Homelessness in Scotland: update to 30 September 2016

Introduction

This bulletin provides information on Scottish Local Authority homelessness applications, assessments and outcomes in the period from 1 April to 30 September 2016. It also provides data on the number of households in temporary accommodation as at 30 September 2016, together with data on the implementation of the Homeless Persons (Unsuitable Accommodation)(Scotland) Order 2014 ^[2] .

The purpose of this bulletin is to highlight key quarterly and bi-annual trends. The most recent annual publication - published on 28 June 2016 - provides a more in-depth analysis of the causes of homelessness in Scotland and the characteristics of the households who apply to Scottish Local Authorities for homelessness assistance. As a consequence, this bulletin provides mainly summary tables and charts. Excel workbooks with the tables and charts from this publication are available for download at http://www.gov.scot/homelessstats.

In November 2012, the Scottish Parliament approved the Homelessness (Abolition of Priority Need Test) (Scotland) Order 2012. This meets the homelessness commitment and ensures that from 31st December 2012 onwards, Local Authorities no longer apply the priority need test to homeless households. As a result, all unintentionally homeless households in Scotland are entitled to settled accommodation. With the priority need test now abolished, information on this aspect of the homelessness legislation is no longer collected.

This publication also includes information on the Housing Support Services (Homelessness) (Scotland) Regulations 2012. These regulations came into force on 1st June 2013. These regulations place a duty on Local Authorities to assess the need for housing support for every applicant assessed by the Local Authority as unintentionally homeless or threatened with homelessness, and who the Local Authority has reason to believe would benefit from housing support services as prescribed in the regulations. If an assessment of a need for support is made, Local Authorities must ensure the housing support services are provided (see the section Housing support regulations).

Please note that this bulletin also updates previously published figures. There may be delays in some cases being reported to the Scottish Government due to IT issues, quality assurance processes and delayed entry of data - particularly at the end of the quarter. As a result, it is estimated that the headline number of applications may change by as much as 3% (up to around 300 cases for the current quarter for example) between first and subsequent publications (see the section Notes on the Statistics).

Readers may be interested to note that Housing Options (PREVENT1) statistics are also available at http://scotland.gov.uk/homelessstats. These are also produced on a bi-annual basis.