Ending homelessness and rough sleeping: action plan

6 Other actions to support the work

Equality: An Equality Impact Assessment is an important part of the policy-making process. It helps understand how policy impacts on people and is an opportunity to promote equality. There is a legal duty for us to consider equality issues as we develop new policy and in particular the impact of the policy on people who share certain ‘protected characteristics’: age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, race and religion or belief.

Discussions at HARSAG meetings helped to highlight areas where we could do more to address the needs of specific groups and equality issues will be fully considered as the recommendations are taken forward. The group also made specific recommendations about specialist support for young people and in relation to people experiencing domestic abuse.

As HARSAG noted, above all other factors, homelessness is a result of poverty. To end homelessness, we need to ensure both the long-term drivers and the short and long-term impacts of poverty are addressed. Although HARSAG did not examine this area in depth, they pointed to the role of the Poverty and Inequality Commission as the key driver for change in this area and recommended that the Commission places a clear focus on the prevention of homelessness as part of its ongoing work.

Actions we will take:

We will summarise data available for people with the range of protected characteristics who are experiencing homelessness in 2019.

We will conduct Impact Assessments to inform the development of our work and help us promote equality as we take forward the HARSAG recommendations:

• Equality impact assessment (including socio-economic impact)
• Child Rights and Wellbeing Impact Assessment
• Data protection impact assessments

We will collect, publish and learn from good quality information about people with protected characteristics in the new national data collection.

Evidence

We need to build on past successes, learn from the most recent evidence and to apply this to our current and future challenges. It is essential that we build the right foundations and create the right conditions to achieve our ambition to end homelessness and rough sleeping, and improve outcomes for people at risk. Evidence based policy making will be an important part of this.

We will continue to develop, analyse and apply the best available data and evidence, both nationally and internationally, to guide and measure progress, investigate economic impact, as well as to inform the actions we take through an understanding of what works most effectively to deliver positive change.

Good evidence is key to understanding and communicating the problem, developing the solution and monitoring and managing progress. HARSAG’s recommendations in this area aim to provide a robust suite of information on the complete picture of rough sleeping and, ideally, broader homelessness in Scotland.

We will ensure existing Scottish Government data collections reflect the increased priority of tackling homelessness. This will complement the commitment we have made to implement a new national data collection.

We will develop the evidence base as we take forward the actions set out in this plan. This will include the evaluation of Rapid Rehousing Transition Plans and we will ensure we share learning about the impact of new initiatives to help partners deliver services that are effective.

Using our current homelessness data collections and the analysis set out above, we will report annually to the Scottish Parliament on our progress towards delivering the actions and outcomes. The first report will be submitted at the end of 2019.

We will undertake an analysis of the economic impacts of the actions set out in this Plan.