Andy Burnham has made a promise to end rough sleeping as a priority. And minutes after he walked back through that door, the government announced £340m of new funding to tackle rough sleeping. In 1999, Tony Blair established a Rough Sleepers Unit, led by Louise Casey, and gave her the target of reducing rough sleeping by two-thirds by 2002. In 2017, as his first act as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he pledged to end rough sleeping across the city region by 2020. And initially it worked: rough sleeping in Greater Manchester fell from 268 people in 2017 to 149 by 2023.