Homelessness in Scotland: Equalities Breakdown 2019 to 2020

A note on interpreting the figures

It is not possible to make direct links within a reporting year for the different stages of the homelessness process as different households will be at a different stage at different times.

That is, not all applications made in 2019/20 will have an assessment or temporary accommodation placement that year. Similarly, some assessments made in 2019/20 will relate to applications received prior to this; and some temporary placements in 2019/20 will relate to household applications and assessments prior to this also.

To note that it is possible for households to make an application and/or be assessed more than once in the same year, and not all households assessed as homeless enter temporary accommodation.

The term 'homeless households' is used throughout to denote households who have been assessed as (unintentionally or intentionally) homeless or threatened with homelessness.

Although data is captured for the main applicant and a second applicant where applicable, for ease of reporting, findings are based on the equalities characteristics of the main applicant only in this publication. Given the majority of homeless households only contain one adult, this only affects 12% of all households where there are two or more adults.

The characteristics of a household are initially collected by the local authority at the application stage. While it is possible for these characteristics to change between application and case closure, it may not be practical for the data collection to be updated to reflect these changes. Therefore, for a small number of households, the characteristics information reported may be out of date. This is most likely to affect household composition.

Care should be taken when interpreting findings based on small numbers. This is particularly the case for the ethnicity breakdowns where there are a small total number within particular categories e.g less than 100 of mixed/multiple ethnicity.

Impact of coronavirus

Given the figures in this publication report data up until 31^st March 2020 this only crosses over with around a week of coronavirus restrictions and changes in homelessness practices being in place. Therefore, changes in trends in homeless data as result of coronavirus will be minimal over this reporting period, particularly for annual figures.