Thank you, convener. You asked exactly the right question. As we all know, there is no going back, but we cannot stay where we are.
From the perspective of the Homelessness Network Scotland, the most important point is that the Scottish Government and the Parliament, and this committee in particular, have already shown incredible ambition on homelessness since the committee’s inquiry in 2017-18. Together, they have chosen a method for ending homelessness that is incredibly clear and backed by evidence: the rapid rehousing framework, to which local areas are working.
The really boring response is that the framework is exactly the right method to get us out of the pandemic and address all the additional damage that it potentially causes around homelessness. Local authorities have said that the framework already gives them the right platform for recovery and that, if they did not already have the rapid rehousing approach, they would need it.
What needs to go alongside that, as the pandemic has shown us, is a level of urgency. The current level has been remarkable. Homelessness is always a crisis, especially for the people affected, and it is always an urgent issue, but our systems do not always act as if it is. The past 10 weeks have shown us that, when we bring together all the parts of the system—housing, health, local and national Government and the third sector, including volunteer groups in local areas—and act with urgency, much more can be achieved. We now need to apply that learning and thinking to the rapid rehousing framework that was already in place before the pandemic.
Alongside that, we need to do a number of other things to mitigate the impacts. We have covered several of those things already, so I will step over them. We need to prioritise prevention: it has to come first. We know which groups are most at risk in recessions and pandemics, and we need to direct urgent efforts towards them—the sooner the better, starting now.
We need to get back on track with rapid rehousing. We now need more housing options and opportunities across all tenures. We really need to up our game in how we solve issues in the private rented sector and how that approach is deployed locally. We need to create a space for big policy and incentives for increasing capacity across all tenures. We really need to rethink and look again at initiatives such as flat sharing and incentivising households to downsize where they want to do so. We can also look at out-of-area housing allocations—again, where that is what a household wants.
There are different ways of doing that, but we need to keep a hold of—[Temporary loss of sound]. Some of the initiatives that come up will fail or affect only a certain number of people. If we really want to build back stronger from where we were on homelessness before the pandemic, we need to think big on numbers and on ideas and initiatives.