It’s just over a year since the Scottish Government published its Housing Emergency Action Plan with a promise of “positive and lasting change” and a specific pledge to “ensure children are not spending long periods in temporary accommodation.”
Twelve months on, and Scotland’s annual homelessness statistics released this week make for grim reading. They paint the picture of a crisis that not only continues to head in the wrong direction but is now at real risk of becoming Scotland’s new normal.
The figures show over 35,000 households across Scotland are assessed as homeless, a record 19,004 households are in temporary accommodation and rough sleeping numbers have continued to rise.
Behind every one of these figures are people and families living with the uncertainty of homelessness or the threat of homelessness, with lives on hold in the limbo of temporary accommodation or facing a night sleeping rough on the streets.
Perhaps most concerningly – in light of that government pledge – we are yet again seeing record numbers of children losing months or years of their early lives to the uncertainty of life in temporary accommodation and without the security of a settled home.
The impact of this on children extends far beyond the issue of housing. It affects their mental health, their education and their ability to form stable friendships in early life. Temporary accommodation has a role to play in tackling homelessness – but it should be a safety net, not the place where a child grows up.
The frustrating thing about these figures is that the causes of homelessness and the solutions are not a mystery. We know one of the main reasons people cannot move out of temporary accommodation to take the next step in life is because the homes are not there for them to do so.
Expert research shows Scotland needs 15,693 affordable homes every year of this parliament to meet the scale of the crisis. But last year the Scottish Government’s Affordable Housing Supply programme delivered just 6,832 completions. Projections from the Fraser of Allander Institute show that Ministers are on course to miss their own target of 110,000 affordable homes by 2032.
Similarly, while Ministers speak of Scotland having some of the strongest homelessness protections in the world, that only matters if those rights are enforceable on the ground – something that is currently not always the case.
If you are homeless in Scotland, you have a legal right to be offered temporary accommodation. Yet this week’s figures show, shockingly, that there were 21,800 instances over the last year when the offer wasn’t made.
Scotland was right to declare a housing emergency and to publish the Housing Emergency Action Plan – which as a reminder also promised “bold, coordinated response”. But the nature of an emergency means business as usual goes out the window and you do things differently. That means investing at a scale that matches the crisis, taking more radical measures than would normally be the case, and clearing away barriers that stand in the way of delivery.
Turning this into practice must start with increasing investment in housebuilding to deliver the numbers required. There also needs to be rapid scaling up proven policy solutions such as Housing First, which we know delivers results and is crucial in preventing rough sleeping, yet only sits at around 10% of national demand.
At the same time, the rhetoric on shifting the system response to a truly joined up and preventative one needs to be recognised on the ground. We need to create a system response among our public services that intervenes early before people reach crisis point and in a way that prevents them being passed from one service to another, often falling through the gaps.
It is not too late to deliver on the above promise of positive and lasting change. But these figures must be a wake-up call. Scotland’s housing and homelessness crisis cannot be permitted to become the new normal and another year of damaging record numbers cannot be accepted as something inevitable.
The solutions are there and we know what works. What is needed now is the political will, the investment and the urgency to turn these into practice.
Because for the people and the children behind these figures, Scotland’s housing emergency is not a set of statistics, it is their daily reality.