We need a serious homelessness prevention policy - Ewan Aitken

Desmond Tutu once said, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

Nobel Peace Prize winner and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is an inspiration to deal with homelessness. (Photo: Trevor Samson AFP via Getty Images)

This week saw the release of statistics showing that homelessness in Scotland has reached crisis levels, with more open cases than ever before.

Necessary as it is to help folk dealing with homelessness now, we also need to be looking further upstream, as Tutu suggested. This week’s statistics are a strong argument for spending more time, effort, and money to reach people as early as possible.

Over 15,000 households, including 10,000 children - are in temporary accommodation, There are over 40,000 people in temporary housing in Scotland – more than the whole population of Glenrothes.

Ewan Aitken CEO Cyrenians Scotland

And the problem is most pronounced right here in the capital. There are 3,560 households in temporary accommodation in Edinburgh right now, and last year 754 more people entered temporary accommodation in Edinburgh than left it. Ironically, the saturation in temporary accommodation is at least in part because we have got a better at catching people when they fall into homelessness, keeping them from rough sleeping.

But a lack of affordable homes to move on to traps folk in limbo – the average stay in temporary accommodation continues to climb, now sitting over 7 months – more for families with children. Long periods in temporary accommodation have significant impacts on people’s mental health, ability to put down roots, employment and much else besides. Edinburgh needs significant Government investment to get back on track - last year the city was only able to start work on 734 out of their targeted 1,186 affordable homes, and even the full target wouldn’t have been enough.

But upstream prevention is the key, and that means real support. For example; many people on remand lose their home because they're in prison before trial. While on remand, they don’t get the same level of support available to prisoners who have been convicted, so they have no-one advocating for them with their landlord (often the council) to keep their house. Many are acquitted and leave the court free but homeless. By providing support to prisoners on remand, this unnecessary outcome could be avoided. It would be an investment which would save money, but more importantly also help people rebuild.

Similarly, there's a strong link between addiction and homelessness, both as a cause and a consequence. Those who go through rehab are likely to be in danger of slipping back into drug use at least seven times in the first year. There's no point in investing in rehab if we don’t follow through with long-term, community-based support to catch folk when they stumble – just as we would want were we in the same place.

The Government’s ambition is to make homelessness brief, rare and non-recurring. It's a good ambition, honest and realistic; human fragility means there will always be folk in tough places. Homelessness will never be completely eradicated. But it need not be a lifetime condition nor something which creates compounding harm. To end the sorry state we see in these new figures, we need to be pushing forwards serious homelessness prevention policy to make sure we’re not just pulling people out, but making sure they don’t fall in.

Ewan Aitken is CEO Cyrenians Scotland