Homelessness crisis starts at the prison gate | Homelessness

We should all applaud Andy Burnham’s commitment to end rough sleeping (‘It’s generations of decline’: can Andy Burnham really end rough sleeping?, 24 July). The ambition is right and overdue. But he set the same goal in Greater Manchester in 2017 and found, as anyone would, that you cannot clear people off the street faster than the system puts them there. Much of rough sleeping is manufactured upstream.

Take prison. In 2024-25, around 1,000 people a month left prison in England and Wales homeless and went on to sleep rough. Homelessness feeds reoffending, reoffending feeds custody, and release feeds the street. No government can credibly promise to end rough sleeping while one public institution keeps releasing people straight into it.

We run accommodation for prison leavers under the Ministry of Justice’s transitional community accommodation service tier 3 (Cas3) scheme and house more than 1,400 ex-offenders a night. What we see is simple: a bed alone is not enough. Many people leaving custody need housing alongside trauma-informed support, life skills and help to sustain a tenancy. Give them that continuity and the cycle can be broken. Without it, homelessness becomes a revolving door.

The £340m to be spent at the street end will not fix a pipeline that starts at the prison gate. Until the government treats prison release as homelessness prevention, not homelessness management, the promise will stay a promise.
Gary Teper
Managing director, The Housing Network