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Scottish councils produce new Housing First plans
Scottish councils have produced plans on how to transition to a Housing First approach for homelessness cases.
Every local authority in the country has submitted a draft plan to the Scottish government setting out how it plans to move towards ‘rapid rehousing’, a key part of the Housing First strategy.
Housing First is a strategy aimed at helping rough sleepers. It involves immediately moving rough sleepers into their own accommodation and then building services around that, rather than progressing them through emergency shelters and temporary accommodation.
The Scottish government’s Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group, set up in October 2017, advised that local authorities needed to draft plans on how to transition to a rapid rehousing approach.
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Councils have now done this, sending reports to Holyrood explaining the housing and homelessness situations in their local areas and putting forward measures to move towards a rapid rehousing approach.
Aberdeenshire Council suggested in its plan that it would carry out a review of its allocation policy and identify changes that could be considered to assist rapid rehousing.
It added: “These include just-in-time allocations, more flexibility in the size of property that can be offered, creating vacancy chains and considering targets and quotas in relation to the proportion of allocations to those with homeless priority.”
South Lanarkshire Council said it would gradually look to reduce the amount of temporary accommodation in the area and increase the number of social rented homes being offered to homeless households.
This was a focus for most other councils that submitted plans because a key strand to Housing First is putting fewer people in temporary accommodation and finding permanent homes for them instead.
The Scottish government plans to provide detailed feedback to all the local authorities plans, after which they will be amended and adopted.
