Chamber and committees

The support that has been provided and the reforms that we have seen have been to try to prevent that very issue. I welcome the steps that local authorities have taken to provide emergency accommodation during the pandemic. However, we now need a long-term plan to end homelessness—something that SNP ministers have failed to do for 14 years. Rough sleeping and homelessness need a system-wide shift towards a preventative model. I agree with the cabinet secretary: I hope that there is genuinely an opportunity for us to look at that.

SNP ministers pledged to tackle homelessness by scaling up the housing first approach, as my colleague Stephen Kerr mentioned, but we have missed previous targets of supporting 800 people into housing first tenancies. The 2021-22 programme for government states that ministers will

“invest ... in a new Ending Homelessness Together Fund”

and that

“Funding for rapid rehousing will also support the scaling up of Housing First”.

However, we know the pathfinder total number of people moving into their own home through the housing first project. Only 381 people, not 800, had actually entered secure tenancies by the end of November 2020. We know that there has to be improvement from the Government.

There is a huge amount of work to do and, as Crisis Scotland stated in its useful briefing ahead of today’s debate:

“Ending homelessness does not mean that nobody will ever lose their home again. It means that, through prevention, homelessness only happens very rarely.”

At present, around 8 per cent of the Scottish population, or one in 12 people, have experienced homelessness. I very much support the calls to bring forward the preventative model, so where we can we will work with ministers to achieve that. Action to prevent homelessness should start six months before a person faces losing their home. Public bodies including health services should ask about people’s housing situations in order to try to identify issues earlier.

I hope that the recommendations that were set out to ministers through the homelessness prevention review group will now be taken forward. Those recommendations were supported by every party in Parliament, and I hope that the discussions that I have already had with the cabinet secretary can help to ensure that we make the issue a national priority.

It is clear that we need proper cross-portfolio efforts to make progress in addressing poverty, in achieving specific reductions across the board and in meeting the targets that we all supported.

There are also longer-term issues that the Parliament must consider, if we are to bring about real change. For example, we must take action to address intergenerational unemployment and we must provide opportunities to genuinely improve social mobility.

As I said at the start of my speech, I hope that Parliament can, where possible, find agreement and consensus on many issues and areas of work, so that in five years’ time we can all be proud of the effort that we have put into tackling poverty and inequality in Scotland.

I move amendment S6M-01248.1, to leave out from first “welcomes” to “across society” and insert:

“agrees that tackling child poverty is a national mission; calls on the Scottish Government to double the Scottish Child Payment within the next financial year; notes with concern the recent figures that show that 5,000 families have been living in temporary accommodation for at least a year; further notes that an Audit Scotland report released in March 2021 exposed the lack of progress that has been made in closing the poverty-related attainment gap and calls on the Scottish Government to do more to prioritise young people’s education; notes the recommendations of the Independent Care Review and calls on the Scottish Government to set out in more detail how it plans to implement The Promise Scotland; calls on the Scottish Government to implement a national minimum allowance for foster carers, as has been previously committed to; welcomes the doubling of the Carer’s Allowance Supplement this year, but regrets that the Scottish Government will not take control of all devolved benefit powers until 2025”.

The number of homeless deaths in Scotland rose by nearly a third over two years. Would the member support my calls for the Government to hold a full review of access to healthcare for homeless people and rough sleepers, especially given the drug deaths that we have seen recently?

I will say exactly the same as I said to one of our back benchers. My motion seeks to make sure that we double the Scottish child payment during the current financial year. Will members support that, or are they about to vote against it?

Is the cabinet secretary concerned that the costs of setting up Social Security Scotland have now doubled and that we are now looking at £100 million being spent on staff in 2022, to deliver just £386 million of additional benefits? What work is the Government doing to look at the cost overruns?

Good morning. You have both answered the questions that I was going to ask on Boundaries Scotland and your involvement in public consultation. It seems, from your evidence, that both your councils were content with that.

I will turn the questioning on its head. I am sure that you will have corresponded with colleagues in other councils. Given the concerns that have been expressed to the committee by those in other council areas, where do you think that their reviews have gone wrong?

Was the fact that Shetland will have an additional councillor and Orkney will remain on the current numbers a significant issue? Are there any specific concerns that you would like to raise that you feel were not addressed during the reviews but should have been as part of that process?

That is helpful.

Thank you—that was very helpful.

From what I have heard from both panels this morning, I would say that there seems to be a consensus among Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles, which seem to be content with what has been put forward. Perhaps the challenge of managing islands as well as the wider review of mainland council wards as part of this work has presented difficulties and caused concern. What are your views on that, given that not many people to whom I have spoken about this expected to see a reduction in councillors to come out of the islands act? Can you start, Derek?

Perhaps Douglas Hendry can give us a view on how councils with a mainland and island mix have been dealt with.

That is helpful. Finally, Maggie, you are likely to be standing in a two-member ward. Do you think that people will feel encouraged to come forward to stand when they realise that there will be just two councillors representing such a significant number of people, or they will be put off from standing? What impact do you think that will have?