Join 58,000+ subscribers on our free mailing list. Welcome to our new website. If you're already a member, put your e-mail in again to read all our articles
Please check your inbox and click the link to complete signup, Thank You!
Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.
Please hold while we check our collection.
Skip to content

What should be done about Manchester city centre?

Illustration by Jake Greenhalgh.

'It is absolutely filthy everywhere. There are balloons, canisters, cigarettes, bottles, vomit, general rubbish just all over the street'

Three years ago, Andy Burnham held a press conference that captured the hard choices at the heart of Manchester city centre. On the one hand, the mayor said that the number of people sleeping rough was rising, and that he had signed off on extra funds to create more emergency housing for the homeless. He said the Greater Manchester approach was one of “support-first” – engaging with people on the streets in order to give them the advice and help they might need about benefits, housing and healthcare. 

On the other hand, the press conference had a slightly harder edge. Burnham talked about how “not everyone who appears homeless is in fact homeless”, and that there had been examples of “what you might call persistent or problematic begging in the city centre." Sitting alongside him was a senior police officer called Ian Jones, GMP’s commander for the city centre, who said that for people begging in the city centre who already have an income and who aren’t living on the streets, “our approach to these is all enforcement”. Jones also said the force had to “balance the needs” of people who live, work and shop in the city centre with the needs of the homeless community. 

It was an interesting moment, and it felt like a discernible change in tone. Ever since he was elected in 2017, Burnham had made ending rough sleeping his signature priority. But after an impressive start, the numbers were rising again, and now he and Jones seemed to be responding to a public mood: that something needed to change. They mentioned complaints from members of the public about begging, and the remark from Jones about balancing needs of different groups of people suggested Burnham and the police felt some pressure to act against antisocial behaviour. Perhaps they had spent a bit of time in the comments section of the Manchester Evening News, where disgust about the state of the city centre —dirty, dangerous, a nightmarish warzone — is never far away. 

‘What is happening in Manchester?’

Last week, a well known Manchester public relations advisor called Nina Sawetz posted a picture on LinkedIn showing a filthy side street, along with the words: “what is happening in Manchester? It is absolutely filthy everywhere. There are balloons, canisters, cigarettes, bottles, vomit, general rubbish just all over the street.” Sawetz added: “We are all working to try and promote Manchester as a global city for business and investment, but when I’m having to let my international clients walk past human **** that is slightly frustrating.” The post received more than 800 likes and almost 400 comments. 

Sawetz was clear in the replies to her post that she was deeply sympathetic to the city’s homeless population and didn’t blame them for the state of the streets. She recommended that the council make public toilets accessible and “Stop hiding the homeless behind town hall scaffolding and start helping them”. In the replies to her post, one person talked about the state of Piccadilly Gardens, and the “incredibly intimidating” people who hang around there. Another criticised the council for having a policy of “we don’t move the homeless on”. 

The tents at St Peter's Square before they were moved. Photo: Jack Dulhanty/The Mill.

No one responding to the post seemed to know that Manchester City Council does have a strong tool with which to act against the kinds of issues raised by Sawetz and many others. It’s called a Public Space Protection Order (PSPO), and it’s designed — in the council’s words — “to make sure we can all use and enjoy public spaces, safe from antisocial behaviour.” 

First implemented in 2020, and renewed for three years in 2023, the PSPO covers the whole city centre, and prohibits urination and defecation, the discarding of needles and the consumption of nitrous oxide or alcohol. In addition, anyone erecting a tent that is likely to create a health and/or safety risk can be asked to remove it. Anyone violating the PSPO’s conditions can receive a fixed penalty notice, or be prosecuted if they refuse to pay. 

And yet, it’s clear from speaking to experts and people on the street that the PSPO is not being heavily enforced. Some homeless charities in the city aren’t even aware of its existence. Scouting around Market Street, Piccadilly Gardens and the surrounding area, none of the people who sleep on these streets say they have been threatened with a fine (Jo Walby from from homeless charity Mustard Tree says they’ve never had anyone come in asking for help paying off a fine). 

I’d heard a rumour on Cross Street that a homeless man called Gabriel, who used to sit outside Greggs near The Mill’s office and would often chat to our staff, had been moved on for reasons unclear to Chorlton. But after a morning wandering aimlessly around Chorlton in search of him, I return to the city centre where another man under a blanket on Market Street says I’ve been chasing a red herring. Good news: he thinks Gabriel has actually found housing. 

What’s not so hard to find, however, are people who want to see these rules applied more stringently. According to Cass, a woman in her late 50s, Piccadilly Gardens is somewhere she’ll “avoid like the plague” after a certain time. She says she is sympathetic (“I get that it must be really hard for some of these people …. I am sympathetic”) but ultimately, she’d support a rigorously enforced PSPO. Her husband Mark, also present, tells me it might be bad now but it used to be “much worse”, recalling the spice epidemic in Manchester almost a decade ago (“now that was bad”).

A few weeks ago, our sister publication The Tribune published an interesting article about a recent push by the authorities in Sheffield to make that city’s centre feel safer and more pleasant. Sheffield City Council imposed its own PSPO just over a month ago, and seems to have enforced it much more energetically than Manchester has, perhaps because thousands of visitors were arriving in the city for the World Snooker Championships. In his piece, my colleague Dan Hayes expressed his concern about the new rules. “Are we in danger of socially cleansing our city?” he wondered. “Has the PSPO created a hostile environment for homeless people?” 

The general response from readers was more supportive of the PSPO. Some of these comments were constructed so tentatively they practically tiptoed their way towards the point, with eggshell-treading prefaces. Naturally, I have the greatest sympathies for….It goes without saying that…Let me start off by…. But the message that followed was clear: the city centre was a better place now that antisocial behaviour was being tackled. 

One woman said she previously felt so “intimidated” she’d been avoiding the city centre altogether. “As far as I’m concerned, well done to the council — and I don’t say that very often”. One even dealt my colleague Dan a piece of criticism I’ve no doubt he greedily received: “I can appreciate you may not feel threatened as you appear to be a fit young man but as a senior citizen in my seventies I have a different perspective”.

Political sensitivities 

On Market Street, I find a woman with a different perspective of her own. She’s called Mary and she’s 74 and her different perspective is this: Manchester doesn’t smell very nice. We stand just on the fringes of the blast radius of the thick scent of corn on the cob, although this isn’t the odour she has in mind. “I wouldn’t want to say it's all because of people sleeping on the streets,” she says. “But I do think something has to be done to tidy things up. You walk around and it just doesn’t feel clean.” Is that a change she’s noticed from 10, 20 years ago? “I think so. I would say so, yes.”

When a city centre PSPO was first mooted in Manchester in 2019, one public opponent of the plan was Walby from Mustard Tree, who saw the proposed measure as not only inhumane but also highly impractical. “The argument we made was that it's not dignified to demonise or criminalise people on the streets who can’t afford to help themselves,” she says. 

Nonetheless, she makes a distinction between the tent encampments in Albert Square, which consist of individuals suffering what she calls “political poverty” (these are mostly migrants who can’t get work due to their unprocessed asylum claims) and some of the cohorts of people in places like Piccadilly Gardens “who are making their living by begging on the streets [despite the fact] there isn’t really the evidence that backs up that lots of those people are homeless.” 

Andy Burnham has made homelessness one of his major priorities as mayor. Photo: Dani Cole/The Mill.

“I understand why people don’t like the sound of things like [PSPOs] but what’s the alternative?” Martin, who lives and works in Spinningfields in the city centre, wonders aloud with a Pret paper bag in his fist. “Parts of the city are absolutely filthy”. He accepts that to some extent grime is part and parcel of being a major city (“Paris is hardly the tidiest place”), and that cuts to council funding from central government have made it a lot more difficult to keep our streets clean. But equally, he says that people have the right to public spaces that “don’t stink of piss — if you’ll excuse me”. 

One person who works closely with the council on city centre matters describes the PSPO as “next to useless” because of how lightly it has been enforced. “If we’re honest with ourselves, it hasn’t exactly been transformational”, he says. This is a view I hear a few times: that the implementation of the PSPO was an attempt to make it look as though something was being done about the problem, rather than actually making a difference. 

The data seems to bear that out. A council analysis found that between May 2021 and August 2022, 469 PSPO interventions were recorded – less than one per day across the whole of the city centre – including 222 verbal warnings, 205 confiscations of alcohol, 13 referrals to other agencies, three written warnings and only five fixed penalty notices. 

Whether this is for want of resources or political will is a tricky point. If you take the tented encampment which was removed from St Peter’s Square in February (only to pop back up a few yards away) the PSPO could have been utilised. After all, it does explicitly cover tents – but instead the council went through the courts. One reason for this might be that the PSPO does not allow the council or police to order someone to remove a tent, only to request it. The punishment for not doing so is a fine, and fining people sleeping on the streets isn’t something the council wants to be seen doing. 

It's been suggested that getting a court order also created a bit of distance between the council and the action of moving people on. After all, it wasn’t council workers evicting these people, it was bailiffs backed by a court. “Nobody wants to be the heartless person on the front page of the MEN ordering tents to be dragged away”, the source who works with the council tells me. The Mill was present as bailiffs enacted the dawn crackdown. “I’m impartial,” one of them replied to an activist charging him with heartlessness. 

For Burnham, the mayor who promised to end rough sleeping in Manchester, the encampment on St Peter’s Square — which has now moved to Albert Square — is a sensitive issue. “This is not good for people in the tents. It’s not good for the city. It’s not the right place for people to get support,” he told BBC Radio Manchester at the time of the tent eviction in February. And he added that more enforcement action might need to follow. “I do not think this will be the end of it,” he said. “The city council will have to consider its options.”

Tents in the city centre. Photo: Jack Dulhanty/The Mill.

At Mustard Tree, much of the current focus is on helping the people who remain in tents. Manchester, Walby says, does seem to have a more distinct “tent issue” than most other cities and this has been the focus of a lot of negative tabloid attention in past months. And charities like Mustard Tree find themselves stretched so thin their focus is inevitably on the practicalities of helping as many people as they can, rather than more abstract debate over who the city centre is for. The other day, 89 people from Altrincham’s Cresta Court (this is a hotel temporarily being used to house asylum seekers) suddenly arrived at their door seeking assistance. 

Morag Rose, a lecturer as well as the founder of the Loiterers Resistance Movement, thinks the issue with PSPOs is even simple: that they “set the tone” for a whole ranch of policies dictating who the city centre is and isn’t for. Rose is that rarest of things in Manchester: a vehement defender of Piccadilly Gardens. Where the collective viewpoint of my other interviews was that Piccadilly Gardens is a “hole”, a “cesspit” and a place to give a seriously wide berth unless you’ve got a wanton disregard for your own personal safety, to Rose it is the best of Manchester. “I’m a little bit obsessed with Piccadilly Gardens. It's free to use, it's open to everybody — in those sorts of spaces we realise how rich and diverse our city is,” she says. The joy of spaces like Piccadilly Gardens, to her, are their openness and “soft sense of belonging”. Policies like PSPOs fly directly in the face of that.

There isn’t one Manchester, really. The Manchester experienced by a 74-year-old who feels afraid to access a public garden after nightfall is not the same Manchester experienced by a 25-year-old who likely won’t share these fears. Nor is it the same Manchester experienced by someone dragging a sleeping bag into an underpass in hope of a few hours sleep. Everyone seems to agree that a balancing of needs is required — where and how that balance is found is another matter. To Walby, finding common ground is essential. “What we can all agree on,” she says. “Is that none of us want there to be people sleeping on the streets. So we should start there”.

Share this story to help us grow- click here



Comments

How to comment:
If you are already a member, click here to sign in and leave a comment.
If you aren't a member, sign up here to be able to leave a comment.
To add your photo, click here to create a profile on Gravatar.

Latest