Homelessness prevention: business and regulatory impact assessment

Purpose and Intended Effect

Background

In September 2017, the then First Minister set out a commitment to eradicate rough sleeping, transform the use of temporary accommodation and end homelessness in Scotland. Scottish Ministers subsequently established the Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group (“HARSAG”^[1]) to make recommendations on how this could be achieved.

HARSAG produced its recommendations in June 2018^[2] aimed at securing strategic changes at both national and local level to help support delivery. In November 2018, the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (“COSLA”) published the Ending Homelessness Together High Level Action Plan,^[3] which set out the actions we will take to end rough sleeping and homelessness. HARSAG was reconvened in 2020 to provide recommendations on tackling homelessness during the coronavirus pandemic and in the longer term. Following this, in October 2020, an updated Ending Homelessness Together Action Plan^[4] was published jointly with COSLA that sets the direction for real and lasting change towards ending homelessness. A key action in both strategies was to develop wide-reaching prevention duties.

At the request of Scottish Government, Crisis convened the Prevention Review Group (“PRG”^[5]) to develop recommendations for legal duties on Scottish local authorities and other bodies to prevent homelessness. The overarching foundational principles of the PRG, published in 2021,^[6] were that:

a) Responsibility to prevent homelessness should be a shared public responsibility and not rely solely or primarily on the homelessness service.

b) Intervention to prevent homelessness should start as soon as possible. In many cases this will be before issues have escalated to a point where homelessness appears imminent.

c) People facing homelessness should have choice in where they live and access to the same range of housing outcomes as members of the general public, with appropriate protections to mitigate further risk of homelessness. Housing outcomes should be comparable across the prevention and homelessness duties.

The PRG recommendations^[7] proposed:

a) Amendments to existing legislation to strengthen local authority homelessness prevention activity, and

b) The creation of new homelessness prevention duties for relevant bodies to require the wider public sector (beyond housing and homelessness services) to take responsibility, where appropriate, for preventing homelessness by asking about a person’s housing situation and taking action based on the response.

If introduced, the homelessness prevention measures will build on existing good practices and place a collective responsibility across public services to prevent homelessness. Having legal duties in place will help drive the allocation of resources and set clear expectations of the public sector. The policy will thus enable the identification of a pending risk of homelessness, and enable prevention activity to be undertaken before homelessness occurs, through early intervention across public services. Where homelessness has already occurred, work can begin to address this with a view to making it brief and non-recurring.