Prime Minister Andy Burnham is to donate 15% of his additional salary as prime minister to homelessness charities and causes, saying he wants to ‘lead from the front’ in tackling rough sleeping.
Having recently announced an additional £102m in funding, taking the total investment to £442m, to help ensure everyone sleeping rough in England is offered a route off the streets by Christmas, Burnham is now reaching into his own pocket to help.
The pledge was revealed exclusively to The Big Issue, which broke the story following an interview with Burnham during a visit to homelessness charity Changing Lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Burnham will donate 15% of the £75,440 additional salary he receives as prime minister. He had already pledged to donate 15% of his earnings as MP for Makerfield to local causes.
He told The Big Issue: ‘I wouldn’t want to ask anybody to do anything that I’m not prepared to do. I want to lead from the front.
‘This issue matters massively to me. I don’t want to live in a country where walking past people sleeping rough just becomes commonplace and we almost say: ‘Well, that’s it, there’s nothing we can do.’
‘There are things that we can do. We proved it in the pandemic. We should do it again now and it should just be what we do all the time.’
Big Issue founder Lord John Bird said Burnham’s announcement that he will back up his announcement with a personal commitment is significant: ‘The prime minister is leading by example by donating 15% of his salary to the fight against homelessness. This gesture reminds us that homelessness is all our problem and eradicating it will need everyone to put our shoulder to the wheel,” said Bird.
‘Today he’s backed his ambition with personal and political action, and I look forward to working with him to make this ambition a reality.’
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