Reintroduce local connection for homelessness applications

A Scottish Government decision in 2022 to remove the need to show a local connection to the council area where you make a homelessness application has resulted in people from all over the UK making applications in popular cities like Edinburgh, says Iain Whyte (Picture: Artur Bogacki/Getty Images)

Core numbers of homelessness applications, while running at a recent high of 3814 in 2023/24, remain considerably lower than the approximately 5000 applicants every year between 2002 and 2010.

What has surged is the inability of the council to move people on from the temporary accommodation provided and to find them a settled home. Ongoing homelessness cases were always below 2000 (often considerably so) until 2010, but are now over 7000. The rising trend started in 2016 and has increased rapidly in the last three years.

One of the major causes of the council’s need to find more temporary accommodation is a Scottish Government decision in 2022 to remove the need to show a local connection to the council area where you make a homelessness application.

The result is that people from all over make those applications in popular cities like Edinburgh. This might be acceptable if Scottish Government funding for homelessness services and housebuilding in Edinburgh increased accordingly, but it hasn’t.

The result is clear in the Scottish Government’s own figures. Edinburgh saw a 42 per cent increase in homelessness applications from the year before the rule change to the first full year after. Applications are up Scotland wide but only by 14 per cent, so the attraction of the Capital is clear.

Anecdotally, the situation is being made worse by the Scottish Government’s approach to benefits, homelessness rights and the funding of people with an immigration status of “No Recourse to Public Funds” (NRPF). All of this is apparently drawing applicants from England and Wales to Scottish cities. It is even being suggested that English local authorities are offering single homeless males a train ticket to Scotland as they don’t qualify for temporary accommodation under their local rules.

In many ways I can understand ministers’ wish to appear compassionate. But they aren’t backing it up with the funding needed to solve the problems they’ve created. The impacts fall hardest on those locals unfortunate enough to find themselves homeless and at the back of a much longer queue. While local taxpayers are footing the bill for national policy changes.

I’m also certain that most taxpayers would wonder why we are funding and housing people with NRPF status. There are three main groups. Those who come on a visa knowing they are required to support themselves, those who come illegally, and asylum seekers who are supported under separate rules by the Home Office.

Given the present political outcry about both legal and illegal immigration it was ironic that the Greens got the left-wing bulk of the council to back calls to ask the UK Government to end this status last week – once again utterly ignoring public opinion.

Shelter Scotland, a campaigning and advice charity rather than a housing provider, is right to say the council shouldn’t weaken people’s rights by housing them in an unsuitable and unlicensed house in multiple occupation (HMO). But they can’t show wider public support for increasing “rights” and they haven’t persuaded the Scottish Government to fully fund the implications for councils.

Until that changes, I will continue to argue for the reintroduction of the need for a local connection when making a homelessness application.