Official statistics published last year showed that Manchester continues to have one of the highest rates of rough sleeping in the country – a rate that rose tenfold in the city centre alone between 2010 and 2016 alone under Coalition and Conservative governments.
In 2017, after years of negotiations on ‘devolution’ between local councils and the Westminster government, former Labour MP Andy Burnham was elected as the first mayor of Greater Manchester.1 For Burnham and the council, devolution represented an opportunity to ‘shift power from London’ and create a Northern Powerhouse, the project coined by then Tory chancellor George Osborne. The headline promise of Burnham’s mayoral campaign was to eradicate street homelessness in the region by 2020. After being elected, Burnham reaffirmed that ‘ending rough sleeping by 2020’ would be ‘one of my top mayoral priorities’, and pledged 15% of his £110k a year salary to a new Greater Manchester Housing Investment Fund (GMHIF). Like the public services that Labour councils have connived in cutting, those promises are in tatters.
The results have been dire. Burnham’s first year in office saw a 44% rise in street homelessness. Between 2017 and 2018 it rose by a further 34%. Money from local councils and celebrity-led fundraisers, like former Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany’s testimonial match at the Etihad Stadium, has gone towards a ‘bed every night’ hostel campaign. Burnham boasts that a third of those staying in hostels have now found permanent housing. Yet a cornerstone of his ambition, a 24-hour homeless shelter run by the Riverside housing association, was closed after less than three months in January 2019. While the closure was blamed on structural problems, the shelter did not reopen.
Manchester’s ‘bed every night’ hostels and B&Bs remain cramped, dirty, in hard to reach areas and exclude homeless couples. Even the usually loyal Manchester Evening News reports that the temporary accommodation on offer is ‘grim… a grimy, stomach-churning mix of stale dirt, damp and bleach’, infested with flies, rats and without locks on bedroom doors (MEN 22 April 2018). The Openshaw-based Justlife charity estimates that around 500 individuals in Manchester alone end up languishing in B&Bs, undocumented, ‘cycling in and out of rough sleeping’. Residents of these hovels are taken off housing priority lists by the council as national legislation no longer deems them as being owed a ‘duty’ to be housed.
Whilst claiming to have no ‘duty’ towards homeless people, the council is clear about the expensive ‘duty’ it owes towards private landlords: it’s estimated that, at full occupancy, landlords are creaming off an average £3,000 in housing benefits per homeless household accommodated in the building per month.
This is only part of the picture. Through the GMHIF, the Burnham regime has posed as saviours of the homeless while continuing a longstanding Manchester Labour tradition of enriching its friends. Councillor Beth Knowles was appointed by Burnham to lead in ending rough sleeping and flew off on ‘research’ trips to Canada and Seattle, where she told reporters of ‘private sector organisations that want to help solve homelessness’ and the leading role played by Mancunian property developers. The Fund boasts of a £420 million commitment to build over 5,150 housing units across 40 sites, providing loans to building and property companies. The GMHIF case study is a set of ‘family homes’ built by Nook and Key in the Hyde area. The developer’s own website describes them as ‘executive family homes’, with two bedroom flats on sale for a minimum of £160,000 – there are 14 on the market, without even the pretence of providing ‘affordable’ rented accommodation. Burnham’s fund lines the pockets of the rich while doing nothing to solve the housing crisis.
But Manchester councils and Burnham’s mayoral team have not only left the homeless to rot. As we reported in April 2019,2 Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) are being used to socially cleanse rough sleepers from city centres and high streets, serving only to push homelessness into outlying areas. In fact, the Labour council was only recently pressured into dropping a planned fine of £100 (up to £1,000 if taken to court for non-payment) for ‘aggressive and intimidating begging’, but is still rolling out the penalty for people caught urinating in public places, dropping syringes or refusing to move from doorways. Deputy council leader Nigel Murphy claimed ‘It is easy to dismiss such concerns when you haven’t, for example, got discarded needles in your garden or someone sprawled on your stairwell… This is not a magic wand but it is an extra tool for the council and police to help address issues which have a negative impact on people’s experience of the city centre.’ The ‘issues’ are people without homes.
Homes not hostels!
1 Turnout in the mayoral election was an unenthusiastic 29.34% of registered voters.
2 https://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/britain/labourtrade-unions/5541-labour-backs-social-cleansing-in-manchester
