Homelessness in Scotland: update to 30 September 2017

Introduction

This bulletin provides information on Scottish local authority homelessness applications, assessments and outcomes in the period from 1 April to 30 September 2017. It also provides data on the number of households in temporary accommodation as at 30 September 2017, along with the number of households in unsuitable temporary accommodation as defined in the Homeless Persons (Unsuitable Accommodation) (Scotland) Order 2014 ^[1] .

The purpose of this bi-annual bulletin is to provide a summary of the latest quarterly and six monthly results, and to place these in the context of longer term trends.

Separate annual bulletins, the most recent being published on 27 June 2017 which covered the financial year 2016/17, are lengthier publications and provide 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. The next annual publication for the year 2017/18 is planned to be published in June 2018.

This bi-annual 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 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. As a result, it is estimated that the headline number of applications may change by as much as 4% (up to around 360 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, with the latest publication being released on 23 January 2018, the same day as this Homelessness In Scotland publication.