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One of the defining features of politics over the past decade has been the frustration that the centre of government is weaker than it appears.Keir Starmer made the point when he appeared before the Liaison Committee last December, describing his ‘frustration that every time I go to pull a lever … delivery is longer than I think it ought to be'.But new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is providing a welcome antidote. His administration has generated early momentum and, on his first day in office, he committed to ending rough sleeping.This is clearly a priority for the new administration and it reflects Burnham's longstanding interest in homelessness. Indeed, on his first day as Mayor of Greater Manchester he joined the Rough Sleeping Outreach Team on a walk through the city centre to see first-hand the support they were providing. He chronicles it in a new chapter of a book edited by the Centre for Homelessness Impact, How to Use Evidence to End Homelessness, which I was fortunate enough to contribute to.In his previous role, Burnham's Greater Manchester did not end homelessness, but it arguably went further than anywhere else in England in trying to do so.Its flagship programme, A Bed Every Night, halved rough sleeping in its early years, before its numbers began to creep back up. For households who were homeless but not sleeping rough – whether in temporary accommodation or sofa- surfing – Greater Manchester established a city region framework with its constituent local authorities to prevent private providers simply supplying accommodation to the highest bidder.It trialled Housing First – which Burnham describes ‘not as one model, but as a philosophy that could be expressed in different ways' – and established an Empty Homes Package, scaling support that would not have been viable for individual local authorities to provide alone.For these reasons I am optimistic about what the Government can achieve when it comes to tackling homelessness. But the lesson from Greater Manchester is also that tackling homelessness cannot be achieved without the full weight of the Government behind it – not least in giving local authorities the tools and resources to prevent homelessness before it occurs.That requires a broader conception of prevention than the one embedded in the homelessness system today.Too often, prevention means intervening shortly before somebody becomes homeless: negotiating with a landlord, mediating with family members or finding an alternative tenancy or support to mitigate the harm of homelessness.These interventions matter – known as ‘secondary' and ‘tertiary prevention' – but they come relatively late. A genuinely preventative system should address the circumstances that make homelessness more likely in the first place: low incomes, unemployment, ill health, insecure housing and family breakdown and identify those at risk before they ask authorities for support.It also requires greater collaboration across the sector and a genuine exploration of new technologies that can make providing and accessing support less cumbersome.Many local authorities are already moving in this direction, but not enough. This move reflects a wider transformation in how authorities conceive their role, away from paternalistic models of service delivery and towards place leadership and a more relational state. Rather than residents being passed between services organised around institutional boundaries, support can be organised around the individual when it is needed. That means building relationships, understanding the circumstances that affect people and bringing together the services capable of supporting them.The Government must, therefore, create the conditions in which prevention becomes the organising principle of the homelessness system. That means longer-term funding, better data-sharing, integration between public services – and the organisations that run them – and a willingness to test, evaluate and scale what works well.As the Housing First philosophy rightly extols, homelessness is not only an issue of housing need. A household approaching an authority may simultaneously be experiencing rent arrears, unemployment, poor health, debt or family breakdown. Yet the public services intended to address those problems are often fragmented. Prevention therefore needs to become a whole-council – and increasingly whole-place – responsibility, bringing housing together with social care, public health, employment support, the NHS and the voluntary sector.There are already glimpses of what this can achieve. Kensington and Chelsea LBC's Homelessness Prevention Hub, for example, brings housing, public health, social care and other services together in one place.Greenwich LBC's hypothesis- led approach, which involves a ‘Test, Learn and Grow' model of understanding what is effective, has improved outcomes for homeless households.Elsewhere, the Office for Public Service Innovation, which is part of the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, is using shared data to identify households in need of support earlier.None of this requires pretending that innovation is a substitute for resources. Local authorities are operating against powerful structural forces: too few have enough social homes, there is inadequate welfare support available and they do not have enough hands-on-deck to support the growing number of households with needs.To use Starmer's phrase, many of the levers capable of addressing those problems sit with the Government.The Government must, therefore, create the conditions in which prevention becomes the organising principle of the homelessness system. That means longer-term funding, better data-sharing, integration between public services – and the organisations that run them – and a willingness to test, evaluate and scale what works well. It also means recognising that prevention is not a discrete homelessness programme. It is a different way of organising the state around people before their challenges become crises.That is the opportunity now facing the Government. Its new Rough Sleeping Programme, backed by £442m over the next three years, will support the Prime Minister to deliver on his immediate ambition to get rough sleepers into accommodation before Christmas.He must build on this by starting with a renewed focus on prevention.Jack Shaw is director of Groundwork ResearchThis article draws on Jack Shaw's chapter in the book, How to Use Evidence to End Homelessness, a collection of essays by leading thinkers across different sectors about the need to shift from crisis response to prevention in homelessness. Edited by the Centre for Homelessness Impact, the book is published by Bristol University

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HOMELESSNESS

Let's start with prevention

By Jack Shaw | 03 September 2026

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