Mayor looks north to fix housing problem

Greater Manchester is looking overseas to fix a ‘fundamental’ problem which has blighted the region ‘since the eighties’.

Andy Burnham is trying to gather momentum for his ‘housing first’ initiative, which he unveiled in his mayoral re-election bid earlier this year. Housing first is a ‘philosophy’ that gives people at risk of becoming homeless a place to live in an effort to prevent other issues from coming up, like being drawn into crime and repeated health woes.

A pilot of the same name ran in Greater Manchester from 2019 to 2022, and helped re-home 118 people in that time. Now, the mayor wants to rapidly expand the programme, and bring in employment support services, usually delivered via Job Centres, in order to create a coherent method of taking a rough sleeper and reboot their life.

Foundational to housing first is that having a home is a basic human right, Mr Burnham said as he hosted the Finnish ambassador to the UK this week on Tuesday (10 September).

“A good home should be a human right, enshrined in UK law. I would like every party to commit to a Grenfell Law.”

“It’s unjustifiable to have that [Grenfell] report and not change the way we think about housing... Parliament will be culpable if there’s no profound change in our thinking,” he went on.

But to make his ambitions a reality, Greater Manchester requires cash from the new government.

“We are submitting our spending proposal for the budget today,” Mr Burnham confirmed.

“As well as asking for ‘Housing First’ in its current form to be continued, we are looking at mainstreaming the philosophy of housing first to come right across Greater Manchester. We have put a spending proposal in to adopt that approach.”

And the amount of money required to get the ball rolling on housing first – and therefore see the promised benefits of incurring less demand for other public services over a longer period of time, such as the NHS and police – can be ‘high’ up front.

That’s according to Finland’s ambassador to Britain, Jukka Siukosaari. The Scandinavian country pioneered housing first, and now has it firmly implemented across the nation.

“You have to get over that peak, in a way,” the Nordic diplomat told the Local Democracy Reporting Service. “But I don’t think it’s [expensive] when you get it right. It takes moving resources to prevention rather than the symptoms and the problem – then it becomes more economical to tackle homelessness.”

The programme worked in Finland, he added, because affordable and social housing is built next door to top-end developments.

“It’s important not to isolate socially affordable housing into the outskirts of the cities, because then you create other sorts of problems, you create ghettos and social problems because of the concentration of certain types of social class,” Mr Siukosaari said. “That’s why our solution has been affordable housing has to be within the general area and well-off areas.”

His comments come as a similar row erupted in recent weeks in Manchester over five new skyscrapers being approved containing 2,388 luxury flats in Deansgate.

Planning rules dictate developers need to make a 20 percent profit on their proposed projects before they’re compelled to include affordable homes inside it.

In Manchester, it’s rare for the profit margin to get above single-digits. When asked if the ‘20 percent’ rule needed to be relaxed to a lower threshold, Mr Burnham would not be drawn, but he did call for a reset in the relationship between planners and property moguls.

“The rules need to be strengthened, as does the hand of local authorities,” he said. “There’s a power imbalance, I think, between developers and local authorities. So it’s more powers and more capacity for local authorities as well [that’s required].”

It means, as the mayor tries to gather support for his housing overhaul, he needs more money from the government and would benefit from more powers coming north.

Ethan Davies, Local Democracy Reporter