Market Forces and Malpractice

One morning​ in Manchester, in November 2023, a young man went looking for a place to stay. He’d lost his job and couldn’t pay the rent on his flat. When he asked the council for advice, they told him to stay put. He did, until the bailiffs came and changed the locks. He slept rough in a train station. He was on drugs. His phone was stolen; he told the police but there was an argument and he was arrested. The police released him, but he had nowhere to go. He remembered the address of an acquaintance, a man called Josh Morris, who has a solid career in HR and owned a two-bedroom flat in Skyline Chambers, one of the smart new blocks close to the synthetic neighbourhood that property developers have branded ‘Noma’. But Morris, too, had just been kicked out of his home. Six years after the death of 72 people in the fire that consumed Grenfell Tower in London, fed by cheap cladding that acted like solid petrol, the owners of the freehold on Morris’s building and the Manchester fire service had decided it was too dangerous for the occupants of its 107 flats to stay in their homes. They were told to evacuate at once and not return until further notice. The freeholders’ managing agents said they would pay to move ten boxes per household; anything more the residents would have to organise themselves before the building was sealed.

Superficially on opposite sides, the two men share much. Both have been let down by the government and by the speculative builders whose priorities have come to stand in for housing policy; both have cause to doubt the possibility of a home being a secure refuge. There are homelessness crises and buildings with unsafe cladding in other cities, but what makes Manchester stand out is the intensity and concentration of new development, with costly hotels and tall, market-price-only residential blocks rising out of the ground, as if nobody had ever put cladding that burned like a torch on towers where people live, as if nobody needs affordable flats.

Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester – which covers the city of Manchester and the boroughs of Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Salford, Trafford, Tameside, Stockport and Rochdale – made the housing crisis central to his re-election campaign in May, when he won a third term by an overwhelming margin. He donates 15 per cent of his salary towards the effort to end rough sleeping. He says he’ll bear down on exploitative landlords who squeeze high rents out of tenants living in damp, chilly, crowded rooms. He promises to build ten thousand new council houses over his four-year term, a thousand in each borough. He wants the next government to allow him to suspend the Conservative policy of Right to Buy, which leads to the best new public housing being bought up at artificially low prices and often re-let by private landlords; he frames this, like his successful reform of the private free-for-all that crippled Manchester’s bus network, as ‘reversing things that went wrong in the 1980s’ – a direct attack on the excesses of Thatcherism.

Burnham could be portrayed as a rival to Keir Starmer. There are tensions, and should Starmer become prime minister, Burnham assumes there will be friction; he’s admitted pique at not being given a bigger role at party conference and broke with Starmer over Israel’s war in Gaza. But the more obvious relationship is of kinship: Burnham presides over a scale model of a future Starmer Britain, one where a social democratic leader full of genuine desire to mend the broken, over-marketised public realm is hamstrung by lack of resources and constrained by fear of frightening away the wealth-holders. Like England, Greater Manchester has its richer south, the Cheshire fringes where the golfing set and superstar footballers live, its great main city of hedonism and cranes and sky-high rents, and its decapitalised, struggling northern towns.

I met Morris in the serviced flat rented for him in another modern block by Wallace Estates, which owns the freehold of Skyline Chambers. The plain low-ceilinged rooms are decorated with paintings he took from his flat, along with a metre-long model of the Titanic, a childhood obsession, but most of his belongings are still in Skyline. He can see it from his new balcony, a seven-storey block faced in timber and what looks like red brick but is, in fact, cladding, backed by combustible insulation. It was built seventeen years ago. Invisible from the street is the unusual interior, a courtyard with a glass roof. The only way in and out of the upper-storey flats is through courtyard-facing doors, which have surrounds of thick wood, along wooden walkways, with wooden balustrades, faced with untempered glass and supported by unclad steel girders. In the immediate aftermath of Grenfell, Morris said,

we were told there was nothing to worry about, you know, everything’s fine, there’s none of the combustible cladding on it or anything like that. And then the tone started to change as the months progressed. It became apparent there were issues … Our only exit from the building was from that walkway. And if that walkway was on fire, we wouldn’t get out. If the exterior went up, we would be fucked. If the inside went up, we’d definitely be fucked.

For now, Morris is stuck. Even if the fire risk hadn’t been severe enough to trigger compulsory evacuation, he wouldn’t be able to sell up in the normal way; no lender will offer a mortgage on his flat. Only cash buyers will buy unremediated flats, and they can force desperate owners to sell at a big loss. But Morris still has to pay his mortgage. ‘If you add the service charge,’ he said, ‘I’m paying upwards of £800 a month for a building I can’t legally enter.’

This month, on the seventh anniversary of the Grenfell disaster, the activist group End Our Cladding Scandal estimated that 600,000 people in Britain still live in homes at heightened risk of a fatal fire and three million own homes they can’t sell for fire safety reasons; since Grenfell, more than 15,000 people have been forced to move out of their homes indefinitely. There was a harsh reminder of what’s at stake here, and the weakness of the government’s response, in 2019 when the Cube, a nearly new seven-storey student hall of residence in Bolton (it opened in 2015) was devoured by a fire that spread with frightening speed from the fourth to the sixth floor via its cladding. The building was swamped with firefighters – almost one for each of the more than two hundred people safely evacuated – but it was a close-run thing. After Grenfell, the Cube had been checked, but because its combustible cladding wasn’t the same as the type used at Grenfell, and because it was too low to be designated ‘high-rise’ according to the government’s arbitrary 18-metre height limit, there hadn’t been much concern.

The extent of the cladding crisis, and of the recklessness and casual malfeasance involved, has only slowly become clear. The revelations of the Grenfell inquiry, so plainly and painfully recorded by Peter Apps of Inside Housing, are echoed not just in thousands of other cases of ghastly what-might-have-beens but in the lackadaisical, flailing process of undoing what was done.* The inquiry revealed a tangle of deniability masquerading as responsibility, with the refurbishment of the tower carried out by a host of specialists whose skills and integrity were corroded by cynicism, complacency and bottom-line pressure. No sooner had the inquiry begun than the contractors turned on one another, trying to shift the blame for ignoring guidance, bending rules and failing to observe contracts. The refurbishment design combined Arconic cladding panels – imagine a chocolate mint where the thin chocolate coating is aluminium and the filling highly flammable plastic – with insulation by Kingspan, which gamed and bullied its way to certification for its highly dangerous product, and by Celotex, inspired, it seems, by Kingspan to rig the official test of its material, which is made from a combustible plastic that emits poisonous gases, including cyanide, when set alight. Arconic concealed the results of a fire test which showed that using the panels in ‘cassette’ form, bent and hung from rails, as they were on Grenfell, would turn them into incendiary devices. The fire took just half an hour to climb twenty storeys to the roof, and four hours to engulf the building. As Danny Friedman, one of the lawyers representing the survivors, said towards the end of the inquiry: ‘We are still in the era of the rolled-back state and Grenfell is one of its greatest failings. The centre of government – particularly the ministries of everyday life, like housing, fire and building – has been hollowed out … Inevitably, market forces and malpractices have filled the gap.’

Fifteen flats in Skyline Chambers were lived in by leaseholders like Morris; the leaseholders of the rest were landlords, who rented the flats out. Wallace Estates is paying for alternative accommodation for owner-occupiers and compensating landlords for lost rent, but renters were given three months’ accommodation then expected to return to the open market. The building was completed in 2007 by a company called Space Developments UK, which was bought by the huge Irish housebuilder McInerney in 2002. When McInerney went bust after the financial crash, Skyline was picked up from the creditors by Wallace, an opaque entity that makes its money by owning freeholds and charging leaseholders for ground rent and building management. It’s owned by an art-collecting Italian called Luca Rinaldo Contardo Padulli, sometimes styled Count di Vighignolo in official documents, who has a Norfolk manor as one of his more tangible home addresses; the Cambridge-based network of companies that runs his investments is owned by a Gibraltar-registered company, Perseverance Limited, which in turn is owned by the Guernsey-registered Hauteville Trustees, which has Padulli as a director.

Since Grenfell, there have been endless squabbles about whose duty it is to pay to make Skyline Chambers safe. Wallace blames the developers for rule-breaking and shoddy work, but the executives involved have long since dispersed. Boris Johnson’s government passed a law, the Building Safety Act, preventing freeholders from shifting the burden onto small leaseholders. In a further complication, the focus of the act is on the outside of buildings – the cladding – not on the tons of wood and unsafe glass in Skyline’s inner court that are its most dangerous feature. Even when funding is in place, fixing unsafe buildings is only effective if everyone – regulators, leaseholders, mortgage lenders and insurance companies – accepts that the finished job really does make the building safe.

After Grenfell, a new fire alarm system was installed at Skyline, with screeching sirens and flashing lights inside every flat. A single smoke alert in any room would set the alarm off everywhere: the building sometimes had to be evacuated multiple times a night. Wallace tried to sell the freehold; unsurprisingly, there were no takers. The government agreed to fund some of the work, but not all, and last year sued Wallace to force it to pay its share. Wallace caved before the case came to court and in February agreed to do the job by the beginning of 2026. Months later, there’s no sign of progress. I approached Wallace and was told that the building had been closed after its fire safety advisers found it had not been ‘built in accordance with either the original specifications or building regulations in place at the time’. The suggestion was that Wallace and the leaseholders are being punished for the sins of the builders and lax enforcement. Wallace said delays up to now were due to uncertainty over how long it would take for the government’s new building safety regulator to approve its plans, although it isn’t clear that Wallace has actually submitted its plans. Nor is it clear how the project is going to be funded. Wallace says it will pay up, in the hope of getting it back later, but also told me that the project will cost £15 million. Wallace Estates has net assets of £48 million and a cash balance of £9 million, almost all of which is required to service its long-term debt.

Morris and I talked about the Titanic and its relevance to Grenfell. We tend to obsess over the shipbuilders’ boasts of unsinkability, even though, before it went down, the promotional focus was on how glamorous it was, how luxurious. Later, I wondered about the moment when the well-off passengers on the upper decks, accustomed perhaps to a remote sense of pity towards those in steerage, realised that the ship was going down and they were all in it together. I asked Morris, hoping it didn’t sound as if I were judging him, whether he felt more of a sense of solidarity with rough sleepers since he had been thrown out of his home. The story of his friend was his answer. Morris helped him out. Late at night he called the council homeless hotline on his friend’s behalf and was dismayed at how curtly he was treated; the woman on the end of the line told him to sort it out himself and hung up on him. Morris paid for a hotel room for the night, made sure his friend was fed and got him a phone with credit. The daytime council homeless workers found him a place in a hostel; he’s now living in a flat with the support of a charity and is working again.

Morris was vexed that homelessness is still a problem in Manchester when, as he put it, Burnham ‘told us, you know, repeatedly, as the mayor, he will do away with this’. Morris’s friend declined to talk to me, but what happened to him fitted with what I had already heard about the radical, multi-causal increase in homelessness in the area, driven by problems Burnham and the Greater Manchester boroughs can’t resolve easily or quickly. Homelessness includes rough sleepers, but also much larger numbers of people in council-funded temporary accommodation and, though not officially counted, the hidden homeless: the reluctantly tolerated couch-surfers, the households forced to squeeze inside other households. Charities and social entrepreneurs want to help, but their means are limited. As is becoming more and more common across the British state, help is only available when you’re in the middle of a crisis, not when you can see it coming. As I write this, squeaky little derivative phrases like ‘the struggle against homelessness’ rise to my mind, as if homelessness were an illness, an insurrection or a baffling natural manifestation, rather than something entirely within the government’s means to fix: a lack of places for people to live.

Itook​ one of Transport for Greater Manchester’s custard-coloured trams to Bury, north of the city. Bury and the centre of Manchester are about as far apart as the edge and centre of London, but Greater Manchester’s population is less than a third of the capital’s, 2.8 million against 8.9 million. Between the Manchester conurbation and the northern boroughs lie expanses of countryside. The trams click through moorland dotted with sedge and rushes, past woods and farms. I saw a wild deer grazing by the tracks. Towns such as Bury are nominally in Burnham’s fiefdom, but the boroughs prize their distinct identities and have their own powers. The inner boroughs of Manchester have the money and fancy jobs, the big football teams, stadiums and music venues and universities, the obscure authority of a cluster of skyscrapers. The allure of the city acts remorselessly to drag the small towns into suburbia. As varied as the sitting candidates running for Greater Manchester’s two dozen-plus parliamentary seats are, from Lisa Nandy in Wigan to Angela Rayner in Ashton-under-Lyne, from Rebecca Long-Bailey in Salford to George Galloway in Rochdale, the politics of place are as central here as party politics.

I met Gavin Grimshaw, six foot four, lean and sunburned in a Lonsdale boxing vest, in the simply furnished two-storey terraced house in Bury where he currently lives. The door opens straight onto the narrow pavement; part of the street is the original red brick, part pebble dashed. We sat in his living room, Grimshaw hunched forward amiably on a low-slung sofa, knees miles ahead of him. He wears an electronic tag on his ankle that sends a signal to the authorities if he drinks alcohol. He’s not actually a drinker, he says, but before the crime that got him put away for a long stretch – he severely battered an acquaintance who chose the wrong moment to provoke him – he’d been buying booze for a friend. After he got out on licence in March, seven years in to a thirteen-year sentence, he went camping with his brother and had a little drink. The tag alerted his probation officer; since he didn’t do anything bad while he was tipsy, he wasn’t sent back to prison, but the threat of a quick return to jail for any misdemeanour will hang over him till the end of the decade.

Grimshaw spent his time inside on a tour of the prison system of North-West England and Wales: Strangeways, where he did five years, Buckley Hall, Kirkham, Preston, Berwyn. It’s often said that being set free from Britain’s overcrowded, underfunded jails into the unstructured, cash-demanding world can be as tough as getting locked up, but in Grimshaw’s case, he and the system preparing his re-entry did good things. While in prison he started studying for an Open University degree. He began writing poetry and screenplays; one of his poems won the Pinter Award for prison writing. ‘I’ve won over thirty awards, you know,’ he said. A plan was in place for the most critical aspect of his release – where was he going to live? – in the context of a housing shortage so dire that Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, has reported instances of prisoners being issued with tents and sleeping bags on release. After getting out, Grimshaw lived in a supervised hostel for eight weeks, then moved into the two-bedroom house where I met him, which is run by a charity called Stepping Stone Projects. He shares it with another ex-prisoner. ‘We’re both tidy,’ Grimshaw said. ‘We both put food in the cupboard, so we just share everything. I had a lot of conversations [in prison] with my probation officer. She kept saying: “Well, where are you going to go?” I said: “Well, I haven’t got anywhere to go.” They kept saying I’m a high risk to the public, but they were just going to put me out on the street. So she’s pulled the finger out and got me in here … I’m not roaming around dotting from couch to couch or getting involved with the wrong people, you know, so it’s helped me a lot. The main thing is I’ve got a quiet place to write, and do my essays, and that’s what I need more than anything. And if I didn’t have nowhere to live I wouldn’t be able to do my uni.’

Grimshaw went through a messy time as a teenager and young man, thrown out of the family home, then living on the street or with friends, stealing to support himself, in and out of prison for petty crimes. In his late twenties he had children and lived in a council house with his girlfriend. He found steady work as a gardener. Things were stable for ten years until he split up with his partner, became depressed and got into the fight that resulted in his recent conviction. He’s 44 now, and optimistic about the future, but the house is only funded for a couple more months. He has applied for longer-term specialised accommodation, but demand is high. His first attempt to get a job faltered when his prospective employer learned the details of his violent act. And although he didn’t buck the system too much when he did his long stretch, he showed he wasn’t biddable. When he got annoyed with prison officers at Kirkham, an open prison, he simply walked away. He spent two weeks on the lam with his children – he has four now, and a grandchild – spending his literary prize money in Blackpool and having a pleasant time before someone shopped him and he was hauled back. He knows the dangers for homeless ex-offenders. ‘My best mate got out on exactly the same day as me. He had to go and move back to his mum’s. His mum’s boyfriend didn’t really want him there. So he ended up homeless last week. He’s back in jail now.’

Bolton, Bury and Rochdale have 700,000 people between them and are only eleven miles apart, but there are no trams or trains connecting them: everything radiates out from the city. ‘I came in the 1980s as a student,’ Dave Smith, the head of Stepping Stone, which is based in Rochdale, told me. ‘Manchester city centre was a desert. You really wouldn’t go for a night out there unless you were going to the Hacienda or one of them clubs. You’d stay in your locality. Now they reckon at the weekend over half a million people are going into the city.’ People are moving in the opposite direction to find housing, according to John Ryan, who runs the Manchester office of the homeless charity Shelter: ‘People on the average wage can’t even dream of living in Manchester anymore, so are having to move out to places such as Rochdale, which then places pressure on the housing market in those areas as well.’ It’s not always a voluntary decision. Short of space, Manchester City Council is housing some homeless families northwards, out of the borough. ‘I think the voters of Manchester city are thinking “good socialist bastion”, but what they do is they’ve reduced the amount of bed and breakfast [residents] in Manchester and just placed them elsewhere, so people from Manchester suddenly find themselves in Rochdale or Tameside or Bolton,’ Andrew Beeput of The Bond Board, another charity working in Manchester, told me. Smith made the same point. ‘We’ve got ex-offenders, drug abuse issues, mental health problems. They’re exporting them out.’ (Manchester City Council says the latest figures show a downturn in temporary accommodation numbers, but Gavin White, the councillor with the housing portfolio, admitted that the centre was struggling to cope. He also pointed out that ‘other boroughs place people in Manchester as well.’)

I went to Rochdale to talk to Smith. For the first-time visitor on foot, the town has an episodic quality. There’s a chapter of high street decay, of charity shops, pound stores, grimly proud independents shutting up at five, a few pensioners lingering over steel pots of tea. Nearby is a chapter of regeneration, with a new cinema and gleaming white retail halls tenanted by mainstream chains such as H&M and M&S. A short walk takes you to the levelled-up town square and its restored neo-Gothic town hall, its interior a gorgeous orgy of faux-medieval décor, adorned with frieze panels depicting serene sub-Raphaelite archetypes processing cotton. An interlude of lovely, steep parkland takes you to the Central Mosque and Tweedale Street, home to Zeeshan Fish & Chips, Haji Superstore and an abundance of George Galloway posters, showing the Workers Party candidate framed by a Palestinian flag. The town centre is hemmed in by a fast, pedestrian-hostile ring road. Each of these places seems to have its own separate time. The recent history of the town, too, includes a string of episodes that persist in the national consciousness but never quite join together as a narrative. It was here that Gordon Brown had his fateful encounter with Gillian Duffy, whom he was recorded calling a ‘bigoted woman’ during the 2010 election campaign. It was here that organised groups of men sexually abused young teenage girls, whose complaints were initially dismissed by police. It was here that Cyril Smith, exposed after his death as a serial abuser of boys, served as Liberal MP for twenty years. It was here that two-year-old Awaab Ishak died, in December 2020, after mould inhaled from the walls of the flat where he lived affected his breathing.

Rochdale was also one of the places it’s thought David Cameron had in mind in 2016 when he launched his attack on ‘sink estates’, as if bad architecture, rather than multigenerational deprivation, was the root cause of council estate problems. The Rochdale estates in question were badly in need of refurbishment, and perhaps replacement, but Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH), which took over the local council’s housing stock in 2012, proposed to get rid of 772 homes, most of them let out at ‘social rent’ – usually about 50 per cent of the market rent – without saying how many new social houses, if any, it would build to replace them. Awaab Ishak’s family lived on an RBH estate. The outrage after his death crushed RBH’s reputation and creditworthiness, and it cancelled a central element of its programme, the demolition of four of the 1960s tower blocks known as the Seven Sisters, in favour of refurbishment. It had originally planned to replace 528 flats with only 120 homes.

Mark Slater, a tenant activist who lives on a high floor of one of the Seven Sisters, showed me round his flat. He’s a 72-year-old single man and doesn’t live in luxury, but he has a home. The windows look out on the town below and the moors, Saddleworth and Rooley. ‘I can see where I went to school,’ Slater told me. ‘I can see what my first job was. I can see where I was born, the hospital just up the road. When my dad was alive, I could see where my dad lived. I could see all my life out of that window. I would find it very difficult to leave here.’ The flat saved him from homelessness. His marriage had broken up and, aged 64, he was sleeping on his dad’s couch. His father had just had a stroke. Part of the reason he campaigned to stop the flats being demolished is that people in his situation would find it much harder to get anything similar now. When he moved in, the doors were hanging open and there were pigeon droppings all over the floor. He had a ripped camp bed a friend lent him, a borrowed TV and a white plastic garden chair. ‘I used to lie on the camp bed and watch TV. It can happen to anybody. A divorce, redundancy, an illness, mortgage rates going up, lots of reasons and all of a sudden you find yourself needing somewhere to live. And the social housing is just not there.’

Andy Burnham uses the phrase ‘perfect storm’ to describe the current surge of homelessness. Dave Smith did, too, and so did I when I was arranging to meet him. Clichés become clichés for a reason. Even if the effects of Right to Buy and austerity, worsened by the actions of successive post-Brexit Conservative governments, are to blame for the crisis, the consequences are so sharp, the contingent symptoms so extreme and various, that it seems like a vast natural phenomenon. John Ryan used the word ‘tsunami’.

From the 1980s until the early 2000s, the problem for council house managers in places such as Rochdale and Oldham was too many homes chasing too few tenants. Many of the available houses and flats were in poor condition or in areas where people didn’t want to live, and there was scope for people to be picky. The seemingly large council house waiting lists of those days, according to Smith, disguised the many people who already had a council house and were sitting on the list, accumulating points, waiting for a particularly nice property to fall vacant so they could move in and eventually buy it. ‘In some of the estates you would be fighting over the tenants with other difficult to let areas. It led to some demolition programmes around the town because there wasn’t deemed to be the long-term demand there to keep them open.’ Smith joined the Oldham equivalent of RBH in 2003. ‘At that time, we had about three thousand people on the waiting list. The reality was less than half of those people were actually searching proactively for a home. When I left Oldham in 2019, the waiting list was 24,000. We no longer used to talk about difficult to let properties. You could have let a tent.’

When people at low risk of homelessness think of the homeless, they tend to think of rough sleepers, figures in stained sleeping bags in shop doorways or sitting cross-legged near cash machines with a plastic pot for coins. The most recent annual rough sleeper census, taken on a night in late October when council and NGO tellers fan out and go through the streets, under bridges, along the covered walkways of council estates, peering behind the broken door where the wheelie bins stand at the bottom of the rubbish chute – it’s shelter, after all – gives a figure of 3898 for the whole of England. That’s an unconscionably high number, and certainly an undercount. It’s 27 per cent up on last year and more than double what it was in 2010. But rough sleepers are vastly outnumbered by others without homes. By far the greater number are the ‘statutory homeless’, those the council has a legal obligation to house. They end up in temporary accommodation, hotels, bed and breakfasts, and hostels. By the end of 2023, that number had risen to 112,660 English households, including 145,800 children, the worst figures since modern homelessness law came into effect in the 20th century. In reality, the number is much higher. It’s not easy to be recognised as statutorily homeless, even if you present yourself to a council as having nowhere to go. You have to show you literally have no roof over your head – getting notice of eviction isn’t enough. You have to prove you’ve got a local connection, otherwise you’ll be told to apply to your home council. You have to show you’re vulnerable, that you have young children or are seriously ill or disabled. And you can’t have done anything that would give the council reason to say you made yourself intentionally homeless: quitting a flat because it was a horrible place to live, for instance. Homeless people who fail the tests don’t necessarily become rough sleepers. They make calls, they make compromises, they beg for another day on the sofa from somebody who doesn’t like them, or who likes them too much. They sleep in the car. ‘When they talk about the rise in homelessness … they’re only talking about people that satisfied those four conditions,’ Smith said. Recent figures suggest the number of households in temporary accommodation in Greater Manchester is just over five thousand.

Tameside, to the east of the Manchester conurbation, had thirteen homeless families in temporary accommodation ten years ago. This March, it had 221. Now, less than three months later, it has 334. Taking into account the people who don’t show up in these figures, the rough sleepers, the hidden homeless and people housed in accommodation run by charities and other NGOs, Shelter estimates the real number is closer to 550 in that borough alone.

Smith grew up in a working-class household in Grimsby. He has experienced homelessness. Violence at home obliged his family to take refuge in a hostel when he was a child. By the time he was 25, he’d lived in 28 different properties. He’s worked as a housing manager in council departments and housing associations in the East End of London, Rochdale and Oldham for nearly thirty years. So when he says Greater Manchester is facing an unprecedented crisis of homelessness, you take it seriously. He told me that people often used to go through a ‘revolving door of homelessness. They had multiple complex needs, they’d been banned from every list of every landlord … and you’d spend your time concentrating on those. Now homelessness is increasingly young people, it’s families, it’s working people … the range of people impacted is massively growing.’

What’s happened? On the demand side, there’s the increase in population. Since 1980, Greater Manchester has grown by 350,000 people. On top of that, there are more households because so many single people live on their own, and an older, sicker population demands homes with special adaptations. The housing of asylum seekers, the majority of whom wait more than six months for a decision, has been outsourced to private, profit-seeking companies since 2012. In the North-West of England, including Greater Manchester, Serco has the contract. The northern boroughs of Greater Manchester offer cheaper private rents than the South of England, but its government contract allows Serco to pay private landlords top rates. Because a Serco lease is highly attractive to landlords, blocks of private rented housing that might be available to local people of limited means is taken off the market without any corresponding plan to build to make up the shortfall. If an asylum seeker is granted leave to remain, as a majority of those who get a decision are, they’re given just 28 days to quit their Serco accommodation and fend for themselves. Last year, under pressure over its failure to process asylum claims quickly enough, the government started granting asylum en masse, and large numbers of asylum seekers were evicted with only a week’s notice – a week during which they were expected to get a national insurance number, get a job, claim benefits and try to find somewhere to live. ‘It can take months for all of those things to happen,’ Smith said. ‘I was talking to a lot of local authorities during the wintertime and they were saying that 70 per cent of people who were taking on their cold weather provision were former asylum seekers given leave to remain and left on the street.’ These were single people; most former asylum-seeking families end up in council-funded temporary accommodation. Government figures suggest 62,000 people were given leave to remain last year. ‘There was no infrastructure put in place to support that,’ Ryan said. ‘But that’s not the fault of people who were given leave to remain.’

Late last year, the National Housing Federation published figures showing that, for every new social home, six households were being accepted as homeless by councils in England. Manchester councillors recently told Ryan that an eligible family could expect to wait 42 years for a four-bed property. When poorer people unable to get a council or housing association home turn to the private rented sector, they come up against rents that have increased drastically over the last few years, without corresponding wage rises. Many, including people with full-time jobs, are reliant on housing benefit to pay their rent, but there’s a government cap on this. After a six-year freeze, it was raised in 2024, but the rise fell far short of the rent increases in most of Greater Manchester during that period. Central Manchester got a big increase in the allowance, nearly a third, but research by the estate agents Savills suggests that only 10 per cent of the area’s two-bedroom private rentals are affordable for someone on benefits. In Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Oldham and south Manchester, it’s under 5 per cent; in Wigan and Tameside, under 2 per cent. People economise on other essential areas, like food and energy, to make up the difference. The situation is perilous for local authorities too. At a time when several have already gone bust, Manchester City Council had spent more than £22 million on temporary housing halfway through the last financial year, more than it spent in the entire previous year. And councils are only allowed to claim back part of the cost from the government.

If tenants fall behind on their rent or make too much fuss about mould and broken fixtures, it’s easy for landlords to evict them using a Section 21 notice, which doesn’t require a reason to be given. Rishi Sunak’s government planned to ban Section 21 evictions, but changed its mind under pressure from the landlord lobby. Benefits restrictions are skewed against large families and young people: families don’t get additional child benefit if they have more than two children – a policy Labour has no plans to change, although Starmer said recently that he was ‘not immune’ to the strength of the argument against it – and if you’re single and under 35, you’re usually only eligible for housing benefit as part of a house share.

Through Smith, I met a young Stepping Stones apprentice, Raven Betts, who was taken on by the charity in March. At the time, Betts and her family – her partner and three children, aged six, three and ten months – were homeless and being housed by Oldham Council in a single small room with a bunk bed in a hotel in the Harpurhey district of Manchester. The family were in the highest category of need on Oldham’s waiting list and bid for every social housing tenancy they could, but so extreme is the shortage of places that it took four months for them to escape from the hotel into an two-bed housing association flat.

Bett’s story makes clear how hard it is in Britain, after fourteen years of Conservative rule and 45 years of insufficient building, either to make a go of things in the place where you grew up or to move to make a fresh start in a new town. Never mind social mobility: mobility would be a start. Before moving to Oldham, she and her family had been living with her parents in their three-bed housing association flat in Maidstone in Kent. Betts was working more than forty hours a week in two jobs, at a farm and a bakery, to support the family, while her partner, who has a health condition, looked after the children. Private rents in the area were so high as to be out of reach and there was no public housing available. Her partner’s mother and brother, who live in Oldham, were chronically ill and in desperate need of care, and since housing was cheaper in the North, the family decided to move. They hoped to find a place of their own before they arrived, but the council wouldn’t prioritise them until they relocated and it was hard to get a private rental, even if they found one they could afford. ‘Because it was my first time renting, they needed me to have a guarantor, somebody who earns over £36,000 a year,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anybody that earns that amount of money.’

They moved into her partner’s family home, but local health and housing officials soon said they had to leave – the flat was overcrowded – rendering them statutorily homeless. The council, now legally obliged to house them, found a space in the hotel in Harpurhey. It has 26 rooms on two floors, block-booked by different councils; when Betts arrived, the larger rooms were already taken. Some were underoccupied, but the hotel couldn’t swap people round because the rooms had been booked by different boroughs. Betts and her partner slept in the lower bunk, which was wide enough for two, her six-year-old slept on the top bunk and the youngest in travel cots. There were no cooking facilities in the room and no running water. They had to wash in one of three shared shower rooms on each floor and cook in a communal kitchen with one air fryer and two microwaves, storing their groceries in a communal fridge, from which food was regularly stolen. There was nowhere to sit and nowhere for the children to play. You weren’t allowed in the kitchen unless you were making or eating dinner. If you spent a night away from the hotel, or broke the midnight to 6 a.m. curfew, you would be evicted. The room itself was stiflingly hot – the child-locked window could only be opened a crack – and they had to keep the door of the room wedged open while they slept for ventilation. Somehow, amid all this, Betts managed to get her job, although the commute cost her £80 a month.

I thought Betts might have been exaggerating a little when she estimated the size of the room to be six foot by eight, which would make it less than half the size of a typical parking space, but she showed me a video taken on the day they moved in. If anything, it looked smaller. When they were finally offered the two-bed flat, she told me, they were warned that they had to take it or be struck off the priority list. So they moved in. The welfare system has got them a fridge, a cooker and a washing machine, but otherwise they have no furniture and no carpets on the concrete floors. ‘We’re all still sleeping on blow-up beds,’ Betts said.

Beeput and Smith are used to dealing with the hardcore homeless who need special support in any system, but the present crisis is on an altogether different scale. Smith raised the idea of rent controls; Beeput, more sympathetic to landlords, argued that they’re quitting the market in droves because it’s not worth their trouble. Ryan said there were four thousand private homes lying empty across Greater Manchester that could be brought back into circulation as a medium-term fix. All pointed to the lack of affordable homes as a basic flaw. ‘We proved with Covid that with a national health emergency, we could house everybody,’ Ryan said. ‘The second Covid was gone, or we stopped worrying about dying from it, all those policies reversed. We prevented private landlords from evicting people. Then we reinstated it again.’

The journey​ to the city of Manchester from the northern boroughs feels like a journey out of disempowerment and underinvestment. At ground level, the landscape is knotted, layered. The heavy brick industrial palaces, old mills and warehouses and clerking shops, stand implacably between gaudy branches of global retail chains and office blocks. Bridges, rivers, railways and canals with narrow cobbled towpaths weave unpredictably under and over the streets: the last scuffling, stumbling, underlit Victorian moments lurk there in the darkness, in the rain, but otherwise the city, in the favourite attribute of 21st-century boosterism, gleams for all it’s worth. The modern campuses of the two universities that lay claim, after property development, to be the city’s main industry, sprawl for miles. An obsession with heritage branding and commemoration, including of events that have only just happened or people who have only just died, overlays the palimpsest of Manchester with a marketing grid of hubs and quarters and artificial neighbourhoods.

Over it all rises ‘Manc-hattan’ – the skyscrapers, dozens of them. Five towers taller than a hundred metres, all residential, were built in 2023 alone. The big developers include Salboy, funded by the BetFred owner Fred Done; the Peel Group, run by the Whittaker family; and, most substantially, Renaker, run by Daren Whitaker – reclusive even by the standards of reclusive tycoons – whose complex of seven towers along Great Jackson Street is about to be joined by several more. Salboy and Renaker are competing to see who’ll be first to build a skyscraper higher than seventy storeys. A well-informed observer of the Manchester property scene, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of alienating his clients, told me that ‘everyone’s absolutely buzzing about it, because it’s pushing the envelope in the city.’

None of the Great Jackson Street towers includes any affordable housing, defined as homes offered to tenants at 80 per cent of market rents or less, even though Renaker has benefited from large government loans via Burnham’s Greater Manchester Combined Authority. According to a local property news site, Place North West, Renaker has received half a billion pounds in loans since 2015, an average of £100,000 for each property, albeit paid back on schedule. Meanwhile Manchester City Council, which decides on planning permission, is criticised by homelessness charities for failing to use its powers to demand a higher proportion of affordable housing – or, in Renaker’s case, any at all – under Section 106 orders. In the last two years, in the midst of a residential building frenzy, the council has gleaned only 99 affordable homes via Section 106, although it has received £5.3 million to help build subsidised housing further from the centre. The council says more social and affordable housing is now being built across Manchester city than at any point in the last two decades. Developers push back against Section 106 demands, saying that they’re building on brownfield sites, which are expensive to prep, and that they’re trying to build to London specs with much lower Manchester margins. ‘It’s a question I’ve asked a million times of councillors, “Why aren’t you pressuring the developers to provide what you want in terms of affordability?”’ the industry insider told me. ‘And the answer I get is “viability”. I’ve asked if it’s right, societally, that we effectively have a no-go zone for affordable housing in the city centre. And they say it’s not a societal thing, it’s an economic thing, it doesn’t make sense to build it in the city centre. City councillors have the view, in my opinion, that you either have the delivery of the homes without affordable housing, or you don’t have them at all.’

I met Andy Burnham in his modest office, partitioned off from the busy, heads-down mayoral headquarters near Oxford Street, a severe thoroughfare that reminded me of Glasgow and Boston. Burnham tends to refer to Greater Manchester as ‘GM’, replacing the lumbering five syllables with two, like London, Paris, Berlin, LA. He was affable, patient and unexpectedly shy, although his earnestness cut through.

‘There has been a learning for me in this role,’ he told me. ‘The existence of Right to Buy in its current form completely takes away the incentive to build social homes. Because why would a council in an era of constrained resources put up public money to build a council home just so that it can evaporate? And they don’t do it. That’s the problem.’

Burnham has become an advocate of the ‘housing first’ philosophy – the idea that instead of trying to passage the homeless back into security of tenure through a cascade of intermediate forms of accommodation, you give them their own long-term stable tenancy from the beginning and, if they struggle, surround them with support. He visited Finland, where the idea is mainstream policy, and had an epiphany. ‘If you read Nye Bevan’s speeches, as I do, if you read his speech that was the post-war Housing Act, second reading, he talked about how housing needs to be thought of as a service, not a commodity to be traded and sold, a wealth creator. Everybody needs it, it’s an essential service. And it was interesting how he positioned it like the NHS. And so that’s the philosophy that we need.’ In Finland, he said, ‘I was like “Oh my God, it’s the same thing.” I feel a bit of shame that it took me so long to realise … Housing First is about thinking of it as an essential human right, something that’s got to be there for everybody if they’re to have any chance of a good life.’ That universality, he said, needed to extend to the cladding crisis. ‘I’m now increasingly wanting to talk about a Grenfell law, and the right learning from Grenfell is to enshrine in UK law a decent safe home as a human right. It shouldn’t be “you might be lucky, you might not.”’

It makes​ little sense at the moment to write about the policies of ‘the main parties’. According to the polls, Britain, imitating where Greater Manchester has been for a long time, has only one main party, Labour, and despite the party’s promise to ensure 1.5 million new homes get built during the next parliament, Labour avoids the uncomfortable fact that in order for homelessness to be vanquished, and rents and mortgages to fall to a level where they don’t eat up most of people’s post-tax income, supply will have to match demand, which means a steep fall in property values. There’s disagreement over the way this should come about. One view, held by the homelessness lobby and many on the left, is that a huge programme of subsidised housing, to be let at ‘social’ and ‘affordable’ rents, is needed to fill the gap that was left by Right to Buy and decades of failure to replace lost council houses. The other view is that it doesn’t matter what kind of houses are built – mansions, luxury flats, council houses – as long as they get built. Make it easier to build them. Loosen planning, loosen the regulations. The market will provide. Once the build rate reaches the ‘right’ level, everything resolves itself, the range of prices widens downwards, and everyone gets housed.

As things stand, partly because the government hasn’t supported an alternative and partly through choice, Manchester has gone down the second route. If it’s working, it’s not clear how. There’s a popular perception that the skyscrapers and lower-rise developments in the centre are disconnected from the local market. The reductive logic that if you build a stack of luxury flats in a relatively well-off area where there isn’t enough housing, everyone shuffles up a notch – the rich move into the luxury flats, the slightly less rich move into their old flats and so on until the poorest find space in the homes nobody else wants – isn’t playing out. One reason – and this is what everyone I spoke to believed, despite a lack of hard evidence – might be that if you build ritzy accommodation in a city that is significantly cheaper than a not dissimilar city only a few hours away, you end up drawing in new people from that city rather than expanding the housing choice for local people. ‘You walked around Manchester ten years ago, you wouldn’t hear that many London accents,’ the industry insider said. ‘Now you hear them absolutely everywhere. You know, these towers, apart from overseas students … there’s a lot of, you know, influencers from down south.’

‘So why are they here?’

‘Because London’s too expensive. Manchester’s got everything that London has, just on a smaller scale, and it’s much cheaper – for people coming. For people who are here, it’s getting more and more expensive.’

‘What you’re getting,’ according to Jon Sharma, an estate agent in central Manchester, ‘is a lot of people who’ve been living in little rat holes and boxes in London and across the South. Now they can work anywhere … So why should they live in a little box? I can live in Manchester, have my own apartment for the same money. If I need to go to London, I can just catch a train once or twice a week. People are not Northern anymore, not in the city centre, anyway. You get the Southerners who are earning £60,000 a year and living in Manchester, but local people are still on normal wages. They’re having to go to the suburbs.’

Andy Burnham pointed out to me that the big loans issued to Renaker and other developers were a legacy of George Osborne’s time as chancellor. It was an Osborne scheme whereby the council got money to lend and was able to spend the money it earned in interest on desirables such as affordable housing. When I put to him the two roads to housing for all, the maximum build-out version versus the prioritising affordability version, he immediately rejected the first. ‘You have to build homes of all types,’ he said, ‘but particularly in the social rent space.’

At the same time, he wouldn’t yield on the skyscrapers, on the Manchester model of developer-led economic growth. ‘There was definitely a phase where we just had to bring the investment into Greater Manchester. The city needed kickstarting – that was the mid-1990s onwards – and people couldn’t afford to be choosy at that time, we just needed investment, we needed to improve … you focus on the criticism, but obviously we have to build our economy as well.’ His vision for reviving the ailing outer boroughs of Manchester is already playing out in Stockport and Farnworth near Bolton, where commuter enclaves for city workers are being created as an alternative to dying high streets and neglected malls. ‘To me, that’s the way to go,’ he said. ‘These towns are blighted by redundant retail space because people’s shopping habits have changed. They try and cling on to it but we’re saying don’t, actually. Replace that redundant retail with new residential.’

One way​ of seeing what’s happened to Manchester since its cotton-fuelled industrial heyday, when between the American Revolution and the Paris Commune it grew from a town of 25,000 to a city of 400,000, is to go into the big Primark near Piccadilly Gardens and look at the labels on the clothes. They’re made, as you would expect, in China, Cambodia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, India, Morocco, Vietnam. Near the front of the store, Primark has made a token effort to change its image as a fast fashion giant by making space for a vintage clothing section, run by a firm called WornWell. What’s striking is that these second-hand clothes, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, have a few labels marked ‘made in France’ and ‘made in USA’, but were overwhelmingly produced in the same countries as now, places like Mexico, Cambodia, China and Bangladesh. Manchester’s deindustrialisation is an old story now. I was reminded of Engels’s description of the way the middle classes of 1840s Manchester could travel from their pleasant suburban homes to the grandeur of the city centre without seeing the wretched living conditions of the working class. ‘One is seldom in a position to catch from the street a glimpse of the real labouring districts,’ Engels wrote. It’s even harder now; instead of being down the alley round the back, they’re five thousand miles away in Bangladesh. And just as Manchester’s industrial heyday made some people prosperous, even as it demeaned and exploited others, so the new manufacturing countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa have been doing it long enough to enrich a fairly broad section of society – to create people with money to spare and eventually, money to invest.

What better way to invest it than by buying a flat in Manchester? Most of the new residential towers are developed on a build-to-rent basis, designed to be sold to people who’ll let them out rather than live in them, who may never see the property they own, or to people who don’t even know they own it, because it’s bought on their behalf by a pension fund. The internet is thick with agencies like the Emirates-based, British-run RPA Group, which markets UK properties to overseas customers using mirror-world copy that expresses the same ideas as homelessness campaigners, characterised as a moneymaking opportunity. ‘More and more renters are competing for less and less housing, hence the situation we’re seeing now,’ the firm’s website says:

Although supply may increase in the coming decade, because of the way capitalism works, prices aren’t suddenly going to drop and go back to their pre-2020 levels. Ain’t gonna happen. When the squeeze on supply eases it might flatten the curve of rent increases but that’s about it. High rents are here to stay.

Under the heading ‘Shortage of Affordable Housing’: ‘We don’t mean to get political, or sound like a tabloid, but truly, the affordable housing system in the UK is screwed, which is driving more people into the private rented sector, driving demand and thus prices.’

‘We don’t want to see the gentrification of a city where nobody below a certain salary can afford to live here,’ John Ryan of Shelter said. ‘And we are in danger, like London, of moving down that road. I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think we make choices along the way.’

In​ The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis, Isaac Rose describes the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’ in the mid-20th century by the ‘cross-class alliance of reforming liberals and the growing political muscle of organised labour’ that brought about the high-water mark of municipal homes.† He tracks the contradictions between the idealism and paternalism of the city authorities as they demolished private slums and replaced them with council estates, knocking down faster than they could rebuild. The grand idealistic vision of the 1945 City of Manchester Plan was substituted with a cheaper, shoddier, slower, system-built version when, first, postwar austerity, then the accelerating collapse of industry left it short of resources. Between 1962 and 1997, Manchester lost 109,000 manufacturing jobs. ‘Vast holes,’ Rose writes, ‘opened up in the inner city.’ Labour activists became more middle class and championed causes the media lampooned as ‘loony left’, campaigning against racism, homophobia and nuclear weapons.

In 1984, the left-wing Labour councillor Graham Stringer took over as leader of Manchester City Council; he tried to rebel against Thatcher’s suppression of town hall spending until, in 1987, he sensationally capitulated, embracing close co-operation with business under the banner of ‘regeneration’. That’s been the Manchester way ever since. He’s better known today as a contrarian MP, a Lexiter and climate change sceptic, but his 1980s turn to capital was crucial in the establishment of the new Manchester economy: private housebuilding, leisure, higher education, finance, research. Rose suggests it was Stringer’s involvement in Manchester’s Olympic bids that opened his mind to the American notion of municipal authorities becoming the handmaiden to private enterprise, and getting things built in return. The old Labour left had plans for Manchester, but capital, essentially, went on strike until it was able to build on its own terms. Thatcher, naturally, was on capital’s side. Since then, there have been good regeneration projects, but when it comes to regenerating council estates, municipalities find they have little leverage. Mid-20th-century slum clearance may have been high-handed and paternalistic, but those who carried it out imagined the replacement housing being inhabited by the people who used to live in the slums, or people very like them, at affordable rents. Modern housing regeneration will take measures to accommodate some of the old tenants, but developers want to attract new people, smarter, better-off people, aspirational consumers without large families. Sitting social housing tenants are to be worked around, rather than allowed to multiply.

If any building epitomised the new Manchester in the 2000s, it was the Chips building in Ancoats, to the east of the city, designed by the architect Will Alsop and built by Urban Splash. Cardroom Estate, which fitted Cameron’s description of a ‘sink estate’, was demolished and the developers would have also knocked down the Ancoats Dispensary, from where the epidemiologist James Kay carried out his influential studies of disease among the poor, had a campaign not been mounted to save it. Council house residents who wanted to stay got new homes at social rents; 55 were built for them. A proportion of the 142 flats in the Chips building are owned by a housing association. The head of Urban Splash, Tom Bloxham, has always insisted he wanted to avoid a gentry-only gentrification. Still, the destruction of Cardroom saw the loss of 163 social housing units that won’t be replaced any time soon.

The building was designed to look like three chips laid one on top of another. Printed panels along the sides are supposed to give the impression that the chips are wrapped in newspaper. The building is now wrapped in scaffolding covered in brown tarpaulin, as if the chips had been left out too long and gone mouldy. In 2018, a post-Grenfell check on the building’s jaunty panels found that on the inside face, away from the newsprint, the panels had ‘non-fire-retardant’ written on them. They are now being removed, agonisingly slowly, the latest episode in a six-year ordeal for the people who live there. Urban Splash was reportedly pressed by the government to pay £46 million to replace the unsafe cladding on seven buildings in Manchester. I wrote to the company to ask who was paying to make the building safe, what Urban Splash’s relationship was to the building since it no longer owned the freehold, how much the project would cost, why it was taking so long and whether Urban Splash could afford it; a spokesperson said she couldn’t comment because ‘this is an ongoing legal process.’ I had wondered when I started writing this piece whether it was a stretch to cover homelessness and the cladding scandal in one article, but I kept stumbling across people, whom I had gone to interview about other things, who were stuck with property in unsafely clad buildings. One homelessness charity executive I spoke to, who asked not to be named, lives in a flat with dangerous cladding. Sharma, the estate agent, lets out a flat he owns in an affected building. While the owners try to get it fixed, the buildings insurance has gone up by a factor of seven. He’s already put his tenant’s rent up to £1100 a month and feels he can’t put it up any further. ‘To what? How can you raise it any higher? Who’s going to pay you that much?’

In the Chips building, I talked to C. She so fell in love with the idea of the building that, as a 22-year-old with no inherited wealth, she scraped together the deposit for a flat there when it was still in the planning stage. She worked all hours and lived off £50 a week. She remembers stumbling out of a Manchester club late one cold December night and going to gaze up at the half-finished building, saying to her friend: ‘That’s my flat.’ It cost her £168,000. She remembers the fear she would lose her savings in the financial crash before she had a chance to move in. She remembers how huge the flat seemed when she got the keys. The building wasn’t fully occupied at first and she used to roam through it, peeping into the empty flats. She remembers that the crash temporarily crippled Urban Splash, that for years Chips stood as a lonely beacon of regeneration in an area half wasteland, half red light district. ‘I wanted something that was iconic, something that stood out … that was a bit quirky,’ she said. ‘Honestly I wish I’d bought a square box.’

She hadn’t expected Grenfell to have consequences for her. ‘It was a modern flat. It wasn’t a 1970s council block. I thought: “It’s a modern building, it’s not been tarted up, what’s the issue?” Then they said: “You either get a waking watch or you evacuate everybody.”’ She holds no grudge against Alsop; she says she still loves her flat, the way it can be reconfigured using sliding panels, the bare concrete ceilings, the modular kitchen in the centre of the space. She does hold a grudge against Urban Splash. She doesn’t feel the state has held it to account. The area has been built out now and looks spiffy, for the most part. There’s a sourdough bakery down by the marina. But seven years after Grenfell, the residents of Chips are still waiting for the building to be made safe and insurable. There’s no end date for the works. Thanks to the insurance increase, her service charge has gone up from £1500 a year to £4000. Her mortgage deal is up for renewal, but she can’t shop around. ‘I should be able to get any deal on the market. And I can’t because my flat is unmortgageable.’ To compound the sense of injustice, the leaseholders of Chips are locked into a single provider of heat and power, and have no right to shop elsewhere. It was cold in C.’s flat; she doesn’t put the central heating on because it’s so expensive. We talked about homelessness and C. told me one of the reasons she liked Chips was that it was explicitly intended to be a mixed development of private owners and housing association tenants on affordable rents. ‘It wasn’t going to be gentrified, like you’re not doing a culling of what was there before. It was sold as the bigger dream, and that’s where I feel I’ve been missold.’