Funding first

After a year of deliberation a Scottish Parliament Committee comes up with Housing First as a means of reducing homelessness. But this isn’t a new idea for Scotland. Between 2010 and 2013 there was a Housing First pilot operating in Glasgow. It was evaluated as successful. So why, five years on, hasn’t it been widely rolled out?

One reason is that such schemes succeed because of the high level of support built in. The Glasgow pilot had six staff members for 22 tenants. Councils have been struggling with several years of funding cuts. If the Scottish Govern- ment is seriously interested in implementing Housing First it has to provide the resource for the support workers.

The elephant in the room is the acute lack of permanent low rent housing for people to move into. Recent research by Heriot-watt University, which looked at Housing First and other measures, made specific recommendations for the priority actions needed by each Scottish city. For Edinburgh “the main emphasis should be on improving the options for longer-term suitable accommodation, with an urgent need to expand social housing supply in the city”.

For all the Scottish Government boasts of building more “affordable” housing , in Edinburgh in the last two years only a quarter of the total was housing for social rent, the rest was mid-market rent or “help to buy” schemes, all out of reach of virtually everyone in temporary accommodation. An urgent investment in rapid building or buying of homes is essential, followed by reinvestment of the subsequent savings in the public money being paid out to private landlords and B& B operators.

The bottleneck at the “exit” from the homeless journey is the “bed-blocking” of the housing crisis. Until that is addressed with the urgency it deserves no real solution will be found.

SHEILA GILMORE St Catherine’s Place, Edinburgh