Reverse austerity, take over empty properties, build council homes
Hamza Khan, West London Socialist Party
The government has announced an additional £102 million in funding for its plan to ensure that every rough sleeper in England is offered a bed by Christmas. Prime minister Andy Burnham pledged to “end rough sleeping” in his first announcement as new prime minister. But while emergency accommodation is urgently needed, the focus on beds alone ignores the deeper crisis created by decades of neglect, privatisation, and the erosion of essential support services.
Rough sleeping is not simply the result of a lack of beds. It is the outcome of successive governments failing to provide adequate mental health services, addiction support, social services, domestic violence refuges, and community outreach programmes. Austerity intensified these failures, slashing budgets and dismantling what little safety nets had been established. Thousands of people sleeping rough today have complex needs that cannot be solved just by placing them in temporary accommodation and hoping for the best.
End austerity
Without restoring funding and expanding these crucial services, the government’s plan risks becoming another short-term fix that leaves the root causes untouched – as happened following a similar programme during the Covid-19 pandemic. Burnham’s plan seems like it’s less about supporting homeless people and more about ensuring the public doesn’t have to see them, an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach that mistakes visibility for the problem itself.
The pledge to deliver only 1,000 permanent homes over three years is nowhere near enough. Britain faces a severe shortage of council housing after decades of sell-offs and underinvestment. Meanwhile, more than 250,000 homes sit empty across the country, many of which are held as speculative assets by landlords and developers. It is indefensible that people have to sleep on the streets while an entire Manchester worth of homes remain unused. Councils should take long-term empty homes into public ownership, renovate them, and expand genuinely affordable and high-quality council housing.
Ending rough sleeping requires more than emergency beds. It demands reversing decades of housing policy failure, rebuilding public services, and breaking the grip of private landlords and developers over the housing system. It requires rent controls, eviction protections, and a mass programme of council house construction. Housing must be treated as a basic human right, not a commodity.
