“You can’t have a good life without the security of a good home. But a good life is about far more than where you live.”

Andy Burnham writes those words in a chapter for the forthcoming book How to Use Evidence to End Homelessness. They distill what nearly a decade of working towards ending homelessness in Greater Manchester taught him.

He entered the mayoralty determined to confront the indignity of people being left on the streets, first through an immediate alternative to rough sleeping and then through Housing First.

But the work led him to a wider question: where had public services seen the risks earlier but failed to act? By the time he returned to parliament, Live Well had become the wider expression of that learning: an evidence-informed neighbourhood approach intended to bring services together around residents, identify difficulties earlier and make it easier for people to get practical help close to home, with communities playing a larger part in shaping what is available.

That journey makes Mr Burnham’s decision to begin his premiership with a commitment to end long-term rough sleeping especially significant. It also invites a question I hear often: the Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) achieved striking reductions in the 1990s (it worked!), so why can’t we do it again?

The answer is that we can, but not by simply repeating what worked then.

The original RSI began in central London, helping to build a response the capital largely lacked by funding outreach and resettlement alongside temporary and permanent accommodation.

Three decades later, the homelessness sector is much larger, yet long-term rough sleeping is rising, and thousands of people still pass through the streets each month. Over time, effort and resources have been increasingly focused on treatment and crisis management rather than effective prevention and early intervention.

Long-term rough sleeping is the right place to begin because it makes the gap between activity and results impossible to ignore and is more amenable to action because of the scale of the inflows into short-term homelessness.

In March 2026, an estimated 3,045 people had been seen sleeping rough during the month and in at least three of the preceding 12 months. They represented 40% of everyone recorded sleeping rough that month, and their number had risen by 9% in a year.

Every one of those people should be known by name and have an actual, funded route into housing – not simply another assessment, plan or referral.

I saw both the power and the limitations of such an approach in 2010, when I examined London’s Rough Sleepers 205 initiative. Identifying 205 people with some of the longest histories on the streets and making them a shared priority across borough boundaries brought an overwhelming problem into human focus.

It also exposed the harder task: turning knowledge and responsibility into a suitable home for each person, with support organised around their needs.

Mr Burnham’s commitment must achieve that. But success cannot mean working through one fixed list while another forms behind it. The Ending Rough Sleeping Data Framework, developed by government with the Centre for Homelessness Impact and five early-adopter areas before national rollout, reveals the scale of that churn.

During March, an estimated 7,541 people slept rough at some point, including 2,139 who were new to the streets and 1,013 who had returned after time away.

Those figures define the task for a successor programme to the RSI. It must help people experiencing long-term rough sleeping into a home, prevent those newly on the streets from becoming entrenched, ensure that those who have left do not return, and do more to prevent many others coming onto the streets in the first place.

These are not four separate programmes, but four parts of what ought to be a system-wide effort to prevent rough sleeping or make it otherwise rare, brief and non-recurring.

Achieving that requires a sharper division of responsibility. Too few affordable homes, insecure incomes, inadequate employment and other support to keep and get people into work all push people towards crisis. So do poorly managed departures from prisons, hospitals, care and asylum accommodation.

Meanwhile, people can be repeatedly assessed, supported and referred within the homelessness system without anyone having the means to house them. Once homelessness occurs, the response must help someone into a suitable home quickly.

The additional £340m announced by the prime minister on his first day in office provides an opportunity to begin this next phase. The opening investment is intended to provide 1,200 homes and intensive support – the preventative importance of which cannot be under-emphasised – for at least 3,000 people as part of a five-year programme.

But success will depend not only on how the new money is spent. It will depend on whether it helps align the substantial investment already flowing through national, regional and local systems behind the same outcomes, and creates genuine routes into suitable homes rather than more activity around people who remain homeless.

Making that work in a more devolved system will require a golden thread running from the prime minister’s commitment through to the experience of each person. This will involve a sense of national purpose, investment, regional leadership, application of our now considerable evidence base on what works, and the local capability and capacity to deliver across civil society.

All services must all point towards the same outcome: whether somebody reaches and keeps a suitable home. Places need freedom to organise housing and support around their circumstances, but devolution must strengthen rather than blur responsibility and build the capability and capacity to improve outcomes.

Regional government can provide the bridge between national ambition and local action. It can work across council boundaries to assemble routes into suitable homes, build the fuller picture that individual authorities cannot create alone and expose barriers requiring national action.

The Accelerators in London, Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region offer foundations on which to build. Their purpose is to bring fresh urgency to a crisis that has become normalised, strengthening regional governance and implementation while using shared data, service improvement and innovation, and developing the analytical tools to help better target resources at those in greatest need and thus deliver better results.

A small expert delivery function close to the prime minister could maintain the golden thread: ensuring obstacles have an owner, helping places solve problems quickly and turning lessons from delivery into national policy.

Government must also be able to follow the money as well as the person, seeing where costs and responsibility pass between services and tiers of government, and whether the combined investment is producing better and more lasting outcomes – all grounded in rigorous and timely evaluation of what works.

Together, this could become Everyone Home: a modern successor to the RSI. The change of name would signal a deeper shift. People should not be defined by the experience of sleeping rough, and attention should fall not on those enduring the crisis, but on our shared responsibility for ending it earlier.

Everyone Home names both the destination and the ambition: helping people failed for longest into a home, preventing new rough sleeping from becoming entrenched and ensuring that those who leave the streets do not return, but are able to seize opportunities for self-improvement.

Mr Burnham is right to begin where the failure of the present system is most visible. The larger opportunity is to turn that starting point into a national mission built for a devolving state: combining national resolve, regional capacity and local capability for action without ever losing sight of the individual.

That would not simply revisit the progress of the 1990s. It could establish how this country ends rough sleeping for good.

Lígia Teixeira is Chief Executive of Centre for Homelessness Impact

This article was first published in Inside Housing.

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