Exclusive: Rough sleeping in Greater Manchester has risen for the fourth year in a row

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Dear readers – there was one thread left dangling in Joshi’s widely-read essay about Andy Burnham, and it was about homelessness. Joshi noted that rough sleeping had fallen sharply after Burnham became mayor. But what was the number at the official count last year? 

Every year, the GMCA publishes a press release, usually early in the year, announcing the new number (based on an official count that takes place on one night in November) and taking credit for the progress made. Ending rough sleeping by 2020 was, after all, Burnham’s most high profile promise when he was elected, and even when 2020 passed, it continued to be a major priority, with millions spent on his flagship A Bed Every Night scheme.

This year, they still haven’t made such an announcement. So we dug into the figures from the government and checked them with Burnham’s team. 

The upshot: The number increased to 197 last year, up from 154 in 2024. It means that the number of people seen sleeping rough on the official annual “snapshot” count has risen for four years in a row and has more than doubled since 2021. The number is now closer to the count when Burnham took over (which was 268 in 2017) than the lowest count that was achieved in 2021, when 89 rough sleepers were counted. 

Here’s our graph showing how rough sleeping has gone down and then up again since Burnham became mayor: 

Was there a reason that the GMCA didn’t announce its 2025 numbers as they normally do, in a period when Burnham was in the national spotlight, first when he tried to run for Gorton and Denton and now in Makerfield? “No, there is no specific reason why no announcement has been made this year,” a spokesperson told us.

The GMCA says that the increase in 2025 is consistent with a national trend in recent years, but four years of increasing rough sleeping suggest that the Greater Manchester model is no longer the exemplar for how to tackle street homelessness. Government data shows that London, Yorkshire and The Humber and the East Midlands all saw decreases last year, and Salford was one of the local authorities with the latest increase, rising from 18 to 41 between 2024 and 2025, an increase of 128%.

The combined authority is accommodating a lot of rough sleepers via A Bed Every Night – it increased the bed spaces from 550 to 600 this time last year. Burnham’s officials point to the freezing of Local Housing Allowance rates, increased evictions from the asylum system and the complexities of accommodating people with unmet health and social care needs as factors that are pushing up rough sleeping across the country. It’s also clear that the Everyone In initiative during the pandemic may have kept numbers artificially low in 2020 and 2021.

Does Burnham want to build? 

Tackling homelessness has been central to Burnham’s agenda as mayor. When the number of rough sleepers fell to 89 in 2021, he said that Greater Manchester's “ground-breaking approach to rough sleeping” was changing people’s lives. In his Makerfield campaign, he hasn’t spoken much about the issue, and it doesn’t get a mention in his essay in The Times today, in which he responds to Tony Blair’s intervention earlier this week.

What Burnham does talk about – and has made a theme of his campaign – is the closely related issue of housing. “The failure to reform right-to-buy and fully restore the public housing stock is the root cause of today’s housing crisis,” he writes. Naturally, his critics on the Right contest that point, asking why he isn’t talking about a key plank of Manchester’s recent economic journey: private home-building.

So what does the mayor’s record tell us about what he believes about housing, and what he might do in government? Jack Dulhanty has dug into those questions for Part 2 of our Burnham Blueprint series: a special set of articles examining Andy Burnham’s record and what he believes in. How much has the mayor interacted with property developers? And, crucially, has he achieved his promise to build thousands of new social homes?

‘Tangible sense of tension’ 

At a property and infrastructure conference held in Leeds last week, attendees were nervous about the dawning realisation that Burnham might be on his way to Number 10. “There was a tangible sense of tension among some delegates representing Greater Manchester” at the catchily acronymised UKREiiF event, according to one attendee, the former MEN journalist Simon Donohue. 

In a blog post, longtime Miller Donohue – who now works in the property industry – noted that Burnham’s run for parliament in Makerfield “leaves a sizable hole in some of the certainties that have helped deliver a property boom in parts of Manchester and Salford over the last decade.”