When Andy Burnham became prime minister of the United Kingdom in July, his first pledge was to end homelessness. That should tell you something about what’s possible when a government decides to stop managing a crisis and start preventing it.

Before walking up Downing Street, Burnham met people with lived experience of homelessness. Then he backed it with £340 million ($631 million). He also said something I think deserves to be heard here in Canada:

“For too long, we’ve been told that ending rough-sleeping will take decades or even that it’s impossible. I’m not having that. This is something a government can fix if it chooses to. Today, I’m choosing to.”

We’ve seen this shift up close. Earlier this year, we joined a small international delegation invited to the U.K. to meet Prince William and learn more about Homewards, his Royal Foundation’s youth homelessness prevention initiative. What struck us was how closely the U.K.’s emerging approach echoes what Canadian evidence has already shown works.

Burnham’s framing matters as much as his financial commitment. He described the goal as building “a more preventative state, investing in success rather than paying for failure.” His government noted that a year of rough-sleeping costs an estimated £20,128 ($38,000) per person, compared to £1,426 ($2,700) for a successful prevention intervention. The math, as he pointed out, is not complicated. And the benefits extend far beyond the individual, reducing the pressure on the health-care system, the criminal-justice system and public services more broadly.

Canada faces the same math.

Internal analysis by the........

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