Briefing Scottish Government homelessness statistics: update to September 2019
Briefing Scottish Government biannual homeless statistics January 2020
Local authorities have failed in their legal duty to offer temporary homeless accommodation to households 10,840 times since January 2017.
o The majority of these cases were in Glasgow. The council are currently the subject of an inquiry by the Scottish Housing Regulator.
o The City of Edinburgh Council have also for the first time reported failures to accommodate, stating that they have not provided temporary accommodation when they had a statutory obligation to do so 1,405 times since January 2017. They have said their previous nondisclosure of this statistic is because of technical problems. This raises real concerns on whether there is an understanding and acceptance of the real scale of the issue.
• Local authorities were in breach of the Unsuitable Accommodation Order 190 times between April and September 2019 (125 in Edinburgh). This means there were 190 instances where households with children or a pregnant woman were kept in temporary accommodation deemed ‘unsuitable’ for longer than 7 days. Whilst this was a significant decrease on the year before, it still represents many instances of the law being broken.
• Both these issues are having a devastating impact on people at crisis point, who are not being given the standard of housing, care and support that they are legally entitled to.
• Furthermore, the numbers of households and children in temporary accommodation are increasing. These figures are now at an all-time high with 11,432 households including 7,252 children in temporary accommodation on 30th September 2019.
• This is despite there being no statistically significant change in numbers of homeless applications. In the year to September 2019, 36,375 households applied as homeless, compared to 36,384 in the year to September 2018.
• Scotland has world leading homelessness legislation, but these statistics make clear that this legislation continues not to be upheld in an unacceptable number of instances.
• Despite the Scottish Government’s current affordable housing building programme, there is still a chronic shortage of social housing in Scotland. Political commitment post-2021 and substantial further investment in building affordable homes is urgently needed to effectively tackle the housing emergency and to ensure everyone has a safe, affordable home.