WATCH: Alex Armstrong investigates Andy Burnham's rough sleeping record ahead of NEW pledge

Andy Burnham has promised to end homelessness in Britain but can he do it? So number 10 in the north is literally meters away from me here but literally right behind me is of course a group of rough sleepers. I've had a little chat with one of them he said he's been out on the street for a little while after losing his job but can Andy Burnham really say he's going to end rough sleeping when he's not even able to do it on the doorstep of number 10 in the north and that's what I'm here to find out today from the people in Manchester. I think in Manchester especially Piccadilly Gardens there's a you see a lot of rough sleeping and although he's pledged to do this he was Manchester's mayor for a good few years now and still we're seeing high rates of people still here rough sleeping and nothing's being done. I don't really think he's got much of a plan on how he's going to do it. Walking around Piccadilly Gardens there is definitely a lot of rough sleeping and definitely a lot of I guess addicts is the word and there are certain areas around here where they all seem to congregate especially when you get towards the evening this area makes me feel rather unsafe to be fair. My daughter's at university here so I try and come as often as she lets me. And do you think there's a big homelessness problem in Manchester? There's a big homeless problem all over the UK so I wouldn't just say it's just Manchester. It's rubbish I think it's horrible I don't I wouldn't walk here at night put it that way so yeah I just don't think it is what it used to be. We used to come walk into the bus station and okay there'd be a few homeless people but nothing you were never afraid and I was so young but I wouldn't do it now never. Andy Burnham new prime minister used to be the mayor of here he's pledging the first thing he did when he walked into number 10 he said my first decree is going to be to end rough sleeping across Britain. Has he done a good enough job here do you think he can do it nationwide? He did he did do a bit but it's worse than it ever was I think but I don't know if he can do it nationwide now. Do you need to find homes for the British people? Well it's it's terrible you just sort of have to walk around there to Piccadilly Gardens and see what it's like it's chronic absolutely terrible and you know we've been moving here what what difference is that going to make to any policies it's just for me it's a waste of money I've got here yesterday are they wasting money even more money traveling down here to have a meeting and not solving anything. Well we're going to talk about that but obviously rough sleep is in the area around the number 10 in the north isn't a good look is it in 2017 Andy Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping in Manchester by 2020 but by 2019 he conceded the target would be missed. Rough sleeping in the city has now risen for four consecutive years official statistics show 197 people sleeping rough in Manchester in 2025 that's up from 154 in 2024 and more than double the 89 counted in 2021 but it then begged the question will number 10 in the north actually make a difference? It's absolutely brilliant for the north I've just asked a policeman for instructions how to get here and he was like I'm not sure because we're not from around here and I said you come up from London haven't you and I think that just shows exactly the prominence that we're going to get now the promote the north Andy Burnham is king of the north what he's done for Manchester it's an absolutely great move so delighted. I think it's great the north has a representation so I love it yeah. It's very new it's very new has it attracted a lot of attention around here? Certainly lots of people have been coming by to take photographs myself and there's a big march coming through in a bit so yes. And do you hope it's going to make a difference to the normal day lives of people who are living in the north as opposed to the south? I would hope so and knowing Andy Burnham I really do hope he will. Is it just going to be more bureaucracy you know it's all there's already inefficiency within our government is trying to do new things spreading spreading number 10 around is that going to be beneficial? Not sure. Enough money in the pot to begin with we're getting taxed far too much and we can't afford to pay any more money. High hopes for him as prime minister? Not at all it'll be out in year and a half max the country will turn against him because it's the same old labour same old policies same old people reigning us back says it all for me. I do actually like the idea that it's not all down south no I do because it is that north-south divide all the time and I like that he wants to bring it so that we have a say and we can do things as well so yes I do like that. I do definitely agree with decentralising power from Westminster. I think that's a big problem with why we're not bringing more jobs up north and why there's not a lot of distribution of wealth but you know how would number 10 north work how how would that distribution look and and will he set out a plan to to show us or to tell the people how he's going to do it final question Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham? Andy Burnham. Andy Burnham. Well there you have it that's what people in the north the north right if you're from Scotland you know this isn't the north it's the midlands isn't it but that's what people from the north of England perhaps think about homelessness in the city of Manchester and number 10 in the north what do you think Omar having watched that? Using the internet without a VPN, a virtual private network, is a bit like taking to the road without car insurance. All it takes is one unlucky moment to cost you a lot of cash. This video's sponsor is Private Internet Access. They are the VPN to help keep you safe. Click the link in the description below to find out why over 30 million people have downloaded PIA to protect themselves online. A virtual private network is an app that hides your IP address and helps keep your data private. When you're browsing the internet at home you give up a large amount of data to businesses, to shops and indeed to social media giants too. 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Also there's a 30-day money-back guarantee too. Visit piavpn.com forward slash gbnews to start protecting yourself digitally today. I'll start this off by talking to you Paul. What was really interesting and I do want to make this very clear on the TV because it's what I always report honestly. When we looked around Piccadilly Gardens, there was a few people there you could probably tell might be sleeping rough but there wasn't tents, there wasn't rows of tents everywhere. There were some tents by Number 10 North as we showed you. And many of the people that I was speaking to said this, including some people that were working with me, they said it's miraculous that all of a sudden in the last week or so all these tents have gone. Do you think that maybe there's been a bit of a push now he's got into Number 10 North, he wants to make that big statement that actually... Well you saw the numbers you just quoted there. Under Burnham it went down to 89 which is 89 too many but that is a low number. The government then changed, there was a policy where they sort of redistributed homeless people and shoved them into Manchester so that's when it started to go up again. But this is something he's been dedicated to for years, he's given part of his salary to a homeless charity. I don't think it's something he's just cooked up in the last few days, it is a belief that he's got. Of course tackling rough sleeping is very difficult and complicated. A lot of it's tied into addiction, there are a lot of former veterans on the streets, there's lots of people with all kinds of other issues. It's not just about housing supply, it's about tackling some of those issues. But in the immediate short term you can get people off the streets and out of the tents in our parks and into some sort of shelter where they're not rough sleeping. Blair did it, Johnson did it during Covid and it can be done again. It's not hard, it just needs government's attention and getting on with it which is what he's promised. What do you think Linda? I think that I agree with everything you've said Paul, but what I don't understand about politicians in general and in fact Andy Burnham in particular, is why they continue to make themselves a hostage to fortune by coming up with a headline, with a phrase that will grab a headline, with a target, we are going to do this by then. Because you can very rarely meet those targets, especially with an issue as complex as rough sleeping. As Paul said, the underlying issues where you've got military veterans, where you've got people with very severe mental illnesses, you've really got to start tackling those underlying causes in order to make a difference. I find the whole subject deeply deeply upsetting. I think it's a shame, it's a stain on the nation. In a developed economy that we have so many rough sleepers all over the UK. Go on, you want to come back. I agree, just on specifically the point about why did he say it, it's a moonshot isn't it? If you say this stuff out loud, then it marshals the full forces of government to try and do something about it. This is Kennedy saying we'll put a man on the moon. Now you know, you either succeed or not, but now at least we know the direction we're going in. It's a view, it's a view, but I think the public have got wise to that kind of soundbite stuff. Peter, rough sleeping, I think it is an impossible problem to solve for a multitude of reasons because if you want to end rough sleeping you have to tackle the crisis of addiction which I think is very complicated to do that. They also then require you to get off those addictions, a lot of them are very extreme. I think it's, while admirable and I admire anyone who thinks they can do a good job of it, I think it's almost impossible. What do you think? Well I find myself unusually agreeing with a lot of what Paul has said, but for me I find it very disappointing that when you say the moonshot announcement and compare it to Kennedy, wouldn't it have been great if Burnham had said we're going to fix illegal immigration and we're going to fix the fact that so many people are in the UK that shouldn't be. That should have been his landmark big announcement, but it wasn't and it may be a laudable intention to end rough sleeping, but you know what, in the run-up to the Olympics in 2012, surprise surprise, everywhere I went in London, my home city, I never saw a homeless person and then a couple of weeks after the Olympics have ended and the eyes of the world were no longer on our city, funnily enough there were people with used coffee cups coming up to me asking for a few bob. What's interesting, first of all just say this, Maryland says Alex please just say Manchester. There's many places in the north of Manchester that don't speak for North Yorkshire, absolutely right, I'm only using this language because this is what Andy Burnham is using, but to be clear I have said like I said I think it's the Midlands, however Peter, one other thing that I found talking to people today they said to me they've never seen so many police officers there their entire life in the city centre, what do you make of that? Yeah of course because the Prime Minister needs protected and he will be protected of course because we don't want a political assassination of a Prime Minister in this country. It's style over substance I'm afraid with a lot of what Burnham has said this week, the bus fares, the business rates and all of that. He's a silver tongued communicator, that I have to give him, but it is style over substance, it's not really tackling the big hard issues. I agree if you travel on a bus and you pay three pound each way, you do it twice a day, five days a week, 52 weeks of the year, well say 46 weeks if you take off four weeks holiday and bank holidays, you're going to save about 460 quid, you then get 40 quid off with the VAT reduction on your energy bill, 500 pound a year, a lot of money, a lot of money, so well done, but it's not really tackling the major issues. None of this is going to stimulate growth in the economy and much much more. Incrementalism I think is what people are describing it as, but he hasn't even been in the job for a week. Paul, let's talk about numbers in the North, right? Well first of all that's the most generous I've ever heard Peter talk about a Labour Prime Minister in the last five years, so there you go, he must be doing something right. Yeah, well he didn't tackle the big issues, as I said, his landmark big announcement should not have been homelessness, it should have been immigration. But the bus fares thing, it does generate growth I would say, because if young people can afford to get to jobs a bit beyond their neighbourhoods then that does mean that people are getting back to work. On the number 10 point, I mean I think of course it's symbolic and easily dismissible as being a gimmick and all of that, of course people say it gives him an easier commute to work than he had coming down to London, but it's more than that. If you look at his book Head North and if you look at his speeches since he knew he was going to be leader and then Prime Minister, his whole thesis is the way we fix the economy is having good growth in every postcode, not just in London and the South East. And this symbol of putting government out of London, out of SW1, is something which then sort of generates the growth beyond that. If people think there is going to be proper regional centres of growth, investment of course, like we had in the Victorian era where every city was a municipality creating its own jobs, generating money for the exchequer, then that is something that is quite exciting. So it's not a gimmick, it's actually an ideological view which is you've devolution is really low down the list of people's priorities and I think the argument will be, hang on, hear me out, the argument people will put to you is this and that's what people in Manchester were telling me, some of them, not all of them, as you can see some of them very happy to have it there. The argument is going to be this, it's just more bureaucrats in a different location, you've then got to move the cabinet there once a week or you've got to do all these things there once a week just to accommodate Andy Burnham wanting to go back to Manchester. Is Manchester the right place to have number 10 in the North? Is it just favouritism because he wants to be popular there, he's popular there? Was that the right decision? So there's lots of these questions about whether this place was appropriate. I was outside it today and let me tell you the security there is absolutely dreadful. If there's a massive riot or a protest I'm telling you that place is getting gutted unfortunately because it hasn't got the appropriate security. Well hang on it's the home of GCHQ so I think there's a certain amount of security you probably couldn't see. I'm sure there is but the point is it's meant to be an unassuming office I think as we discussed before it's right next to a slug and lettuce funnily enough. I mean Greg's on the other side but the point I'm saying to you Paul is that is this just pure theatre? No it's not. Is it going to achieve anything? Why can't we do this in Downing Street? Look at the way for example the BBC moving to Salford has transformed that part of Greater Manchester. The Darlington campus of the Treasury has transformed that bit when they put NHS HQ to Leeds that created jobs and help there. Even DVLC out of Swansea and you know when you do this when you shove the state away from the centre it does generate jobs and prosperity in those places. Now it's limited it's not as good as business doing it obviously wealth comes from business but it certainly is a sign of intent and that's what he's trying to achieve. Jobs yes Paul we don't have prosperity hardly anywhere in this nation at the moment unfortunately. Peter's exactly right when he talks about there's not enough economic growth and that is a very very big problem at the moment and that is going to be extremely hard to deal with in the next three years before the next general election. I think the two big defining issues which require so much money are what Andy Burnham describes as he wants a social care service for the older population which is growing bigger and bigger and bigger all the time and requires more and more medical support and then there is the defence spending which we know has to be at 3.5% of GDP by 2035 in order to maintain our NATO commitment and we are very unlikely to meet that target. So there's a very very big issues that are underpinning the economic growth of this country and they are set against a government which I think is very unlikely to tackle the overspending and growth will come from two areas reduce taxes, reduce energy costs and none of this socialist government are going to do any of that. Do you think number 10 in the north and Andy Burnham being there for example will help him stay more in touch with people outside? I do think one of my biggest criticisms towards Keir Starmer and maybe a lot of actually governments over the last few years is that they've become part of the London bubble and the London bubble is nothing like the rest of the country. I know I go out to the most remote parts of Britain to do some reporting, it's nothing like the rest of the country. I think they're so detached these politicians. Well I think you can't, I mean I don't think you can accuse Andy Burnham of that. I think the fact he's a new MP in Makefield is going to try even harder to make sure he's seen in Makefield a lot and make sure he shores up his support there. He's coming in from a city rather than from SW1 so you know he's got that Greater Manchester experience too but the good thing about Andy Burnham is he also knows how the system works so he's not just some gifted amateur who's rocked up hoping for the best like a you know Frank Capra movie. He knows where the levers are, he knows how to operate the system. We've already seen that with his machinery of government changes, a very bold reshuffle and he's hit the ground after five days you know. So the Times are reporting tonight, the Times are reporting tonight Linda, I'll put this to you, Andy Burnham's going to hand mayors a share of income tax revenue to spend on their cities and sweeping devolution plans to be unveiled next week. What should we make of that? Well I still don't think we're concentrating on the main deal. The main deal here is to encourage economic growth. I think that does address certain issues but it doesn't address the real issues that are pressing this country at the moment and we need to get that flywheel turning. We need to actually encourage much more growth. If we had more economic growth we could start thinking about bringing down taxes for example. Yes and to do that you've got to lower the welfare bill and let's see how Burnham gets on with that. We've heard diddly squat from him about that because he'll have the same issues with the lunatic left-back benches that Starmer had and moreover is it ideologically something that he wants to do? Does he want to be harsh on those who get money from the state when they should not get it? And just to repeat, lower taxes, lower business energy bills will generate growth. All right thank you panel.