The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has announced he is putting £442million behind a “national drive” to end rough sleeping by Christmas.
There is a clear need for greater support to help, in particular, military veterans and Britons who have fallen on hard times avoid the vicious cycle of rough sleeping.
As citizens of this country, and those who in many instances have put their lives on the line in service of Britain, it should be a source of national shame these people have been left out in the cold whilst Whitehall officials have been all too happy to spend billions of pounds every year housing illegal migrants.
How many British citizens have frozen to death, or been forced to tolerate awful living conditions, because the British state was distracted by ensuring that tens of thousands of new arrivals had a roof over their heads?
So, yes, a strategy to avert another disastrous winter for Brits down on their luck is welcome.
But is this actually what we are going to get?
We need to be frank and say it is unlikely.
There is a high risk this scheme, far from helping homeless Britons, becomes nothing but another means through which the British state spends taxpayers’ money supporting foreign nationals.
This is because we are told the scheme will replicate the “Everyone In” model deployed in Greater Manchester during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The serious flaw with this agenda, for a new prime minister confronted with the new mega-dinghy crisis, is it guaranteed accommodation for everyone, regardless of how long they had been in the country, regardless of their immigration status, and regardless of whether they were an illegal migrant.
Were the British government to go down this route and begin providing access to public funds for those not entitled, it would be setting a grave precedent.
The No Recourse to Public Funds policy exists to prevent illegal migrants – and legal migrants on temporary visas – from immediately accessing welfare and social housing until they have made some form of contribution. It is about ensuring some degree of fairness for the British taxpayer.
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If Burnham is seriously suggesting he is going to liberalise this policy, it would be greeted with cheers from the huge illegal migrant population living in Britain off-grid, along with those on the beaches of northern France.
The Government would be saying to the world that you can arrive and remain in Britain without permission and be assured a level of state support that has hitherto been reserved for citizens and those migrants with settled status. You do not even need to claim asylum. The only criterion is living on the street.
We already know, thanks to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice, over half of those sleeping rough in London in 2024/2025 were foreign nationals. These are individuals who have another home (their country of origin) but for a myriad of reasons have ended up on the streets of our capital.
The best way to help these people is not to provide them with temporary accommodation, but to help them return to their own country.
The alternative is a doop-loop, in which the British state remains obligated to help not only those migrants who are already a major fiscal drain on the country’s scarce resources, but future newcomers who turn up with similar expectations of support.
The country does not need an "Everyone In" scheme; it needs a "Brits In" scheme. Anything else is an unjustifiable distraction. We can no longer be a foodbank or shelter for the world; it is time the citizenry of this country came first.
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