I’ve always thought you can tell something about a country by what it learns to walk past. And, somewhere along the way, we’ve got used to seeing people sleeping rough on our streets.
We see people bedded down in doorways and sat outside stations, carrying their lives in rucksacks and with sleeping bags on their backs. And I think most people have the same reaction: this isn’t right; it shouldn’t be happening here. But we’ve lived with it for so long that something that used to shock us now feels like part of the scenery.
That’s not on the public. It’s on us as politicians. For decades, Westminster has treated rough sleeping like a problem to step around rather than solve. It’s a philosophy that took hold in the 1980s and came back full force in the era of austerity: this idea that rough sleeping is just a fact of life rather than something government has a responsibility to end.
I’ve never accepted that. Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world. We’ve built the NHS, developed life-saving vaccines and invented the world wide web. But it’s somehow beyond us to get our own people off the streets? I don’t believe it for a minute. We did it during the pandemic. We got people out of the cold because, as a country, we decided it had to be done. We can do it again.
That’s why the first thing I announced when I became prime minister was a commitment to end rough sleeping. Not to manage it, not to reduce it – but to end it. And today, we’re taking the first step in getting it done.
We’re putting £442m behind a national drive in England to get everyone in for Christmas. I don’t want Whitehall trying to dictate how every penny of that is spent. The people who know what will work in Newcastle, Liverpool or Plymouth are the people who live there and see the problem first-hand every day. I’ll expect every person to be offered a route off the streets, but beyond that it will be up to local leaders to decide what type of support their community needs most.
But I also know from my time in Manchester that public money alone won’t solve this. Ending rough sleeping has to be something we all take responsibility for. That means councils, charities, businesses, faith groups and local communities all pulling together. And, even more importantly, it means all of us asking what we can do to help.
So alongside the money we’re putting in, I’m asking leaders across society to get behind this national drive. Because if we all play our part – if we all put care of people at the heart of what we do – we can bring some of that hope back to our communities. No matter who they are or what they’ve been through, every person sleeping rough deserves a chance to get back on their feet – and, together, that’s exactly what we’ll give them.
I don’t pretend this is a permanent fix – far from it. It’s not enough just to help people when they fall on hard times. It’s our job to catch people long before they hit the pavement, and that means dealing with the multitude of reasons why someone might be sleeping rough in the first place.
That’s why we’re reforming education so every young person, whatever their talents, has a route to a good job. It’s why we’re reindustrialising our towns and cities to make sure we get good growth in every postcode. It’s why we’ve committed to the biggest housebuilding programme since the second world war. And it’s why we’ll keep transferring power back to the local people who are closest to the problems they face and are best placed to solve them.
But today is about making that crucial first step. It’s about giving people a safe place to sleep tonight, and hope that tomorrow might be different. And, fundamentally, it’s about answering that defining question: what kind of country do we want Britain to be?
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Because, of course, I want us to be the fastest-growing economy in Europe. I want to see new businesses in our cities, investment in our towns, and homes in every community that desperately needs them. I want people to look around and feel that this country is finally moving forward again.
But all of that growth has to mean something. And if people are still sleeping beneath the cranes building that new Britain, I’ll never kid myself that our job’s done.
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