Andy Burnham entered Downing Street with Parliament already in recess for the summer.  This gives his administration a brief opportunity to think beyond the immediate parliamentary cycle and decide what its promise to rewire the state will mean in practice. In his Manchester speech last month, Burnham made his intention clear: “The whole of Whitehall will now be required to get behind our places and work together with them to make quicker, more joined-up decisions.”  

Homelessness has already emerged as an unusually revealing test of whether that promise can be made real. It is a problem shaped by national policy but experienced locally; produced across departmental boundaries but too often left to housing services to resolve; and sustained by failures that become visible only when they are already costly and difficult to reverse. Local housing markets, welfare rules, prisons, hospitals, schools, employment services, social care and the voluntary sector all influence whether someone loses their home, how quickly help arrives and whether they are able to move on. No single Whitehall department can see or control that whole system, but strategic authorities can often see where it meets in practice. If devolution can help places act earlier, join up those services and create credible routes into stable housing, it will demonstrate something much larger than a new approach to homelessness. It will show how national government can set direction, remove structural barriers and support places to solve problems that do not fit neatly within departmental boundaries.

The new prime minister also brings direct experience of both the possibilities and the limits of this approach. Ending rough sleeping was one of his defining commitments on becoming mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. A Bed Every Night – the city-region offer of emergency accommodation and support to people sleeping rough – was an early expression of that ambition. It was followed by one of England’s major Housing First pilots and a wider housing-first approach built around supply, standards and support. Live Well takes the same preventive logic across public services, organising help around people and neighbourhoods and intervening before difficulties become crises. Greater Manchester’s experience has also shown that local leadership and delivery matter enormously, but cannot by themselves overcome shortages of affordable housing, welfare pressures, unstable funding or decisions taken in national systems. That is precisely why devolution needs to combine local responsibility with sustained national support and reform.

Burnham’s first-day announcement of a £340 million Long-Term Rough Sleeping Accommodation Programme reflects those lessons. Its commitment to provide up to 1,200 homes and sustained support for at least 3,000 people experiencing long-term rough sleeping is an important and welcome start. It combines national investment with local leadership and recognises that housing alone is not enough. Its success will be judged by whether it translates into suitable homes, sustained support and fewer people reaching the streets in the first place.

The case for devolution is not that every place already possesses all the capabilities it will require. It is that local and regional leaders are often better positioned to organise decisions around people, institutions and housing markets. National government should therefore neither prescribe every detail nor simply step away. Its role should be to create the conditions in which devolved leadership has a good chance of succeeding: clear national outcomes, sustained investment, usable evidence, strong data, access to specialist implementation support and serious action to increase the supply of homes into which people can move. That must include building the strategic and analytical capability to turn broad ambitions for prevention into credible delivery plans, operating models and practical tools. Rewiring relationships between Whitehall and places will not be enough if the capacity to use new powers effectively is missing at both levels.

This is why supporting mayoral strategic authorities has become a deliberate focus of our work at the Centre for Homelessness Impact: we are supporting place-based initiatives to prevent homelessness in London, Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region.  Similar challenges are apparent in each: how to move from crisis response to prevention, translate partnership into a workable operating model and create better routes into housing. These are not simply local delivery problems. They are exactly the kinds of challenges a stronger national–regional settlement should help places solve.

A strategic authority may be able to bring councils, housing providers, health services and criminal justice partners into the same room, but convening does not by itself create an integrated system. The places where we are working are among the more mature and ambitious, yet even there pathways remain fragmented, referral routes unclear and the data needed to see who is entering the system and where people are getting stuck is often missing. Reform means redesigning services while continuing to run them, and deciding what should remain local, what is better organised regionally and what national government should provide once for everyone. It is neither realistic nor efficient to expect every area to build that infrastructure from scratch. Analytical tools, common data approaches and robust evidence about which interventions work are national public goods: they should be developed once, improved through use and made available to every place.

The fiscal position makes this division of labour more important. Without reducing the flow into homelessness, even successful investment in rough sleeping will always be chasing demand. Places cannot stop funding temporary accommodation, emergency provision and other crisis services while preventative approaches take effect. The costs of acting earlier may also fall to one service while the benefits accrue later, or elsewhere in government. Without determined national and sub-national leadership, those pressures will continue to favour crisis response even where prevention would produce better outcomes over time. 

The new rough sleeping programme provides a strong opening move. The wider reform agenda should now be organised around three priorities: improving the statutory prevention system people rely on now, developing solutions for the risks it cannot address alone, and turning the new programme into a durable national pathway out of rough sleeping.

The first priority should be to turn Housing Options – the statutory backbone of homelessness prevention – into a system that can learn and improve. Councils operate under the same legislation, yet service models vary greatly, and we still know too little about which combinations of advice, financial assistance, legal help, tenancy support and access to housing produce the best outcomes or value for money. London’s Ending Homelessness Accelerator is beginning to show what practical redesign involves: simplifying the pathway, connecting Housing Options more effectively with wider public services and housing routes, and deciding which functions should remain with boroughs, be organised sub-regionally or operate across the capital. The aim should be not simply to process applications more efficiently, but to identify risk earlier and give people practical help before homelessness occurs.

The second priority should be a cross-government Homelessness Prevention Fund to develop solutions that mainstream services do not yet have. Health, justice, education, defence, welfare and migration should contribute where their systems create predictable housing risks. The initial portfolio could focus on transitions from care, prison, the Armed Forces and asylum accommodation, as well as domestic abuse and sudden financial shocks, developing and testing practical combinations of earlier planning, financial help, employment support, trusted relationships and access to housing. And it should provide a route to scale promising work. This would strengthen targeted prevention while also generating the evidence and tools needed to act progressively earlier, rather than waiting until people are close to crisis.

The third priority should be to turn the new programme into a twenty-first-century renewal of England’s approach to street homelessness. The Rough Sleepers Initiative, launched in 1990, and the Rough Sleepers Unit that followed established coordinated outreach, clear targets, and specialist provision in England’s major cities. A decade later, the £90 million Hostels Capital Improvement Programme – and the  Places of Change programme that followed – used national investment to remodel hostels and day centres around recovery and routes into settled housing. 

The new investment has the potential to become an equivalent programme for today’s challenge. But acquiring 1,200 homes and supporting 3,000 people must be treated as the beginning of a durable national pathway, not a self-contained initiative. That investment should come with clear shared outcomes, common measures and evaluation built in from the outset, so that funding can follow results and the programme can improve as it grows. National government should help strategic authorities build the outreach, assessment, housing and support systems around those homes, rather than expecting each place to design them independently.

Delivering these priorities will require a modest but permanent national capability. A focused improvement and innovation function could work through strategic authorities and existing partnerships, providing shared evidence, data infrastructure and specialist support, and helping effective models spread without requiring every area to develop them independently. It could also help places undertake the hard-edged analytical work needed to identify risk, target support and understand whether prevention is actually reducing homelessness.

Burnham knows from Greater Manchester what visible leadership, A Bed Every Night and Housing First can achieve, and where local action reaches its limits. The National Plan to End Homelessness has set the direction, and the new investment in homes and support gives that ambition immediate substance. The next step is to ensure places have the capacity to deliver it well, improve existing prevention services, develop the solutions they need next and secure the wider supply of homes without which lasting progress will remain difficult.

Burnham has promised that Whitehall will get behind places. Making that true for homelessness would be a practical demonstration of devolution done well: national government setting the ambition and removing structural barriers, places designing and delivering the response, and both learning from the results. Rewiring the state is not simply about where power sits, but whether places have the means to use it well.

This article was first published by Inside Housing.

• Lígia Teixeira is Chief Executive of the Centre for Homelessness Impact

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