Operation of the Homeless Persons Legislation in Scotland: 2011-12

Notes on the statistics

Missing data

1. In tables in this publication, the analysis of applications, assessments and outcomes from 2011-12 excludes details for 24 cases across Scotland. Future analyses will incorporate the missing data for these authorities once it has been provided.

General Notes

2. The statistics presented in this release relate to applications made under the legislation as well as individual households. Given the continuous nature of the recording system, figures are updated on an on-going basis and may differ from those previously published.

3. The data presented in these tables are based on the time period relevant to the analysis. In some cases, this might be the year of application, while in others this might relate to the year in which the assessment was made or action taken. All years refer to financial years.

4. To facilitate comparisons between authorities, some of the local authority tables are presented in the form of percentages. However, where the number of applications is small the percentage figures should be treated with caution.

5. Unless otherwise stated, the assessment category of 'homeless' includes both homeless and those threatened with homelessness, as well as unintentional and intentional homeless. Although the focus of the current legislative changes is on providing settled accommodation to those assessed as unintentionally homeless, the proportion of applications assessed as intentionally homeless and in priority need is relatively small. This category has therefore been combined with that of unintentionally homeless and in priority need for the more complex analyses.

6. In December 2001, the Scottish Government changed the data collection system for the case-based HL1 return to provide more detailed information on applications by individual households and to allow more timely reporting. This entailed changing to an electronic data capture system which allows cases to be registered and updated on a continuous basis, as well as enabling applications made by the same household to be linked.

7. The data collection system introduced in December 2001 allows analysis by individual households and the identification of repeat applications. However, this is not the case for earlier data and so analyses comparing data over time will tend to refer to applications rather than individual households. This is also the case for analyses of flow through the assessment process where repeat applications by the same individual household might be assessed differently and have different outcomes. For other analyses, it is useful to distinguish individual households and so the unit of analysis (applications or individual households) is specified in the footnotes for each table.

8. The data collection was further revised in April 2007 in the light of the Homelessness etc. (Scotland) Act 2003, with some additional information included to reflect current best practice. Further information on the HL1 can be found at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/15257/HL1revisions.

9. The estimated share of social lets by homeless applicants in Charts 24 to 26 was derived by expressing the number of homeless applicants securing a social let in 2011-12 as the outcome of their application as a percentage of the estimated number of local authority and housing association lets available to new tenants in 2011-12. For 2011-12, we have used the turnover rates calculated in previous years to estimate the number of relets for housing association and local authority dwellings. We have then added to this the number of social sector new build completions for 2011-12¹¹.