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Andy Burnham: why Housing First is still the way forward and Kit Malthouse is wrong on targets

Greater Manchester’s mayor speaks to Inside Housing editor Martin Hilditch at the MIPIM property conference. Photography by Richard Grange

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Why Housing First is still the way forward and Kit Malthouse is wrong on targets. @AndyBurnhamGM speaks to our editor @MartinHilditch #ukhousing

Greater Manchester’s mayor @AndyBurnhamGM tells @MartinHilditch why he thinks housing minister @JBrokenshire ‏is playing political games over housing numbers #ukhousing

“Rough sleeping is the most urgent thing… people are dying on the streets,” says @AndyBurnhamGM #ukhousing

Andy Burnham on a panel with Inside Housing editor Martin Hilditch (left) at MIPIM last week

We’re only two-and-a-half months in, but so far it’s been a busy 2019 for Andy Burnham.

In the past month alone, the mayor of Greater Manchester has appointed 19,000-home housing association Great Places to lead a consortium of landlords to deliver the city region’s Housing First programme to tackle homelessness, and has got into a tussle with housing minister Kit Malthouse over the region’s approach to housing in its spatial framework. He has also extended the region’s A Bed Every Night scheme for homeless people, set up to run over the winter months, until the end of April.

It’s also a crunch time for Mr Burnham politically. This May marks his second anniversary as mayor, and we’re reaching the point where judgements can be made about his progress on tackling what he has called a humanitarian crisis of homelessness.

We speak to Mr Burnham at Manchester’s beachside pavilion at the annual MIPIM property conference in Cannes, France – surroundings that are slightly incongruous with the subject matter.

Mr Burnham has been a passionate backer of the Housing First approach

It’s the start of an intense two days of back-to-back speeches, meetings and handshaking for Mr Burnham as he attempts to attract investment into the region, so there’s no time for niceties. Sipping a black coffee, Mr Burnham is businesslike, serious and to the point.

Inside Housing wants to find out what progress Mr Burnham has made so far, whether his faith in Housing First has been shaken by the failure of a pilot scheme in Sheffield, and the ongoing implications of that tussle with Mr Malthouse over housing numbers.

It’s certainly easy to see why Mr Burnham has made tackling homelessness a focal point. Rough sleeping shot up by 578% in Greater Manchester between 2010 and 2017, according to the official rough sleeping counts.

In tackling this, Mr Burnham has been a passionate backer of the Housing First approach, which provides housing and intensive support for people with histories of repeat or entrenched homelessness.


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People don’t have to prove that they are ‘housing ready’ in order to access a home – instead, secure housing is seen as the platform from which other issues can be tackled. It has been successful internationally and has virtually eliminated rough sleeping in Finland.

Last month, Mr Burnham started to add flesh to the bones of Greater Manchester’s Housing First pilot, selecting Great Places to lead a consortium of landlords aiming to rehouse 400 people over the next three years, backed by £7.6m of government funding. All of which sounds impressive, but Mr Burnham is quick to point out that Housing First is not the only game in town.

“It is really a piece in our jigsaw,” he says. “That is the way I see it. You need a range of provision at different levels.”

This range includes the aforementioned A Bed Every Night scheme, along with a £2.6m social impact bond to help deliver support and training for rough sleepers.

Greater Manchester’s Housing First pilot is launching at a time when the scheme has met with its first high-profile failure in the UK. Sheffield Council announced that it was pulling the plug on its Housing First scheme last month – less than two years after it launched and a full year ahead of the intended end of the pilot project. In a document presented to councillors in February, the council stated that it had been a struggle to find the 10 homes the pilot intended to source.

“One of the biggest challenges has been the lack of affordable, suitable one-bedroom, self-contained accommodation,” the report said. “The private sector has not been able to produce this type of accommodation within the limits of the Local Housing Allowance for single people, and in particular for those under 35. Public sector landlords have also struggled to provide accommodation.”

Has such a conclusion – and problems locating a measly 10 homes in the whole of Sheffield – shaken Mr Burnham’s faith in Housing First?

“Well, we certainly recognise the issue that Sheffield is raising – no question. And I think that [the relationship with the benefit system] does have to be addressed. I think the point is that our pilot is funded differently. It is an £8m scheme to run for three years.”

But if he acknowledges that the benefit system is potentially problematic, what does this mean?

Housing First: The seven key principles

  • People have a right to a home so Housing First prioritises access to housing as quickly as possible without any conditions other than the willingness to maintain a tenancy. Individuals won’t lose the tenancy if they disengage from or no longer require support.
  • Flexible support is provided for as long as it is needed with housing providers committing to long-term, flexible support without a fixed end date.
  • The housing and support are separate – so housing is not conditional on engaging with the support. The offer of support remains if the tenancy fails.
  • Individuals have choice and control. They have the choice, where possible, about where they live. Accommodation should be pepper-potted and self-contained, unless an individual says they would prefer shared housing.
  • Active engagement. Staff proactively engage clients and caseloads are small. Support provided as long as clients need it.
  • The service supports people to identify their strengths and goals and to develop skills and knowledge to achieve them.
  • A harm reduction approach is used – so individuals who, for example, self-harm are supported to undertake practices which minimise the risk of them self-harming.

Source: Housing First England

“I will very much be saying that the government either needs to change those [Local Housing Allowance] rules or make the pilot permanent, or a combination of those two things if the Housing First model is to work,” he says, before emphasising that he thinks the funding will “insulate” Greater Manchester’s scheme from any problems.

Nonetheless, Mr Burnham is convinced that Housing First is the right approach. “It works,” he states. In fact, he is already keen to extend it beyond a pilot.

“The message to government would be: can we stop running pilots all the time? Can we just have a bit more permanence in terms of what we are doing? I recognise that they will want to test Housing First and different approaches – I understand that – but as quickly as possible we need to move from pilots to permanence.”

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Andy Burnham speaking at MIPIM

Speaking of the government, Mr Burnham has taken issue with an intervention by Mr Malthouse in a Westminster Hall debate about the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework.

Consultation on the framework, which sets out plans for 200,980 homes in Greater Manchester through to 2037, launched in January and closes this week.

In the debate, which centred on the impact the plans will have on the green belt, Mr Malthouse appeared to downplay the importance of the government’s housing need target. The target estimates the number of homes needed in different parts of England, and is intended to prevent the system clogging up in an argument about numbers.

In the debate, Mr Malthouse suggested that “there has been a lot of misunderstanding, resulting in the notion that this is a mandated number that local authorities have to hit”.

After the debate, Mr Burnham said he would seek an urgent meeting with Mr Malthouse to clarify this statement, because the public statement was a different “impression to the one offered in private by civil servants”.

“I wanted to reduce green belt take further”

Today, Mr Burnham says that he is still waiting for the meeting or any feedback about how Mr Malthouse’s words should be interpreted. This is potentially politically significant because Mr Burnham was elected saying he wanted to avoid any loss of green belt in Greater Manchester – a pledge he has had to compromise on because of the government’s housing need figure. He sees Mr Malthouse’s interjection as political game-playing in order to pass on political fall-out from any backlash over numbers.

“The government is piling the pressure on us,” he says. “And I don’t think it is acceptable for a minister to rock up in a debate and say, ‘No, we’re not – it’s up to them.’ That is not the message we are getting [from civil servants]. Because anyone who has dealt with the government on the issue of housing numbers will know they are piling the pressure on.
I wanted to reduce green belt take further. In the end you have to compromise and in the end that is what I did.”

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Delegates at the MIPIM dinner

Is Mr Burnham not trying to pass on responsibility too, though? Surely his housing ambitions for Greater Manchester will necessitate tough conversations about the green belt? Mr Burnham insists not.

Building on the green belt is “building for the car, as far as I am concerned”, he states.

“You can’t sustain that approach. So we have gone back to a brownfield preference, or brownfield-first approach. And that is the logic of our new spatial framework. Green space or green belt should only come into play when all other options are exhausted in a given locality. And at the moment, the way things are working I don’t think it does work like that and that is why the public, rightly in my view, get angry about it.”

There are early indications that Mr Burnham’s approach in Greater Manchester might be working

Clearly, there are more debates to be had with government. For now, though, there are early indications that Mr Burnham’s approach in Greater Manchester might be working. The number of rough sleepers across the region fell for the first time in eight years in 2018 – from 268 to 241 people (although 140 people were in A Bed Every Night accommodation on the night of the count and the number of rough sleepers in Manchester city itself continued to rise).

Ultimately, this is the issue on which Mr Burnham wants to be judged.

“I guess if you can’t deal with that, people will say, ‘I don’t believe you can deal with anything,’ because that is the most urgent thing,” he says. “People are dying on the streets.”

The meeting finishes and Mr Burnham hurries off to his next appointment. The year ahead will go a long way towards telling us what his legacy in Manchester is likely to be.

Cathy at 50 campaign

Cathy at 50 campaign

Our Cathy at 50 campaign calls on councils to explore Housing First as a default option for long-term rough sleepers and commission Housing First schemes, housing associations to identify additional stock for Housing First schemes and government to support five Housing First projects, collect evidence and distribute best practice.

Click here to read more about Cathy at 50

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