Failure to tackle city housing shortage has repercussions - John McLellan

Ryrie's building, located beside Haymarket station, dates back to 1817, it didn't become a pub until around 1842, but now drinking on the footpath comes from a nearby homeless hostel

As cans of strong beer are glugged down, it can be quite intimidating to pass an often large and argumentative bunch where the pavement narrows at Ryries Bar. They weren’t there a few years ago, so where have they come from?

The answer is a hotel across the road, now effectively a homeless hostel and the council pays for the rooms because it’s legally obliged to house the destitute. Or rather, you the taxpayer foots the bill. Drinking on the premises is prohibited, hence the station’s sheltered bike store has become their beer garden.

It is one visible sign of the repeated failure to tackle the housing shortage, both in Edinburgh and elsewhere, with new data revealing there were 40,685 homelessness applications in Scotland in 2023-24, the highest in a decade and a four per cent increase on the previous year.

At the end of March there were a record 31,870 live applications, at a time when the SNP government has just cut £200m from the affordable housing budget.

The Haymarket hotel is due to leave the system next year, but where the people will go? The problem will be exacerbated by a warning to Edinburgh councillors in a report to today’s full council meeting that the authority is breaking the law by continuing to place the homeless in unlicensed houses in multiple occupation (HMOs).

The problem tracks back to the start of the pandemic when there was an imperative to find people a safe place to go and using unlicensed accommodation was deemed preferable than putting people ─ some of whom would have other health issues ─ at risk of deadly infection.

But the council’s legal obligation to house the homeless conflicts with its legal obligation not to use unsuitable or unlicensed accommodation and the monitoring officer, legal services director Nick Smith, also has a duty to warn that it must stop.

A further report will be presented to the housing committee this Tuesday, presumably so the committee councillors can ask more questions than time allows today, but even so it’s hard to understand why so little detail is available for today’s meeting other than the warning itself.

How many unlicensed HMOs has the council been sanctioning? How long has the council known it was acting illegally? How many people are affected? Where will those people go? How much will it cost to rectify the situation? What is the long-term prospect for homelessness services? And if the trend continues upwards, what can be done to tackle a growing problem?

But it’s crystal clear that rent controls are not the answer, just driving housing providers large and small out the market. Yet most councillors are fully signed up members of the common-sense defying rent control fan club.

Nor is a housing plan reliant on forcing businesses out the city to free up land.

Those people gathered outside Haymarket station are unlikely ever to be able to buy a home, and the fewer rental properties are available the more likely they are to spend their lives being moved from pillar to post.