Council playing with semantics over housing issue - Iain Whyte
Is it possible that two seemingly opposite things can be true at once? This week the council claimed a Daily Telegraph article had “inaccurately reported details about how we prioritise and allocate council housing” and went on to say it was “addressing misinformation”.
The article was headlined “Asylum seekers bumped to top of council housing list” and pictured a tented village of rough sleepers outside the council HQ.
But the only “inaccuracy” was down to the semantics of how we describe people who might be arriving in the UK with no visa or job lined up, perhaps on a small boat.
On a beach this person might be an “illegal immigrant”. Once immediately processed they usually become an “asylum seeker”. If they are given “Leave to Remain” they become a “refugee”.
People and the media often use these terms interchangeably, but politicians and government bureaucracies give specific meanings because they give different rights and this obscures policy outcomes.
What remains true is everything at the core of the article – not surprising when it came from a council committee report.
It is true that immigration is placing a strain on our local homelessness services with applications from recent arrivals increasing from 1 per cent to 16 per cent of cases in two years.
It is also true that the SNP’s deliberately generous policies give single young men priority homeless status, meaning the council must house them.
This does not happen in the rest of the UK. The SNP also ended “local connection”, so you don’t have to become homelessness in Edinburgh to claim help here.
Both policies make our city a magnet, but we aren’t given any extra funding to address it.
All of this led the council to do exactly what the Telegraph reported. It stopped taking housing applications from anyone other than those considered homeless, disabled or at risk of violence.
It is true the Telegraph inaccurately said, “asylum seekers” rather than “refugees”. But does it matter if the result is their homeless status prioritises them over most of the 31,000 locals seeking council accommodation?
Let’s also not forget that a skilled immigrant with a visa and a job will find their own housing. Real “misinformation” would have been a reason for a press complaint. So why would the council do this when it was the SNP’s Scottish Government policies that were getting the blame?
I smell gaslighting politics rather than corporate communications.