Good morning. On 29 June, as the media gathered in Manchester at the People’s History Museum to hear Andy Burnham set out his blueprint to transform the UK, over in Westminster the 1824 Vagrancy Act was quietly repealed. It ended two centuries of criminalising people for the typically blameless fact of not having a home.
While this largely symbolic move away from punishment to prevention was welcomed by charities, it did nothing to tackle the scale of the problem. The number of people sleeping rough on a single night in the autumn of 2025 in England – the most recent snapshot – was at a new record high of 4,793, exceeding the previous peak of 4,751 in 2017 and the fourth annual increase in a row. This is despite UK government spending on homelessness more than doubling in the past five years.
