Andy Burnham has said government money alone may not be enough to get rough sleepers off the streets by Christmas, as he issued a “rallying call” for councils, charities and communities to help solve the problem.
Speaking on a visit to the north-east of England, he said he felt “very passionately” about tackling homelessness and wanted the wider society to play a part in wiping it out.
The prime minister acknowledged that not every rough sleeper might take the offer “for their own reasons”. But he said a nationwide effort to stop as much rough sleeping as possible by Christmas was the aim – replicating what happened in the Covid pandemic.
Burnham told reporters: “The government money may not fully get us there, and I’m saying to wider society, faith organisations, let’s see if we can do this together. Let’s see if Britain can do this. Give everybody an offer to come inside before Christmas. You know, that is just something we can do.
“We did it in the pandemic. We can do it again, and it’s a rallying call, really, that I’m putting out there today, with a lot of government money behind it.”
Burnham wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday that rough sleeping has become so common it now “feels like part of the scenery”, as he pledged another £100m to tackle the problem this winter.
The announcement puts tackling homelessness as a central policy for Burnham’s government, and gives voters a measure by which to judge his success.
As mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham introduced schemes such as A Bed Every Night to offer emergency accommodation, but while the number of rough sleepers fell, it then began to rise again.
The prime minister said this was because “we were the only place providing that level of support, and understandably, people then travelled to Greater Manchester to access that support”.
He added: “So my point is, we can do this, but only if all areas are pulling in the same direction, and that’s what this funding is designed to achieve – to make this a nationwide initiative as we go into the Christmas period, getting everybody behind it.”
He said people being left to sleep on the streets “can often cost more to the state because people can be in and out of A&E, and in and out of hospital beds, and sometimes in contact with the police”.
As part of the national effort, Burnham said he would host a summit this autumn to “bring together leaders from across society – from business, finance, charities, health, faith communities and more – to ask what role each of them can play in ending rough sleeping”.
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Burnham said on Wednesday that he would be donating 15% of the additional salary he gets as prime minister to homelessness causes.
Speaking to the Big Issue, he said he wanted to continue what he had been doing as mayor of Greater Manchester. He has already said he would donate 15% of the salary he gets for being an MP to local causes in his constituency of Makerfield.
He told the magazine: “For the best part of nine, almost 10 years, I donated 15% of my salary as mayor of Greater Manchester to tackling homelessness in Greater Manchester.
“I am making a commitment to donate the same of my prime minister’s salary. I’m donating part of my constituency MP salary to local organisations, but the extra bit that comes with being prime minister, I’m making the same commitment.
“I wouldn’t want to ask anybody to do anything that I’m not prepared to do. I want to lead from the front. This issue matters massively to me.”
The latest annual national statistics, published in February, estimated there were 4,793 people sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2025 in England. This was a new record and the fourth annual increase in a row, with 43% of those people sleeping rough in London and the south-east.
