Helen MacNamara , a former deputy cabinet secretary and now chairman of Shelter’s trustees, warns we are laying the groundwork for more future economic pain. “Not having a stable home means there’s often nowhere to cook, there’s nowhere to eat properly and talk as a family, there’s nowhere to do your homework,” she says. “What are these their job prospects going to be? Even if all you cared about was the financial prosperity of the country, you just would not waste talent like that.”

Burnham and Healey have promised to build more homes to provide a long-term fix for this crisis. But for now, their immediate focus is on the streets. Charities and local authorities are racing to ramp up their outreach work as the money flows across the country and say the cash will make a meaningful difference to rough sleeping numbers this winter. But the real test will be long-term change. The government’s “Everyone In” Covid rough-sleeping campaign, which placed homeless people in empty hotel rooms, succeeded in halving the number of people on the streets, but the benefits were eradicated as soon as the programme ended.

Will it be any different this time? Welcome to Westminster The London borough of Westminster – one of the wealthiest places in the country – is the epicentre of the national homelessness crisis. In the year to March, 2,583 people were sleeping rough there, making the borough home to one in five of London’s rough sleepers. The vast majority are not from the area but have travelled there for the services, the drug market, the community or simply because it is recognisable.

Few are as well put together as James. “Do you know what happens when you take spice? You can see other people’s thoughts,” says a bearded Scottish man in Grosvenor Gardens. He is referring to the synthetic cannabinoid which is the most prevalent street drug in Westminster. He has been rough sleeping more or less since he was last let out of prison in 2022. “I’m on the sex offenders register.” His case shows how tackling rough sleeping is a much more complicated problem than simply providing people with a roof over their head.

When he left prison, he was given a place to stay but he left. Charities have tried repeatedly to put him in a hostel, but he never stays. He thinks that wires are coming out of the walls and plugging into his brain. David Harvey, the cabinet member for housing at Westminster city council (WCC), says the local authority or the charities that it works with will make an offer of a bed to almost everyone sleeping on the streets “pretty much every day”.

But each night, as many as 30pc of the rough sleepers they reach will turn it down. “Most of the people out there have had some sort of pretty horrible trauma in their life. So inside their own head, it’s a rational decision sometimes to refuse,” says Harvey. Caroline Sargent, WCC’s deputy leader, says the people on the streets in Westminster can be broadly split into four categories. There are those who have fallen on hard times and typically engage with services quite quickly.

There is a cohort based around Park Lane and Marble Arch who engage in aggressive begging and often refuse support, and there is a group with no recourse to public funds because of their immigration status . The fourth group is known as the street population. “These people might have rooms in hostels or even housing but they have very complex mental health and often addiction needs and they are out on the street,” says Sargent. “They are begging but because people don’t have cash any more, they often resort to shoplifting.

They’re the people you see strung out in parks.” The number of people classed as living on the streets in London climbed by 8pc year-on-year to hit 819 between April and June, according to the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (Chain). More than a quarter (27pc) of these were in Westminster. “This is my playground,” says a 63-year-old man smoking in a red tent in Victoria’s Grosvenor Gardens, a few minutes down the road from Buckingham Palace.

Next to him is a 49-year-old man in a black puffer jacket, lying on a pile of cardboard and soiled, coverless duvets. He has sores on his hands and one on his forehead, and he is holding himself in a way that looks like he cannot move his legs. He has the jerky motions and hollowed cheeks that come with years of drug addiction. Across the capital, more than half of all rough sleepers have mental health problems, a third have a drug problem and 27pc struggle with alcohol.

Rough sleeping is horrific for those who go through it. It also has wider spillover effects for those living and working nearby. Ruth Duston, the chief executive of Primera, a consultancy that operates business improvement districts in London, warns that the high rates have become a key barrier to investment in certain parts of the capital. “It does influence companies’ decisions on where they want to sign their tenancy agreements because they need to think about the experience of their employees and their business visitors,” says Duston.

Large companies looking to source office space for several hundred employees have avoided neighbourhoods such as Victoria because of the sheer volume of rough sleeping. “It has a detrimental impact on the look and feel of a place,” she says. Harvey and Sargent both mourn a reduction in local policing. Labour’s decision to repeal the Vagrancy Act, which made rough sleeping a crime, has reduced the police’s enforcement abilities, says Sargent.

The political stakes for Burnham A few hours before he visited the King at Buckingham Palace on his first day as Prime Minister, Burnham visited The Passage, a day centre for homeless people in Westminster. It was a move designed to make it very clear that addressing homelessness was at the top of his agenda. Later that day, he announced £340m to tackle rough sleeping, which he increased to £442m this summer. “No one should have to bed down in a doorway or outside a station.

But we’ve seen it for so long that it feels like Westminster has started to accept it. I won’t accept it,” he said in August. Next came a national homelessness summit at Downing Street in October and an extra £432m in Healey’s first Budget to tackle rough sleeping over the rest of the parliament. This is the most positive government approach to rough sleeping in more than 20 years, says Pam Orchard, the chief executive of The Connection at St Martin’s in the Fields, a charity that Healey name-checked in his Budget speech.

“I don’t doubt the sentiment and the commitment that is behind it from the politicians. There is a real step change here,” says Orchard. Emma Haddad, the chief executive of St Mungo’s, echoes the sentiment: “The money is off the charts. We’ve been crying out for political leadership in this space for several years and it feels like we’ve got some now.” This cash is flowing through to communities and outreach services are ramping up their offerings.

The Passage has just opened a new emergency hub for 25 people. The Connection is doubling the capacity of its intensive engagement centre. “It is definitely going to decrease rough sleeping. It is definitely going to save some lives. I think the major question is: once people are in, how do you keep them in?” says Matt Downie, the chief executive of Crisis. When he became mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, Burnham made a similar promise to end rough sleeping.

His “A Bed for Every Night” scheme, which aimed to offer support to every person sleeping on the streets, was a precursor to the national Covid “Everyone In” scheme, and it did initially succeed in reducing the numbers. The number of people rough sleeping across Greater Manchester fell from 268 in 2017 to 90 by 2021. But the success did not endure. By 2025, the number had climbed to 197. The big factor behind the rise in homelessness nationally is increasingly squeezed housing affordability, says Downie.

“You used to see homelessness driven by more personal factors,” he says. “But pretty much since the pandemic, the rise in housing costs – particularly in private rental costs – means that everywhere there is a severe affordability challenge. Whoever you are, it’s about needing somewhere to live and the sums not adding up.” Simon, 51, who is sitting cross-legged on the pavement reading a copy of the Metro, has been sleeping on the same doorstep in Victoria since he became homeless a year ago.

“I try and keep it tidy and I leave before people arrive for work,” he says. Simon is not completely sure what went wrong for him: “It was something to do with the migration of the benefits system to Universal Credit.” More and more people are becoming homeless who do not match the stereotypes of recent decades. “Historically, people sleeping on the streets had long histories of trauma, domestic abuse, experiences of the criminal justice system, mental health needs and all kinds of entrenched support needs,” Haddad says.

“We obviously still have a lot of those people. But we have also been supporting a lot of people who have been in