This article is part of the series Home Truths: Europe's Housing Challenge.

MANCHESTER, England — After promising to end the deadliest rough sleeping crisis in the U.K, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham now has less than a year to prove his program has worked — and to convince Westminster it should be doing more to help.

In a city where harsh winters make sleeping rough particularly dangerous, the Manchester government is trying to turn a successful emergency program into a sustainable, long-term solution, and perhaps a model for the rest of Europe.

Twenty one homeless people died on Manchester’s streets in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available. Elected that year, Burnham, a former Labour minister and one-time leadership hopeful, quickly won support for expanding Manchester’s collapsing network of emergency shelters.

“It was almost like we had begun to accept it as an inevitable fact of modern life, that some people have to sleep in doorways,” Burnham told POLITICO in a recent interview. “My pledge was about saying, ‘Wake up, this is wrong, we are not accepting this.’”

“Permanently ending the need for rough sleeping within Greater Manchester now appears achievable” — Louise Casey, former U.K. "homelessness czar"

Launched in November 2018, a year after Burnham took office, the program, A Bed Every Night (ABEN) saw early success, providing shelter to 1,635 people in its first three months, for about £30 per person, per night. Just over a quarter, 466 people, later made a successful transition to stable housing, the mayor’s office claimed.

A national count just weeks after ABEN’s launch found the number of people sleeping rough in Greater Manchester, 241, had fallen 10 percent — the first decline in eight years.

Praise for Burnham’s crisis response has followed. “It’s like a torch in the dark,” said Louise Casey, the U.K.’s “homelessness czar” under former Prime Minister Tony Blair. “Permanently ending the need for rough sleeping within Greater Manchester now appears achievable.”

Now the hard part

For Burnham and his supporters, the challenge is to turn what in many ways was an ad hoc crisis response into a long-term strategy. On the streets, social workers and the homeless are far from declaring victory.

Staff at the Manchester charity Mustard Tree, which provides support for homeless people, said the improvement over recent months, since the introduction of ABEN, has been noticeable.

“I recognize the difference, getting around 400 entrenched rough sleepers off the street with Burnham’s initiatives, or whatever the number is, that’s massive” said Graham Hudson, who runs Mustard Tree’s creative programs.

Still, Hudson said the situation in Manchester remains an emergency, and programs based on emergency shelter networks have often failed to provide stability over the longer term.

Experts say it would be difficult for Manchester alone to support a broader, more sustainable program, like Finland’s highly touted Housing First, without national coordination and funding.

“The success of [Finland’s strategy] flowed from developing a political consensus, coordination of local, regional and national policy, and bringing together all the key organisations,” said Nicholas Pleace, a researcher at the University of York, in a report.

Despite ABEN’s relative success, homelessness remains a daily sight in Manchester. On a recent morning, Mustard Tree’s building buzzed with people looking for shoes and warm clothes, the staff digging through piles of donated clothes to fill requests.

Despite last year’s regional decline, homelessness actually rose 30 percent in the borough containing the city of Manchester itself, with a one-day sample count jumping from 94 in 2017 to 123 in 2018.

On many backstreets in the city, most doorways showed signs of recent occupation, sheets of cardboard or plastic providing protection from the damp. People lay asleep under covers, ignoring the traffic noise. Others wandered the central areas with bags of belongings and sleeping bags slung over their shoulders.

Outside a high street bank, Jamie Smith, 41, was selling poems he had written. “Homeless but Still Human,” said a sign leaned beside him.

“It’s scary living rough,” he said. “You worry about being attacked, you worry about freezing to death.” Smith said the city center had gotten too violent, and he was currently spending nights in a nearby suburb, in a tent.

National challenge

The U.K. government has a strategy to combat rough sleeping, but experts say more must be done.

The homelessness charity Crisis suggested in a recent report that the number of households experiencing the worst forms of homelessnes is expected to almost double in the next 25 years “if we carry on as we are.”

To compensate for holes in the national policy, Burnham said he seeks advice from NGOs and religious groups working on homelessness, and looked at examples from other cities, including speaking with Helsinki Mayor Jan Vapaavuori. In addition to funding provided by the Manchester city government, money for ABEN has come from donations and fundraising drives at music and sports events.

Some central government funding has come through too. Greater Manchester recently began a three-year trial of a version of Housing First, the Finnish program that provides publicly funded homes to people in need. The Manchester pilot will cost £7.6 million (€8.5 million). By comparison, Finland’s nation-wide program cost at least €300 million over 10 years.

The Manchester pilot program hopes to accommodate 400 people with housing and support services, including medical and addiction treatment. In its report, the charity Crisis claimed 18,400 people would be eligible for Housing First services in the U.K.

Burnham said his campaign pledge to end street homelessness by 2020 remains achievable. He criticized the U.K. national plan’s longer deadline, still eight years off, as a lack of ambition.

“This situation can be turned around now,” he said. “We are proving this in Greater Manchester. In a country like ours, no one should be sleeping on the streets.”

Next year isn’t just the deadline for Burnham’s homeless plan. He’s also up for reelection in 2020. Another hard winter will come before election day, and he’ll likely be judged by how many people get caught out in the cold.

“We are further forward than where we were, but we are not yet where we want to be,” he said.