Homelessness prevention duties will be phased in, Scottish housing minister says

At the housing fringe event in Edinburgh on 30 August, Mr McLennan said: “If we’re bringing in prevention duties, it’s got to be brought in at a pace that doesn’t impact massively on the existing services that are there. So it’s got to be phased.”

He said the Scottish government had asked local authorities to give an “indicative cost” of how much it would cost to meet the requirements.

He also met with the Scottish Prison Service and the NHS to discuss the new duties. “We’ve got to make sure it’s phased and that it’s resourced properly,” he added. 

The Housing Bill is set to be debated in the Scottish parliament by the end of the year, but Mr McLennan indicated that the homelessness prevention duties would not be introduced as soon as the bill becomes law.

“We will be guided by the sector itself in terms of when is the best time to bring this in,” he explained.

Fellow panellist Alison Watson, director of Shelter Scotland, weighed in on the requirements.

“Let’s not introduce a prevention duty which isn’t funded,” she said. “Let’s not keep setting local authorities up to fail. We cannot do that.”

Earlier in the panel, she said that “there has been no shortage of big and bold policies that have been passed on housing” in the past 25 years.

However, “we have now reached a stage where those highly progressive housing rights are being broken as a matter of routine every single day”.

The Scottish Housing Regulator has said that councils, such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, are experiencing “systemic failure” in their inability to comply with current rapid rehousing laws for homeless people.

Allan Casey, city convenor for workforce, homelessness and and addiction services at Glasgow Council, also highlighted the need for additional resource for local authorities.

He said: “Right now, caseworkers are carrying huge, huge caseloads, and I think that’s a significant problem.

“There needs to be certainty over funding, multi-year funding as well to give councils the resources to address the housing emergency.”

As well as the ‘ask and act’ duty, the Housing Bill stated that when selecting tenants, social landlords must give a “reasonable preference” to homeless people and those threatened with homelessness (ie it is likely they will become homeless within six months).

Furthermore, every social landlord must publish a domestic abuse policy on how it will help tenants experiencing or at risk of domestic abuse, with a view to preventing homelessness.

The panel on Friday also discussed the need for a land value tax to help build more social housing. Sally Thomas, chief executive of the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, said that she was “absolutely in favour” of such a mechanism.

She added: “One of the main problems for housing associations in providing more social housing is… getting hold of land at a price which doesn’t increase the rents at the end of the development process.

“You can offer allocations that offset the cost of the land to whoever the landowner is to mitigate the financial cost of the land.”

Elsewhere, Mr McLennan condemned private companies, such as Mears, which have made large profits from providing emergency accommodation for asylum seekers.

“It can’t be for profit,” he said. “We can’t make profit out of people in desperate situations… it’s completely immoral.”