I am delighted that Andy Burnham made ending rough sleeping his first instruction as prime minister and followed this with a commitment to offer a route off the streets by Christmas to everyone affected.
This is precisely the type of big, ambitious challenge that has drawn me to work with governments across the world to address complex societal issues. I have no time for fatalism and have never accepted that a challenge like rough sleeping is too difficult. That is the moral equivalent of a shrug.
So I wish the prime minister well in this endeavour. What I have learned, however, is that political will is not enough. To achieve a bold ambitious goal, you need a strategy for its delivery. This resolves around five questions.
He has answered the first question, which is what are you trying to do? Ending rough sleeping is a clear, specific goal.
The second question is, how will you do it? The goal, this must be broken down into a timeline of actionable steps that are clear to everyone involved in its delivery.
To do this, I used to map out a delivery chain. This starts by asking: with whom, day-by-day, do people sleeping rough interact in relation to government services? And who is responsible for these at local, regional and national level?
The chain should map each stage in the delivery arc between these end points. Then you can ask what is best practice for every link in this chain to achieve the goal and at which points can we have greatest influence?
Here, Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda can be hugely helpful. When we think of the delivery chain that maps each link between thousands of people sleeping rough at one end and ministers in Whitehall at one end, metro mayors and combined authorities stand out as potentially pivotal actors. They are relatively small in number and offer points of contact with all the organisations and key decision-makers within the system in major cities and conurbations where rough sleeping is highest.
Question three is, how will you know whether you are on track? You need to create metrics to measure your progress across the system. I used to get criticism over metrics, especially when I led No.10’s delivery unit in Tony Blair’s second term. But these are critical to the science of policy delivery. Meaningful data points that track outcomes, collected independently, show how near or far we are from the destination.
With these in place, you must review progress – regularly. This means bringing together, in one room, key players who are delivering the plan. These meetings should be central to your way of working, and need an atmosphere of trust. Relevant information must be shared quickly and candidly.
The fourth question is, what will you do if you’re not on track? People often find this uncomfortable. But learning what is not working is part of the journey. The answer may not be binary: you may be falling short in some places even if you are on track in others.
Question five is, how will you keep focus on your goal? In my experience, you need one actor for whom this is their priority and who can support people working to deliver the goal and ensure that other government priorities do not distract from it. This individual must have access to a flow of data and ensure that learning from the work of delivery is captured and shared.
When I first worked in Downing Street, I worked closely with Louise Casey (now Baroness Casey of Blackstock) who had that role in delivering the Blair administration’s commitment to reduce rough sleeping by two thirds. We worked in parallel, focused on our separate goals, and we talked many times about what we were learning and about how you get things done in government. There is every reason to think we can emulate what Louise did so brilliantly back then, while recognising that the profile of rough sleeping is very different today.
Rough sleeping is not the result of bad decisions, or personal flaws, on the part of individuals it affects. Street homelessness arises because of a flawed system, or rather flawed systems – many overlapping systems impact on rough sleeping.
Systems can be redesigned, or new ones created. To do so requires navigating the implementation gap we see so often between policy intention and making a tangible impact on the lives of individuals. Bridging this gap requires the science of delivery. I hope he can do it.
Sir Michael Barber is chair emeritus of Delivery Associates. He set up the first Downing Street Policy Unit in 2001 and worked with successive UK governments, and governments and philanthropic organisations across the world, on policy delivery. This article draws on his chapter in How to Use Evidence to End Homelessness, a collection of essays commissioned by the Centre for Homelessness Impact and published by Bristol University Press on 27 August