19/08/2026
We welcome and are delighted by today's announcement by Andy Burnham. It signifies a moral commitment, provides additional funding and a deadline to provide every person sleeping rough with the offer of a bed before Christmas. It shows rough sleeping is not acceptable and the announcement commits to ending it.
The challenge will be to turn a bed every night into long-term solutions. People need safe, sustainable accommodation - a home. A bed every night is the starting point. To make it sustainable, people need access to affordable housing, support services, mental health and treatment services, access into employment opportunities, and so on. To deliver this, long-term investment is required. This will be the challenge.
Today we begin our drive to get everyone in for Christmas. And it will be for local communities up and down the land to decide how best to do it, says prime minister Andy Burnham