Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me, Alan Tolhurst. This week, we're discussing one of the most intractable problems successive governments have failed to solve, rough sleeping and homelessness, and asking, does it need to be this hard? Are the solutions already out there? And if so, why has no

administration managed to grasp the nettle? With me to discuss that, I'm delighted to be

joined by Lord John Byrd, crossbench peer and co-founder of the big issue. Andy Preston,

former mayor of Middlesbrough and founder of the charity CEO Sleepout UK, and Matthew Torbitt,

used to advise a number of Labour MPs and is a campaign on homelessness.

I'm going to start with you, John. As I said, you co-founded the Big Issue magazine more than 30 years ago to offer homeless people the opportunity to earn a legitimate income. But you can just talk us to you,

what kind of the current scale of the problem of homelessness and how things have changed in that time.

I mean, looking back 33 years when we started the big issue, things seemed to be a lot, lot simpler.

There wasn't much money in homelessness.

There hadn't been very big investments in homelessness. What had happened

at the end of the Thatcher era and the beginning of the major era, there were in London

about 6,000 rough sleepers in the west end of London, especially around the Aldrich and places

like that. So there was an enormous amount that we haven't got back to those figures yet.

What we've got now is the dispersal of homelessness away from the magnet towns.

You can go to almost any little town now, and you'll see beggars and people who you're taking for rough sleepers, even though you're not always sure that they're rough sleepers at night, but they're there in the daytime begging and looking for help. So you've had that kind of fracturing. You've also had an enormous amount of government intervention, billions of pounds have been spent

in the last 30 years.

But it's always been spent.

I always feel in a kind of taking somebody on a journey from A to wherever it is that

they can then take over themselves.

And I think most governments take you with A, B, C and D and leave you there

when really you need to be taken onto up the ABC, so to speak,

until you can stand on your own two feet.

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