Temporary housing for homeless costs £600m
Local councils in Scotland have paid out more than £600 million on housing homeless people in temporary accommodation – including B&BS, hotels and hostels – in just five years.
The figures were uncovered through Freedom of Information requests by investigations platform The Ferret and reveals public spend totalling around £660m between 2012 and 2017.
Almost a third of this total – over £210m – was spent by councils on private accommodation providers, including B&BS and hotels run by private companies and flats owned by private landlords. Councils will recoup some costs through housing benefit.
Shelter Scotland said that the figures illustrated a “broken system” that was failing people, and called for investment in social housing.
Last year the number of homeless applications in Scotland rose by 1 per cent to 34,972. It is expected to rise steadily in coming years.
Crisis, which is campaigning for a strict time limit on temporary accommodation, claimed the statistics highlighted By JOSH LITTLEJOHN Founder of Social Bite
Today, we hear reports about the millions of pounds spent on temporary accommodation for the homeless. It’s an obscene amount and the figures really underline the need to move away from a short-term approach to homelessness.
We need to provide our most vulnerable with secure tenancies, as opposed to the unsupported, substandard and expensive temporary accommodation models that are prevalent within the homeless system right now, such as hostels and B&BS.
The work we’ve been doing over the years at Social Bite points to the need for a wraparound response to home- the need for better legislation to prevent homelessness. Opposition politicians called the “scandalous figures” evidence of the need for housing to take greater national priority.
Edinburgh City Council paid out the most, with figures recording a total of almost £192m. Payments to private providers totalled just over £145m.
This included substantial payments to private companies and landlords.
One company received at least £16.8m over the five years. Council chiefs said the local authority was facing “enormous challenges” due to escalating housing costs.
Glasgow recorded the second biggest figure with a total of £126m.
It spent over £10m on hotel and B&B provision in the period. North Lanarkshire, Fife and Aberdeen City were also amongst the top five in terms of spend.
Jon Sparkes, chair of the Scottish Government’s Homelessness and Rough Sleeping action group, and chief executive of homeless charity Crisis, said: “We need to make sure that public money is being used as effectively as possible.
“Clearly funding landlords to lessness. Temporary accommodation is a sticking plaster solution rather than a longterm fix, and while there’s no one-size-fits all answer to homelessness, we’re working towards developing a viable alternative which, we hope, will help the most vulnerable in society.
There is clearly a public appetite to help those in need too. On 9 December last year, I watched as 8,000 people filed dutifully into Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens to sleep outside on the coldest night of the year for the first Sleep in the Park.
These incredible people were from all walks of life, they braved temperatures of -6 and collectively they raised £4m to help eradicate homelessness in Scotland.
The money raised enabled
0 There were 34,972 homeless applications in Scotland last year
provide poor quality accommodation in the private sector is not good for the people housed there or for the public purse.”
Graeme Brown, director of Shelter Scotland, added: “Successive governments in London and Edinburgh have failed to fix our broken housing system.”
Social Bite founder in call for ‘wrap around’ response to homelessness
us to open the Social Bite Village this year and develop a new model for housing people experiencing homelessness in a supportive community. We also used the funds to create a major nationwide ‘Housing First’ programme, where 800 homes have been pledged to enable rough sleepers to get their own place, with a funded wraparound support network.
Housing First is turning the status quo of how we deal with homelessness on its head. It advocates that, rather than making people live for a long period of time moving in and out of temporary accommodation we should rapidly re-house them, and if they need support we should look to fund a comprehensive and tailored programme for people alongside their tenancy.