Homelessness Inquiry
Item 2 is our first session of evidence on progress towards meeting the 2012 homelessness commitment. I welcome the witnesses, who are Olga Clayton, head of community care and housing at North Ayrshire Council, from the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers; Councillor Brian Goodall, chair of the 2012 steering group, from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities; Alan McKeown, head of housing at Angus Council, also from COSLA; and Rebecca Maxwell, assistant chief executive, sustainability, economy and environment, at Stirling Council, from the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers.
I start this session by putting three questions together so that we can get a general background to the situation. First, how has progress towards the 2012 commitment impacted on the way in which homelessness services are delivered across Scotland? Are you confident that local authorities will be able to meet the 2012 commitment? Are there any persistent barriers that will make the 2012 commitment difficult to meet or to sustain after December 2012?
11:30
Councillor Brian Goodall (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities)
The impact has been very significant. The existence of the target has focused minds in local government, but it has perhaps taken some local authorities longer than others to get to a stage where they are ready to embrace and deliver on the 2012 target. Generally, though, the majority of local authorities will be able to deliver on the target.
The target is very much a numbers exercise, but the key issue for us is addressing the impact on people who are experiencing homelessness or who are at risk of doing so and ensuring that we deliver better outcomes for them. That is the key target that we should all aim for rather than just viewing it as a numbers game, with the eradication of priority need groups.
We are in a positive place in terms of the culture shift, which has been major in many authorities. The majority of local authorities have the ability and commitment to deliver, but there have always been barriers to that. Given the recession and the upcoming welfare reforms, which I am sure we will get on to, there are threats out there. It is therefore not an easy task, but local authorities have certainly come a long way in their ability to deliver. We have been pleased to help with that over the past couple of years in trying to get a focus on the 2012 target through the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and Scottish Government steering group.
Alan McKeown (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities)
What Councillor Goodall said is right. Since the implementation of the Homelessness etc (Scotland) Act 2003 and the initial work and resources that were put into it, we have seen what I would class as dramatic improvements in my working lifetime in how we handle the homelessness system. It used to be about gate keeping and exclusion, but it is now about assessment and inclusion. We have made huge efforts to ensure that we know who we are dealing with, that we keep people in the system and that we focus on good-quality outcomes. We are also now moving away from outputs in terms of numbers to outcomes for individuals, which is incredibly significant for how we do our business. The outcomes agenda will provide a platform for further significant improvement in the personalisation of services.
One of the things that we need to do next is to look at homelessness as an enablement service, so that we lose the focus on the language of homelessness and start looking at housing options and outcomes and building sustainable solutions for individuals. Local government is in a good place to be the leader of that. We cannot do it alone, though, so we need to ensure that we bring in the totality of the resources in the system to get a whole-systems approach to the issue. However, we have made significant improvements.
Olga Clayton (Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers)
One of the areas in which improvement has been greatest is the shift in culture and focus for how we deal with homelessness. Partnership working has been key, but the early adoption of a prevention and early intervention approach has been important for the homelessness agenda. That approach will now stretch across the whole policy agenda, but it has been critical in enabling us to make progress towards reaching the 2012 target and has interesting lessons for the wider policy agenda in Scotland.
Rebecca Maxwell (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers)
The other culture shift has been to recognise from a whole-council perspective that homelessness is not just a housing issue but something that we need to take a corporate approach to and which is a significant part of the agenda.
On partnership working, local authorities cannot lead and deliver on homelessness themselves. We need to embed partnership working across the sector more widely to ensure that all can play a part and that homelessness does not get lost among other agendas.
We will move on. If some of the barriers do not come up in the discussion, we can come back to them.
Olga Clayton referred to the homelessness prevention agenda. I had the pleasure of a visit to North Ayrshire the other week, where I talked to people from the Ayrshire and south hub—I think that that is what it is called—which is supported by the Scottish Government to encourage prevention activities through the provision of guidance and so on. The hubs enable a housing options approach. Could Olga Clayton flesh that out a bit for the committee?
We have had the housing options approach in place in North Ayrshire partially since 2005 and fully since 2007. As you say, the approach has been adopted throughout Scotland and the hubs are one of the main ways of delivering it. Going back to what Alan McKeown said, I think that it is about looking at the individual’s issues and finding appropriate outcomes for them. We moved away from the approach whereby, under the homelessness legislation, when someone came through the door and said, “I’m homeless. I need a house,” the solution was to decide whether they qualified for a house and, if they did, where that house should be and who should give it to them. We now take a much more personalised approach, looking at the individual’s underlying issues.
First, we consider whether the person really needs or wants to move or whether what they are presenting with are different issues. I will give an example. Our early experience was with 16 and 17-year-olds, because a third of homelessness in North Ayrshire was coming from that group. The number of people presenting as homeless was increasing all the time, and we got to the point at which we felt that we were really not addressing the underlying issues. When we started to talk to those people and their families, we found that what we were seeing was a symptom of underlying issues such as unemployment, misunderstanding of benefits and family conflict, which often happens at that point. For that particular group, we invested heavily in training our staff and in using external family mediation, focusing on prevention for them.
Our options approach, which developed that approach further, is delivered across the piece. Now, when someone comes to us, instead of seeing them as homeless and in need of a council house, we consider the range of issues that they have and what options are available. For example, for many people in our area, the private sector is proving to be a sustainable and good-quality option in areas where there is a particularly low level of social rented housing. We consider the range of options, which are sometimes not about moving house at all. People used to move house when they were fleeing violence—either domestic violence or external violence—but an option for them is for us to put in greater safety measures and work more closely with the police, which reduces their need to move. We take a tailored approach in which we look at the reasons underlying homelessness presentations and have a range of options available that are tailored to deal with those.
The surveys that you have carried out suggest that access to a council house is not at the top of people’s list of wants and that people are instead focused on access to a house in a particular area. That makes quite a difference to how you tackle the homelessness agenda, does it not?
It does. Many people still prefer a secure council tenancy. We get representations on that basis and that option is open to people. However, we were slightly surprised to find that people are more willing than we expected to consider private sector options. It is important to them to maintain their community links, their links to their children’s schools and their links to employment. However, that is based on the fact that we have a rent deposit scheme and work with landlords who meet certain quality thresholds. In some areas, there are wider issues with the quality of housing in the private sector that limit its ability to meet needs and to play a proper role. That is an area in which more work needs to be done.
I do not know whether anyone else wants to comment on that. The rent deposit scheme is an important feature, although it could be threatened by the proposed welfare reforms. Others might want to pick up on that.
The private sector has a key role to play, especially in a preventative approach, which will be more appropriate in some areas and circumstances than in others. In general, the identification of the preventative approach as a good example of good practice that was delivering was an early outcome of the 2012 steering group. Recognition of that and the need to share good practice led to the establishment of the hubs and the provision of Scottish Government resources for them, which was very positive. That is one of the best examples to come out of the 2012 steering group of the culture shift that is needed within local authorities, which I mentioned earlier.
In many areas, we have moved away from an approach of people saying, “Aye—that’ll work for them, but we’re different,” to front-line officers embracing, through the hubs, a prevention approach that they had resisted. That is a positive outcome from the hubs, which demonstrates that they could be a useful mechanism for sharing best practice in other areas.
Will that shift be permanent?
Absolutely—we need to make that the case. The approach to 2012 needs to move away from being about a target and about something that happens next year. It needs to be about how we establish a new approach and deliver it sustainably in the years to come.
We will never eradicate the occurrence of people finding themselves with housing difficulties, but we can address a lot of circumstances and we can prevent the majority of people from needing to go down the homelessness route. However, when that is unavoidable, we must have in place a system to react and provide appropriate accommodation for people. That takes time and has major resource implications, which we will probably discuss. The prevention approach has been a clear example of how getting more authorities to do what North Ayrshire Council did has helped us to deliver progress towards the target.
Olga Clayton highlighted a couple of issues, such as the key one that we are not talking just about council housing. For a long time, people thought that going to the council for an assessment meant going for a council house—that is still thought by some people to an extent. We must shift the language to the whole system, which means that we assess a person’s housing needs and their wider support needs, largely through the single shared assessment model, which takes us into a world of corporate support through the community planning partnership and not just the council.
A person’s best housing option might not be a council house. For example, the readiest opportunity for someone who is in employment might be in the private rented sector or might be a form of low-cost home ownership or outright home ownership. We can help to pinpoint for people reputable independent financial advice models, for example.
A game change is going on around 2012. It is a pivotal moment when we can switch the balance away to much more enablement and people taking control of their own destiny. We will still be able to provide support, but it will involve enablement rather than doing things to people.
I think that a housing bill is forthcoming. That offers the opportunity for us to pause for thought on the housing system that we have and the housing system that we want to have in the next 10 or 15 years—or 26 years, if we consider when I will reach pension age and retire. I have a stake in what we do now. I was around in 2003, when we developed the Homelessness etc (Scotland) Act 2003 and talked to committees about that, and I vividly remember those committee discussions.
We have an opportunity to look at the situation afresh now. It is difficult to put into context how different the culture of the system is now from what it was in the early 1990s and onwards. We need to take that learning and move it ahead. Olga Clayton’s authority has been a catalyst for that. We are all looking at and developing housing hubs and we are all working furiously. We are redesigning services and putting money into the subject. That is making a difference.
On my visit in North Ayrshire, I was struck by how much working collaboratively was welcomed by everyone around the table. I got the impression that they very much wanted that to continue post-2012. That applied not just to local authorities but to the connection with the Scottish Government. Some people said that they would never have thought of contacting the Scottish Government until that approach was adopted and that they found that extremely useful for developing the agenda locally. Do you foresee that work happening post-2012? Does it depend on continued funding for hubs?
I will speak about what we are doing in Tayside and Fife. We are getting together with all the authorities through the hub model and independently of that to look at where we go next, how we share expertise and sometimes resources and what our policy platforms are. We do not need structural change to share policy platforms across areas. Some of my staff ask why we do not have a Tayside-wide allocations approach, albeit that we have community-based lettings plans that can fix community needs. The hubs have been a catalyst for that wider debate.
There is a real appetite for making it better for the customer. Does that depend on future resources? There are resources in the system. The first thing that we are all doing is looking at what we should do with those resources and whether we can make more of what we have. If we can get close to the levels of success that Olga Clayton’s authority has had with the housing options approach, we will be able to redesign our services. For example, my authority is looking at moving away from hostel provision towards mainstream, community-based provision. That will free up the staff from hostel provision, which is very expensive, and allow those resources to be reallocated to front-line services, which will benefit not just what we call the homelessness agenda but the wider housing network.
Is the issue one of additional resources? We cannot deny that there is a big need for capital to build more houses but, when it comes to revenue for running what we have, housing is very good at making best use of what it has.
11:45
The housing options hubs are evolving, and I think that there is potential for them to develop. The provision of resources would assist that process but, so far, the hubs have demonstrated that they have been able to achieve an awful lot with limited resources, not just on culture shift but in other areas where achievements have not previously been made. They have shown themselves to be excellent vehicles for sharing best practice, resistance to which has been experienced in the past.
The housing options hubs have a real future and there is a lot of enthusiasm within them. They will probably evolve and their membership may change. There should be increased involvement of registered social landlords and other partners, particularly in relation to prevention and other issues to do with homelessness. There is potential to do more with the hubs if they can be sustained, whether through direct resource provision or through working more effectively with the existing resources.
What types of homelessness prevention activities were the most successful? Olga Clayton highlighted the work with 16 and 17-year-olds that helped to divert those youngsters from homelessness, which involved negotiating with the family to prevent them from leaving home and making themselves homeless. Is that the most effective activity that you have undertaken, or are there others that are proving highly successful?
That one was particularly effective in that we immediately saw the return of 92 per cent of the youngsters to the family home, where they were maintained. That is the beginning, not the end, of the service. A shift took place in the homelessness service that saw us support them and their families in the home and work with them to plan when they would eventually leave, which they would do in a sustainable way. That was the shift that took place.
We expanded that work to cover people from the age of 16 to 25. Over the piece, 60 per cent of the youngsters concerned return to the family home, after which we work with them in a planned way to look at what their options are.
We have undertaken a range of activities, some of which it could be said relate to crisis points. We have an extremely effective home security project that works with women who are fleeing domestic violence, which was a major driver of homelessness in North Ayrshire. That involved us going back to first principles and thinking about the way in which the system was set up, which meant that the women and children who were the victims had to leave their houses. It is about providing options. We give women in that position the option of having their house made extremely secure. We give them 24-hour access to special response from the police so that they do not have to move and their children do not have to move schools. We have seen big reductions in homelessness in that area.
We used the same approach to antisocial behaviour and external harassment. In our area, we had a culture whereby people thought that the answer to a neighbour problem was a move. We have developed a solution in our antisocial behaviour strategy, which is where the wider community planning aspect comes in. Our strategy has different tiers of intervention, from early neighbourhood mediation up to much stronger and more effective investigation and enforcement. That has had a big impact as well.
We have developed a range of solutions for different people at different times. We worked through all the different causes of homelessness, looked at them from first principles and asked what we needed to do to deal with them.
Relationship breakdown is still the biggest driver of homelessness. We do not have a solution for that; we have not cracked it. Within families, we can manage it, but when the relationship breakdown is between partners, it is a huge driver—quite aside from domestic violence. However, we can consider people’s housing options and ensure that not everyone is diverted into the homelessness system. That is neither what they need nor what they want. Our homelessness presentations have reduced by more than 50 per cent over the past four years, the impact of which has been that the percentage of housing allocations to homeless applicants has been 25 per cent. We do not set a target for that—for example, that we will allocate only 25 per cent of houses to homeless people. We do what is appropriate.
Resources have been freed up for everyone else. We were in danger of having a system in which there was a perverse incentive to go homeless because it was the only way to get services. In the past, if someone had a mental health or an alcohol issue tied up with a housing issue, the only way in which they could get support was to go through the homelessness route, and that was not right.
We have asked ourselves what we need to do when people present with problems that might put them at risk of homelessness, and how we can make early interventions. That is a huge area of work, and it may tie in with what Rebecca Maxwell said earlier about a shared agenda with health and social work. We need to improve on that.
I will turn the question around and consider an issue that we still find extremely challenging—clients who present with multiple or complex needs. I am thinking in particular about clients whose needs may fall just below the trigger points in individual service areas. If we could focus more on how we improve our partnership working, it would pay benefits.
Councillor Goodall talked about expanding membership of the housing options hubs, and it may be worth considering input from health and social care services in those. Health and social care services face a huge range of pressures, and we have to be alert to the risk that the homelessness agenda will be squeezed out of discussions. Those services need to play a part in addressing homelessness.
I will compare and contrast my experiences with Olga Clayton’s. In 2006-07, our local authority accepted that we had to work through the issue of priority need. In some areas, 95 per cent of our allocations have been to priority groups—most of the people would be classed as homeless, but some groups of elderly people have been in there too. We know the impact of having to provide that volume of support. Our duty in legislation is to provide housing and support, although no one is compelled to take the support. We will do all the assessments, but people can say, “Actually, I don’t want that support.” We are now going in the other direction, and we are all now in a benchmark club—the Scottish housing best-value network. Olga Clayton mentioned a figure of 25 per cent; we are sitting at 65 per cent.
We consider housing options, not just in terms of homelessness but in terms of a redesign of services. We ask whether our services are as good as they can be for individuals. When a 16 or a 17-year-old comes out of care, giving them their own tenancy can be the worst thing to do if they do not take any further support. We acknowledge that, and we work closely with colleagues in social work in trying to redesign services. That would not have happened without our approach to housing options. The commitment to change and the pace of that change would not have been the same.
I will say something about the link with the agendas of social care and health, specifically in relation to children. It strikes me that two parallel approaches to young people are developing. For looked-after and accommodated children, local authorities have raised the age at which they continue to keep contact and provide support. Local authorities and other partners put huge resources into maintaining families and keeping them together. On the other hand, the homelessness agenda seemed to be driving different behaviours. If a 16-year-old came to the local authority’s homeless department, we would immediately facilitate a breakaway from the family—without necessarily even talking to the family.
We have tied up those agendas, and asked why, if it is right that looked-after or accommodated children should be looked after by the authority up to the age of 25, in some cases, we would take a completely different approach if they came to us through the homelessness route. Why would we encourage a separation from the family? That did not make sense, so there has been a joining up of the policy approach.
Alan McKeown’s comments highlight for me one of the additional benefits of the prevention approach. It does not just deliver a better, more sustainable outcome for the person who is experiencing, or at risk of experiencing, homelessness; it can provide better outcomes for people on local authority waiting lists as well, because we resist the pressure to make 90 or 100 per cent of allocations from the housing lists to homeless people. There is a win-win there—as the public perception of the prevention approach widens, the idea that a person has to go through the homelessness route to get a local authority housing allocation should diminish, which will have a positive effect on the number of people presenting as homeless. I hope that that will allow us to focus on those who genuinely need the specific services that have been built up around homelessness.
Your challenge for the future is developing wider services in a multi-agency approach. Thank you for that.
It is critical that there is confidence that the allocation system can both create a sustainable community and meet housing needs, whether those of the individual and their family or those of the community—there are many elements to housing need. My local authority experience has been that somebody who has been allocated a property in an area where they do not want to live often passes somebody on the bus going in the opposite direction to a community in which they do not want to live. I hope that the new approach will start to deal with that.
Confidence in the system is lacking, however, among young men or women who have no health problems, no children and who live with mum and dad. Under the current system they have no prospect of access to social housing as a choice. Will what is to happen in 2012 make that situation better or worse? Will it drive more of those people into attempting to go down the homeless route to solve what they see as their housing need?
That type of client has the statutory right to be in the system. Anyone over 16 can apply. You are right that we need to develop an honesty about who we can help and the pace at which we can help. In the current system, that type of client will have practically no chance of getting a house, but they should have a choice. We can give only one form of tenure, which is the secure tenancy, so we are then saying to people, “Your best option is in the private sector.” That is okay, as long as we are honest about it, and I am not sure that we are as honest about it as we need to be—
If they come and say, “I am now homeless,” what happens?
The way in which the law interacts with the code of guidance on homelessness means that their vulnerability and their priority will be low, so doing that will not help them up the list. The public services—councils as RSLs—need to start looking at why we could not offer that person a six-month tenancy. We cannot right now, but why could we not offer them a six-month tenancy, help them save or help them move on? Local government is very mono-tenure. We should offer better choices, such as six-month or one-year tenancies. We do not have that now.
If we are removing the requirement to be in “priority need”, how are the circumstances of such a young person different from those of the next person?
It comes back to whether you consider them to be homeless or not. That is now the key criterion in the investigation.
May I stop you? What about a letter from my mum saying that I am homeless?
We would not accept that. We used to accept that kind of letter and that is what drove homelessness. Now we will go back and speak to the mother.
What do you do if she says, “I want him out”?
We do not necessarily walk away at that point; we try to understand why she wants him out. Sometimes it happens—people do kick their children out, for want of a better word—but quite often that will change once you explain to people what the likely outcomes and alternatives are. People have a rosy notion of what the options are and how quickly someone will get a house through homelessness, because they believe the myths about it. We explain that there are other options and we will help people through those other options. That is where we have had success in returning people to the family home. The prevention agenda really helps with that.
Our experience in North Ayrshire is that 50 per cent of allocations are going to people who are on the waiting list and are staying in the care of their mum and dad or relatives or whatever. Twenty-five per cent of allocations are going to homeless people and 25 per cent to transfer cases. What stops us from housing more people who are in the situation that you describe is supply. For a time, what stopped us was the fact that in some areas a larger number of allocations were going to the homeless queue. However, we pulled back from that and it is now about not just how many houses there are, but how quick the turnover is. It is about the shape and location of supply.
All the housing associations in our area have a common housing register and allocation policy, but there are disparities in provision. Council housing was built for families and is typically not one-bedroom accommodation, but the majority of waiting lists are made up of single people or small households—one adult and one child or two adults and one child. That mismatch is one of the challenges, because people will not get full housing benefit if they are underoccupying a property. We have all those other issues going on, and supply is fundamental to that.
12:00
Neil Findlay is absolutely right about confidence in the allocation system. There also needs to be confidence in our use of the allocation system. We need to get added value out of every allocation. It used to be one in, one out. We now need to be engineering moves and creating chains of allocations. For example, regardless of the politics around the debate on the number of new-build affordable houses, we have always said that it is about 4,000 or 6,000 allocations. Why are we saying that? We should be creating chains of allocations in which that 4,000 becomes 8,000, which becomes 12,000 or whatever. We need to change our thinking and create housing outcomes. We have not been sophisticated or confident enough in our use of the allocation system.
There might still be some one in, one out, but there is an opportunity to make more of what we have and it is up to us as housing professionals to grab it. The common housing register and more commonality of allocations are the way forward. We need all the partners in that right now because there are a few barriers to that.
Olga Clayton highlighted the issue of one-bedroom properties. I do not think that we have quite understood yet that the benefits system changes will slam into us quickly and will be massively significant across the board. We need to get our heads around that. The use of allocations will be very important. We need to take people off the list and move people who are losing 15 or 25 per cent of their benefit, depending on where the regulations go on that. We have a duty to those people to prevent their homelessness. We really need to get confidence in our use of allocations. I am on the Scottish Government’s benefits advisory group and I have said to the Government that we must not wait to do that—we need to do it now.
I understand what you are saying about one-bedroom houses, but the street adjacent to where I live has a high number of one-bedroom council houses and, if the allocations are dominated by people coming through the homeless process who are unsupported, that creates a whole host of problems. There is a real caveat to what you are saying.
I am from an authority that made that higher level of allocations and I would say that you are absolutely right. It is the issue of confidence. When we were all first regulated we lost a bit of confidence because of the criticism of age restrictions and so on in allocations. We are starting to get a bit more use of professional judgment in allocations. You are right that it is about housing support. The tide is turning, and a bit of assistance is being given by the Scottish Government.
I will pick up on a point that Alan McKeown and Olga Clayton made. There is an issue of supply in general and across all tenures. I think Alan McKeown said that it is not just local authority solutions that will address homelessness in future. We know from councils’ housing need and demand assessments throughout the country that there is a shortage of affordable housing in all tenures. There is a mismatch between demand and house types, which we need to see as part of the bigger issue. The discussion today is about how we deal with the homelessness angle, but there is a bigger issue that also needs to be addressed.
Increasing supply and making best use of that supply is key to that. We also need to learn lessons from the past so that we build appropriate to our needs and in a way that delivers the mixed communities in which it is a lot easier to avoid the problems that have been referred to.
There is a good example in my own authority, Fife Council, which has tried to deliver the maximum benefit for each new-build property. We operate a transfer-first policy for new-build general-needs homes to provide more appropriate accommodation for people on the transfer list. Not only can existing council tenants get a more appropriate move, we can deliver for people on the waiting list and those further down the chain who are homeless.
As I say, we need to maximise the benefit from every new council or RSL property that we deliver. However, I go right back to what was said in the beginning—the more new homes that we can deliver, the better. That is one of the resourcing issues that we are putting before the committee today.
With regard to your comment about changing attitudes, I am struck by the fact that we treat some young people very differently to others. On the one hand, students who go to university live in halls of residence, where many of them live together in flats, and throughout their university experience they will live in flats with many other people. On the other hand, we think that we are doing young people coming out of care a service by putting them in a flat by themselves. I do not think that such a move allows them to develop their social skills, their attitudes towards sharing and so on. Is there a gap in this respect? Should we, as Neil Findlay suggested, put single people in supported, perhaps more collective accommodation?
Certainly we need to examine the shape of existing accommodation. In that respect, Alan McKeown’s point about tenure is absolutely relevant. Many authorities have probably set up shared flats in the past, but the secure tenancy regime, under which, for example, people have become liable for each other’s debts, means that such moves have become pretty problematic and complex.
We need to find a range of better options. As far as housing young people is concerned, support is the critical bit. In students’ halls of residence, there is someone who deals with, say, noise issues at the time; what happens in shared flats is a different scenario. We need to get the balance of support in accommodation absolutely right, but we also need to get away from the notion that although a young person of 16 might have the right to live in separate accommodation, that is not the right move for every young person. Indeed, it is very rarely the right move for a 16-year-old. They do not get the benefits and, because they are socially isolated, they end up having a very negative experience.
We have a responsibility to work with those young people. Although many of us have very good pathways with social work throughcare services, they do not cover the young people who are not dealt with in that manner but come through the waiting list or some other homeless route. As Alan McKeown made clear, we have become much more confident in our ability to do things and more sophisticated in our approach and will now say to young people, “Okay, the legislation says that you have a right to live in separate accommodation but we would like to consider other approaches with you.” That has been the big shift.
We do not yet have a response to your question. Indeed, it is something for the Scottish Government to debate through this kind of structure.
We in local government do not have the tenure choices to accommodate young people in shared accommodation. We could do with having them and they would not be difficult to put together. As we were saying before the meeting, when the original draft of the Scottish secure tenancy was commissioned, it was written in a weekend by a very confident Queen’s counsel. We can do that again and create those tenure choices. Indeed, that is what the Parliament is for and something it is very good at. The Scottish secure tenancy represented an incredible step forward but now we have to think about what we need for the next 10 or 15 years, particularly with the benefit changes to the single room rate kicking in. There is no way we are going to cope with the implications of those changes if we do not change some of our system’s rules to make it more inclusive. Although it will mean having to do more work and giving more thought to the types of housing support that should be available, we will have to do that if we do not want to face a bundle of problems in the next few years. After all, we are going to lose a lot of income and, when that happens, how are we going to build new houses? We have to tackle the issue in the round.
The social housing budget is being slashed dramatically—indeed, disproportionately compared with other budgets. How on earth are you people going to cope with that and continue to provide supply? As Shelter, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and others have told us, the situation is pretty grim.
A number of innovative schemes are delivering in relation to other elements of housing supply, such as the mid-market rented sector, as we have been hearing from Government. Many authorities are keen to look at such housing options, because when people are able to take advantage of such opportunities a bit of pressure is taken off at the other end of the scale, in relation to waiting lists and so on. I hope that such options will allow us to focus our resources—which are limited in the context of our ability to create new build—on creating letting chains that can deliver for all the people who cannot take advantage of mid-market renting or private sector options.
We must be as positive as we can be and make the best use of the resources that we have. Of course, you will hear no arguments from me against making available more resources for new build, but one way to strengthen that case is to demonstrate that we are delivering the best that we can deliver. We need to explore every opportunity to ensure that councils that have the ability to build more have the land, the resources and the support to do so.
In other areas we will have to go down the RSL route. There has been a lot of pressure on RSLs to start to deliver with a similar level of subsidy to that with which local authorities are able to deliver.
The process should help us to focus. The key outcome is not the input but the number of units that we provide in appropriate places for people who need them. That is the figure on which we want to judge progress, instead of looking at budgets in difficult times, when we know that budgets are being slashed.
I agree on the point about maximising the number of units that we build, but it is also about what we do with the units. It is about not just the number of houses that we build but how many outcomes we get from them—that multiplier is the issue. We have something similar to the transfer-first policy. Such approaches might not make the absolute difference, but they will make a difference.
Olga Clayton and I were discussing the issue. I must be honest and say that our authorities have had bumper years in the number of units that we have delivered, because we have been in a financial position to be able to deliver units. That will not last, because at some point we will run out of money and we will not be able to increase rents significantly so that we can do more; we have to be fair with rental levels, which vary depending on an authority’s income. We have been able to deliver innovative schemes. My convener was much to the fore in pushing us along the lines of private sector partnerships with people who can deliver for lower levels of grant. We will deliver 77 units through partnerships with private developers.
Scotland has got much more canny about the use of its public resources through lending on and granting on. In the next couple of years we will see much smarter use of second-homes money and the affordable housing investment programme. However, we will have to take tough decisions. Bids to the innovation and investment fund were for a maximum of £30,000 per unit for local government. We are delivering at that level while some RSLs are getting £44,000 and still looking for more money. We need honesty. If people cannot deliver for that resource, we need to find people who can.
As Councillor Goodall said, more resources for affordable housing in the public sector would be appreciated, but there is a broader debate to be had about ensuring that other forms of housing are available. There needs to be a sufficient supply of affordable housing in the new build that comes forward in the owner-occupied sector, and we need to consider the degree to which the private sector is accessible and affordable for people on lower incomes.
Supply is critical; 2012 is next year and we will not build our way to meeting the target.
On the point about confidence in the allocations system, applicants and tenants in my area support the approach to homelessness, but their support is contingent on their feeling that their needs are being met, which requires appropriate supply.
Resources for new build are about not just money—although money is important—but land, and there is land throughout the public sector. The health sector, in particular, holds land, which is an issue for me locally. The Government could look fruitfully at the better use that could be made of land resources in the public sector to take the agenda forward, because such resources have not been exploited as fully as they could have been. The issue is particularly important, given the demographic pressures in Scotland.
We are about to have the new national older people’s housing strategy. There will be pressure because older people will be in competition with many of our homeless applicants for the same small units. The health sector has a real interest in ensuring that older people are kept in the community, as do we. Land could be released to make the older people’s housing strategy a reality, which would release pressure on us in providing for people who are homeless. There are all sorts of links to the wider policy agenda that need to be made.
12:15
I want to ask about supply. I asked for a Scottish Parliament information centre briefing, which states that the number of households in Scotland is 2,344,000 and that the total housing stock is 2,469,000. That means that there are 120,000-odd more dwellings than households. Over the past couple of nights, Channel 4 has been running pieces about how there are 1 million empty properties in the United Kingdom. Data provided under freedom of information suggests that 7,500 homes lie empty in Edinburgh. Should we be doing something about that to improve the situation for the number of families who are looking for a change?
Work is on-going on empty homes. The empty homes partnership has been partly seed funded by the Scottish Government to look for solutions. In fact, Councillor Goodall spoke at the empty homes conference last week that was hosted by Shelter.
There is great benefit to that work in particular areas. In rural areas, there may be houses that are lying empty while there is a very restricted supply. Work is on-going, and it will bear fruit in some areas. For example, South Ayrshire Council put in a bid to the innovation fund last time round, and it has an innovative approach that works for it in bringing empty homes back into use.
The situation is different in different parts of the country. We need to match the action that we take to what housing demand shows for an area—the empty homes that each area has and to what extent they could and should be brought back into use. Some homes are empty for a reason. That could be because there is a structural oversupply in the area, in the same way as there is a structural undersupply in other areas. Looking at numbers across Scotland can give a skewed picture of where we are.
We must also consider how households are counted. For example, someone who stays with their mother and father would not count as a separate household, as by definition they are part of their parents’ household, but they could be on our waiting list as an aspiring household. We need to look at the demand from aspiring households—people who have not made it into being a household because they do not have their own accommodation.
Angus Council’s survive and thrive initiative has brought empty properties back into use—it was successful in the town of Carnoustie, for example. That has had the real benefit of being a driver for regeneration and for employment and training opportunities for young people. Those opportunities exist.
A long time ago, there used to be a £1 million empty homes fund—in 1996 or 1997. There is no direct empty homes funding at the moment, but some ideas, such as lending money at low interest rates through local government or RSLs, could be looked at and tried for limited amounts of money. They will not solve the problem, but they will be a part of a series of solutions that we are looking at.
It is a major issue. The Scottish empty homes conference was successful and it highlighted a number of innovative approaches that have been taken in other countries and are now being taken in Scotland. The issue for me was that most of the good examples are delivering on a small scale—maybe eight houses here and one or two there. The challenge is to find a way to scale up those projects and deliver something that would make a difference to a place such as Edinburgh, considering the figures that Gordon MacDonald mentioned. The reasons for the homes being empty are also significant.
The issue is a great one as the approaches to tackling it can deliver a series of additional benefits. There are a lot of communities where one or two empty homes in the area generate estate management issues, as well as the extreme frustration that someone who is experiencing homelessness or the threat of homelessness feels when they have to walk past an empty home every day. It is a demoralising situation to be in—we all ask ourselves the question, “How can that be?”
There are schemes that are worth exploring. For me, the key is to find one that we can scale up sufficiently. I know that resources are available through the empty homes partnership to consider having dedicated officer support to deliver on empty homes, to use some of the existing tools, through the internet and so on, to record and register empty homes and to start the work to bring them back into use.
A good combination of carrot and stick will be the appropriate approach. The Government is considering the options on council tax for empty homes, which gives us the opportunity to have some stick that might encourage owners to engage with local authorities and other partners to help to bring those homes back into use.
The issue is crucial but, even if every empty home was brought back into use, that would not solve the problem overnight, as some of them are empty because they are in areas where there is a surplus. However, every little helps, so a solution on that issue would be extremely useful. That work is on-going and COSLA is actively involved in it and happy to be so.
I am surprised that although we have three senior housing officials giving evidence, they have made no real comment on the fact that the social housing budget has been halved. I understand that you operate in a political arena, which perhaps is the reason for the reticence. I just wanted to make that comment.
Actually, I said that supply is an issue and that more funding would be welcome. We probably share that point of view. Depending on what we use as the baseline, there is a 20 or 50 per cent cut to the budget, which is a significant cut that is out of kilter with the cuts to the rest of the capital budget, which are about 3 or 4 per cent. I suppose that, as part of our pragmatic nature, we are used to getting on with things. However, there certainly is an issue and I would not want to underplay it.
That is very diplomatic.
We recognise the reality of the cut from Westminster. Alex Johnstone has the next question.
That is a hospital pass.
We have had the 2012 target for several years. It has been the property of successive Governments and has received support from the parties that have not been in government, so the commitment is very much the Parliament’s property. I was interested in Alan McKeown’s comments on the flexibility that is required. As a north-east member, I know that Angus Council is an exemplar on a host of housing issues, but Mr McKeown talked about additional sophistication that he thinks can be introduced into the allocation policy and other issues. What does the Parliament need to do to allow the council to do its best in years to come?
I am fortunate in that I was around when the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001 was designed. I was also around for its implementation and when the Homelessness etc (Scotland) Act 2003 was designed. I am not sure that we fully understood all the consequences that would arise from the 2001 and 2003 acts, but the vast majority of the consequences have been good. However, it is time to examine the housing system to find out whether it is working in the way that the Parliament felt that it would work, whether it is doing the jobs that we thought that it would do, and whether we can afford to do some of the things that we currently do. We should ask some questions and then think about where to go next if a bill is forthcoming.
My view is that more flexibility on tenure would allow us to reach out and help a bundle of people whom we cannot help now. For example, the national housing trust, whether we like it or not, is aimed at achieving housing options through councils for groups that we previously were not able to reach. The NHT has allowed councils, whether or not they have sites and can afford it, to hit the individuals that we have heard about. If we accept that the NHT gives us that, why cannot councils consider doing that through a non-NHT route?
There are some relatively easy things to do in relation to tenure choice and giving local government the ability to be more entrepreneurial. That might just be about sending out the clear message that the council is a developer as well as a body that allocates houses. If the market is going nowhere in a particular area, the council can stimulate it, as we have done through our survive and thrive initiative, which is driven by our housing convener. We can use our resources to stimulate whatever tenure is there. That goes back to the housing options approach, which has enabled flexibility and innovation. The issue is about housing outcomes, not the tenures or who delivers them.
We have got much smarter. The innovation and investment fund allowed private sector partners to bid for Government funds in a way that they did not do previously. We should continue that direction of travel.
I was delighted to hear some of the witnesses mention the increasing role of the private sector in supplying housing. However, in the supply of social housing, the private sector is a relatively new part of the process. Could the private sector deliver more and could changes be made that would allow it to deliver a more effective service?
Yes. The partnership with the private sector needs to get better and become more of an open book. We need to talk about shared risk and shared return, or lower levels of return with more higher-end houses and a much more flexible use of the planning system. That is about negotiation. We have got much better at the use of section 75 planning gain agreements, but we need to reflect on whether they are now fit for purpose and whether we could be a bit more flexible. Relationships are starting to develop and they are encouraging.
To return to our survive and thrive initiative, almost all the money in that goes, through our prudential borrowing capacity, to private sector agencies, which receive grants of around £30,000 to deliver new affordable units for rent or for sale for low-cost home ownership. My authority was successful in getting resources from the innovation and investment fund for its own shared-ownership scheme, which we believe will give us a rate of return. I see no reason why local government cannot build houses for rent or for low-cost home ownership, or outright home ownership, on a not-for-profit basis and then recycle that resource to meet local community needs.
The private sector probably can and should do more. It probably was doing more through developer contributions for affordable housing, but the big issue was the recession. Obviously, if sites were not developed, the contributions were not forthcoming, which had a major impact on the number of affordable homes that were being delivered throughout the country.
On more active participation by private landlords, one issue is the uncertainty over how the new approach to housing benefit will affect them. We have a representative of private landlords on our Fife housing partnership. Landlords are concerned about the current issues. Those who deal predominantly with people who are reliant on benefits are concerned about how that relationship and process will change. There have been suggestions that some landlords will steer away from taking anyone who is likely to be reliant on benefits—as many do at the moment—or will steer away from being a landlord at all and consider other options.
We need to work on that and find a way to ensure that private landlords continue to make a contribution where that is appropriate. I hope that we can find a way to ensure that the new benefit structure does not work against that. That is a concern for private landlords and for those of us who rely on them to help us to deliver the 2012 target.
Alan McKeown talked about councils being able to offer more flexible tenure. We would like a more flexible regime so that private sector landlords can give people longer leases. There are issues, particularly for people who have children, for whom stability is important. When people put their child in school, they want to feel that they will be living in the area for the requisite length of time. However, the current tenancy regime in the private sector does not give people that security, although that is sometimes achieved through agreements with individual landlords. Representatives of private landlords always give examples of people who have been in the same house for 15 or 20 years, but that tends not to be the pattern. We do not have the German pattern of long-term renting in the private rented sector.
We should not have different tenancy regimes in the sectors; we want flexibility so that people have a proper choice. If someone wants to live in a particular area, the length of time for which they can live in a house should not be dependent on which sector it is in. People’s choice can be constrained by their locality. The only real choice might be the private sector, which means a lack of security of tenure. It is important that we look across the piece.
Keeping those issues in mind, I would like to ask about RSLs—the housing associations, largely—which have been the growth area in recent years and have provided a lot of accommodation. Are they taking their share of responsibility with local authorities in providing houses, particularly for the more difficult tenants?
There has been a mixed picture across the country, and probably within authorities as well. Different RSLs have taken slightly different approaches, as is their right. Some have bought into the whole prevention approach; they have had their own culture shift and made a greater contribution to delivering accommodation for homeless people. We have seen RSLs that have increased their allocation levels and, in some cases, their targets for homelessness, which has been very positive. There are not many examples, however, of them doing more than a local authority would do with its own housing stock.
There is scope for all RSLs to do more, and for some to do quite a lot more. It is a mixed picture. RSLs are represented on the steering group, and there has been an on-going discussion about that subject. We are keen to welcome the work that has been done and to praise those that are playing their part, but we also want to pull the others up to a similar level.
12:30
We have discussed this issue over the past few years. The majority of funding for new housing still goes to RSLs. When we talk about increasing the supply to meet the 2012 agenda and to make our homelessness approach sustainable in the longer term, we cite the figures about new supply, but if the new supply is being provided by RSLs that do not provide allocations to homeless people or help with the agenda in some other direct way, that need is not being met. On the one hand, we are saying that we are doing things with the supply and, on the other, we are talking about having these policy aims; the two need to tie up. In discussions with the housing associations’ representative body, we have identified a fundamental issue, which is that RSLs are part of the voluntary sector and some of them have a philosophical problem with the notion that they are being used to deliver a statutory obligation.
In my area, we have a good relationship with the RSLs, which are proactive on homelessness. I know that that applies in many other parts of Scotland as well. Some, however, still feel that homelessness is the council’s agenda and the council’s issue. All the obligations are placed on councils; they are not placed on the partners. Many of the RSLs still see it as a matter of choice whether they should engage or not. When we ask questions at national level, the response is often, “We aid a whole lot of people who are not statutory homeless, so the definition is changing. We house a lot of people who are hidden homeless on waiting lists.” That really is not an answer; if it were, the figure would go up by about 90 per cent, because we house those people as well. There has been insufficient focus on ensuring that the investment addresses this agenda through RSLs.
A “mixed picture” is a good way of describing it; it is mixed across the country but also within areas. We have some top-notch RSLs in my area. Hillcrest Housing Association signed up for the common housing register and common allocations a long time ago. That is a good, productive relationship, and we are working to bring others on board. Common housing registers have been around for eight or nine years, and some have taken a long time to develop because of technical issues. As Olga Clayton pointed out, there are also issues of principle involved, with some RSLs saying, “That’s not for us. That’s your job, not ours.”
Alex Johnstone asked what Parliament could do to try to move things along. We need to be more explicit about this. If we are putting in public investment, it needs to achieve the national outcomes that have been set out. We should be saying, “By the way, if you are getting £50,000 of public investment to help to build an affordable house, it needs to go to the client group that the Government wants to help. Go and make that happen.”
There is still a very mechanistic way of doing this, for which I am partly responsible, along with David Bookbinder, who is now at the Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland but was formerly at the SFHA. We wrote a section 5 referral programme. Why do we have to go through the bureaucracy of a referral programme when we have the potential for common housing registers and common allocations policies that would make things much easier for the customer? That bureaucracy needs to be, and can be, removed quickly, just by saying, “You should all be in a common housing register. You should all work together on a commonality of allocations, and you need to increase the number of allocations that you make to priority groups, rather than playing with definitions.”
Olga Clayton is not alone in her experience of RSLs saying that they house homeless people even though they are not housing statutory homeless people. They are making up that definition for themselves, and we need to level that playing field. We must ask whether the system is fit for purpose and doing what we thought that it would do.
My final question is about what we often describe as the revolving-door syndrome in social tenancies. I am not sure about the scale of the problem, but we all have anecdotal evidence of tenants becoming antisocial, being evicted and having to be rehoused. Are the housing support services developed and resourced enough to support homeless households or to ensure that those households can sustain their tenancies once they have moved into a house?
More resources would have more impact in this area. However, going back to Rebecca Maxwell’s earlier comments, I think that much of this is about linking with existing social and health services. With many of these families, we need to map out the services they receive and the contact they have and, although it is clear that they are in contact with other services, quite often that support does not address the lower-level areas of prevention that we want to focus on and will need to look at even more in future.
We have seen the revolving door in action. However, an interesting quirk of the current statistics is that at the moment the percentage of homeless households that present again within a year—in other words, those that become homeless, get a house, lose it and come back—appears to be going up. However, that is because the overall percentage of homeless presentations is going down. It looks as though things are getting worse but, in fact, what we have is a core number of households whose complex needs were not successfully met the first time round. That number has neither increased nor decreased and authorities are now looking at the best way of dealing with the most complex cases. Clearly, the problem cannot be dealt with through the housing function alone; after all, drug and alcohol addiction, mental health and certain learning disability issues lie at the root of these cases, and we need to get much better at achieving joined-up working across the sector and targeting it at low-level support.
On the numbers that Olga Clayton highlighted, I bang on about this issue a lot because my community and convener keep raising it with me; the national level is 5 per cent, whereas the level in our area is 2 per cent. We must be getting something right, and what we think we are getting right is the single shared assessment that we carry out. We struggle to meet the 28-day target at times, but at least when we go in we have a much more holistic picture.
As for whether our housing support is working, the problem is that most of the people we would want to engage with housing support do not; indeed, there is no responsibility on them to do so and we need to think about whether there is some lever we can pull in that area. We are also looking at pre-tenancy work in connection with these issues.
The critical issue, however, is the impact on communities’ perception of fairness. They see someone evicted for rent arrears or antisocial behaviour being rehoused by us temporarily and then permanently. That is the current system and, as professionals, we work under it, but there is a debate to be had about whether it is what we thought would happen. If that was the aim, that is fine—that is what we will do. However, some tenants, particularly those who engage with the system, will say to us, “Why did you rehouse that person? They wrecked their house and left behind £4,000-worth of damage and £1,500 of rent arrears. They’ve also had four tenancies”. If that is what we have to do, that is fine. We now know where everyone is in the system, which has made a massive difference, but there is a price to be paid for that. Perhaps we just have to admit that we know what the price is and that that is how things have to go and instead do things entirely differently and ensure that there is more effective engagement with housing support.
The witnesses have touched a little on the issue of welfare reform, but I wonder whether we can flesh it out a bit more. We have taken evidence on the Welfare Reform Bill from a number of bodies, including COSLA, Shelter and the SFHA, all of which expressed concern about the proposed changes to housing benefit. Alan McKeown seemed to come closest to fleshing out the issue earlier; he should forgive me if I am citing him slightly incorrectly, but I think that he said that, although the housing benefit changes were going to slam into local authorities, no one really understands them at this stage. Of course, that is understandable given that the detail has been somewhat light. With that caveat, can the witnesses tell us what specific impact housing benefit changes might have on the 2012 target?
The headlines are obviously to do with the impacts on individuals. Benefits will be sliced across the board, which will impact on a range of individuals who tend to be more dependent on benefits and are captured by the legislation and the code of guidance. The headlines are not only about housing benefit, but the changes to housing benefit—the move to a universal credit that will be paid monthly—will be incredibly challenging for those who have never budgeted, who do not think that budgeting is important and who, in any case, think that budgeting involves spending money on things other than rent. That poses a risk to our income streams. I know that some people might say that we should not be thinking about that, but we should, because that money pays for repairs, improvements, new houses and staff. We have to think about our income stream and have a business head on. The loss of direct payment to local authorities and other landlords will be important.
Presumably, continued payment ensures continued tenancies.
Absolutely. A key message needs to be that it is okay to ask people to pay their rent. It is okay to chase people for their rent because that is what keeps people in their house. Above all, we want sustainable tenancies.
The reduction in benefit will be between 10 and 15 per cent for someone who underoccupies by one room but between 20 and 25 per cent—depending on the regulations—for someone who underoccupies by two rooms. You can see that confidence in the use of allocations is incredibly important in that regard. My view is that we should be prioritising those individuals and helping them to move. Many of us have assisted-move schemes. We have one that we will present to the council again in January whereby we pay up to £2,500—on a sliding scale—to get someone out of a four-bed house, because we need those bigger houses, we need that movement and we do not want people to be in arrears.
Those are some of the headlines. I gave a presentation to the Scottish Government’s benefits reform group in which I said, “We know this stuff is coming. We need to get ahead of this. What are we saying about the policy implications and the policy choices?” Because we have devolved responsibility for housing, we can move much more quickly than other parts of the UK. We must start thinking about what we can do. If action is not taken nationally, it will be taken locally. Some decisions that we will make might not be what we should do, strictly speaking, but they will prevent homelessness down the line. We are looking closely at that at the moment.
There are a couple of specific points on the 2012 target. From January, people up to 35—previously, the cut-off was 25—will be eligible for housing benefit only on a shared-room basis; they will not be eligible for housing benefit for a single flat. For those of us who use the private sector as one of our housing options, that will have a big impact, as it narrows down the options. We are trying to develop a range of responses to that and to negotiate with landlords on rents.
The welfare reforms will drive policy changes, whether intentionally or not. In the local housing strategy in my area, we decided that we would not build one-bedroom houses in future, either through the council or through RSLs, because they are not flexible. Someone might move in as a young single person, but they might acquire a partner or a child, or they might become old and want a carer to stay with them or their family to visit overnight. We might have to change our approach to that because we want to ensure that people can sustain those properties in future.
The change could have an impact on allocation policies. At the moment, we cannot take into account someone’s ability to pay when allocating a house for them—it is expressly forbidden. However, are we really going to allocate someone a two-bedroom house if we know that they are not going to get the full housing benefit? What is the implication of that for the law in relation to allocations in Scotland and the extent to which it might need to be changed to give us some flexibility? We would be taking someone’s income into account for the right reason, to make sure that they sustained their tenancy. That is an important point.
Do you have any sense that Scotland’s 2012 commitment has even remotely featured on the radar of the UK Government?
12:45
I was at a meeting with the civil servants who were leading on this piece of work, which was also attended by a few representatives of local government and COSLA. I know from speaking to colleagues in England that it is not just about the 2012 target; there is a policy blindness towards the housing agenda. When we raised all those points, we were told, “Those are housing policy issues and are not our concern. We are not concerned with the working of the housing system. Our concern is the benefits system and delivering these savings.” The answer that we got back was very clear: interaction with the housing system is not on their agenda. English colleagues have had the same message, so it is not a matter of not understanding the Scottish policy agenda; it has just been dealt with in a very mono-focused way.
I have a last point about how the changes might drive behaviour. Many of us are now looking at our temporary accommodation, because the people we accommodate now are different from the people we used to accommodate 10 years ago, and their support needs are different. Alan McKeown has outlined to you one way he might be changing that in his area and we will be changing it in different ways in ours. Someone who has been accommodated in a homeless hostel for three months will be exempt from being restricted to the single room rate. That does not need to be three months at one time; it can be any three months from when they were 16, and they might present when they are 42. That raises record-keeping issues for us and it also gives us an incentive to keep hostel provision, as we can then ensure that people have a wider range of options, because they will have less restricted housing benefit.
A lot of system changes will take place in housing development as an unintended consequence of welfare reform. For good reasons—think of the older persons agenda—we would want to develop two-bedroom houses. Someone might go into a house when they are 56, while they are of working age. If they are underoccupying, maybe they can manage it by paying the difference, because they do not want to move—people do not want to move all the time as they get older. Are we really going to say that people will to have to move according to their age? Would someone move back into a two-bedroom property as they got older because they were now exempt? Welfare reform will drive all sorts of unintended consequences in the system and Alan McKeown is right to say that we have yet to see what those will be.
The impact on council tax is significant. There is a 10 per cent cut. My authority will lose £700,000 in council tax and COSLA is working on a national approach to that. People do not realise that it is another massive budget cut that we will have to deal with. The changes are so widespread that is difficult to get hold of how many there are, but we know the headline ones and we can do something about them. We should start getting on our toes on this and start thinking about solutions.
To go back to the tenure issue, I think that there is no question but that shared accommodation will have to come back to the fore. People will say, “We tried that before; it did not work,” but I do not think that we have much choice now. Right now, we do not have the tenure, because there is still a right to buy on non-new supply shared equity, and how do you work that out on a shared tenancy? We then need to look at houses in multiple occupation legislation. The best solution might be to have three or four different people in a house. That takes us into HMO territory, so we will have to look at the consequences of that. The answers are out there, but it is complicated, as Olga Clayton points out.
It is absurd that someone who was in a hostel at one stage in their life will have better choices across the board than someone who was never in a hostel. Did we ever think that that is where we would get to? I do not think that some of these things have been thought through. For example, for people who have to move from a local authority home into the private rented sector because they are underoccupying, the chances are that the rent will be higher than for a four-bedroom local authority house. There are some good examples floating around of that. I am sure that the SFHA gave you some. It is up to us to put our foot on the gas here—we have the ability to react to this and, with the Scottish Government and the Parliament, we need to get on with it.
It would be nice if we could put our foot on the brake as well, but I take the point.
Absolutely, but it just does not look like anyone is listening.
Most of what I was going to ask has been covered, but is there anything that we can do to support local authorities to continue to improve services to homeless people, especially post-December 2012?
I think that one thing would be to recognise that it is not just local authorities. Pressure and encouragement should be brought to bear on our partners to continue to participate in the agenda and not allow it to be lost in the range of other, competing agendas that they may have.
We want to deliver against the target, but we also want to deliver the best possible outcome for people if we have not been able to prevent their homelessness and they have had to go down the homelessness route. It is generally agreed that it is not appropriate for us to offer bed-and-breakfast accommodation, but we often still have to do so. Any resources that could be made available to help us to use more appropriate temporary accommodation would help us to deliver our target. That could lead to a positive outcome for people; it would also save money and help with some benefit issues. Costs are involved when local authorities offer bed-and-breakfast accommodation as opposed to offering either their own or a partner’s temporary accommodation.
The language used has to shift—towards the language of enablement and personal responsibility. Local government should not be expected to deliver everything to everyone all the time. We cannot afford that, and neither should we be doing it. We have to work with people so that they can help themselves and help us to help them.
It was remiss not to have made this point about ALACHO. If we gave the impression that we did not think that supply was important or that additional funding for housing was important, that was not our intention at all. However, we are where we are.
I will touch on a point that Rebecca Maxwell made. A particular concern of mine relates to health, social work and social care. As progress is made with the integration agenda, and a sharp focus is put on the change funds for older people and for children, homelessness might fall off the agenda. Indeed, it may not have been firmly enough on the agenda in the first place. As joint outcomes are developed for health and social work, I wonder where the outcomes for homelessness will fit in. How can we ensure that they do?
What about changes to legislation? Flexibility of tenancy has been mentioned, but is there anything else that we need to do?
Legislation may be required in relation to housing allocation. At the moment, there is a specific requirement that people’s financial circumstances are not taken into account. That requirement is there for good reasons, but it was not meant for the situation in which we find ourselves now. The requirement has to be looked at again, because flexibility is needed. Even if a person has come to the top of the list, we would want to have the flexibility to say that they should not get a two-person house because they will not receive the housing benefit for it. At the moment, we could be left in a slightly tricky situation. If we bypassed that person, our reasons might be left open to challenge.
Clarity is also required in the legislation on tenure, to give us greater flexibility. We should be able to offer shared tenancies in a sensible way.
We are 10 years on from 2001, and nearly 10 years on from 2003; there would be merit in pausing for thought. Is the legislation framed correctly for the next 10 or 15 years? We know that the capital gap is significant and will deepen; we should accept that the legislation needs to grow, be flexible and be reviewed. Is the system fit for purpose? If we think that it is, great, we can keep on going. However, if we think that some things could be tweaked and changed for the next five, 10 or 26 years, we should be mature enough to accept that perhaps we did not get things quite right.
We should not consider only the social rented sector; we also need to examine legislation in relation to the private rented sector, and the degree to which it does or does not work.
I would like to thank the committee for offering us the opportunity to present the situation from a local government perspective and to highlight the fact that it is not important only to local government—our partners also play a key role.
A sense of ownership of the 2012 target by the whole Parliament, and not just by the Government and COSLA, has been mentioned. The Government has indicated that it is still committed to the target, and COSLA is still committed to the target. Knowing that the commitment existed throughout the Parliament would also be very useful. If you could find an opportunity to express that, it would be useful.
Thank you. On that note, I thank the witnesses for giving evidence today. It has been very helpful and useful. I also thank you all for the innovative and collaborative work that you are doing.