We should all applaud Andy Burnham’s commitment to end rough sleeping (‘It’s generations of decline’: can Andy Burnham really end rough sleeping?, 24 July). The ambition is right and overdue. But he set the same goal in Greater Manchester in 2017 and found, as anyone would, that you cannot clear people off the street faster than the system puts them there. Much of rough sleeping is manufactured upstream.
Take prison. In 2024-25, around 1,000 people a month left prison in England and Wales homeless and went on to sleep rough. Homelessness feeds reoffending, reoffending feeds custody, and release feeds the street. No government can credibly promise to end rough sleeping while one public institution keeps releasing people straight into it.
