Temporary Accommodation Task and Finish Group: final report and recommendations

Priority 1: New supply of social homes means people experiencing homelessness will be able to move rapidly into a permanent home

A rapid and significant increase in social homes is required to reduce the numbers of households in temporary accommodation and the length of time they spend there. Increasing the supply of social homes will mean that people can move more quickly into settled accommodation. By aligning the location, type and size of these homes to local housing need, with particular consideration for households experiencing homelessness, we can work rapidly towards addressing equality issues ensuring that the needs of specific groups are given attention as required. This includes people from ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, larger households and families with children, who routinely spend long periods stuck in TA because of a lack of appropriate permanent homes in existing social housing stock.

Recommendations

Recommendation 1: The Scottish Government must at a minimum adequately fund the delivery of new social homes through the Affordable Housing Supply Programme (AHSP) to meet a target of delivering 38,500 social homes by 2026.^[18]

The AHSP is not currently on track for delivering the target homes required and the latest budget announcements showed a cut to the capital housing budget. If this target is missed, affordable housing need will increase, illustrated at least in part by the number of households in TA.

Recommendation 2: The Scottish Government should urgently introduce a large-scale national acquisition policy and action plan to buy private sector properties.

This Acquisition Plan would provide a single point of contact for private owners and landlords. It would be adopted locally as required and delivered by local authorities through their Strategic Housing Investment Plans and would support them to rapidly scale up their acquisition programme and quickly drive up the numbers of social homes available for let. Acquisitions should be prioritised and aligned to local housing needs, using homelessness data to target purchases of properties that will meet the needs of those currently stuck in TA for long periods. This should support equality issues to be addressed ensuring that the needs of specific groups are given attention as required.

This programme should prioritise properties that are currently empty, to ensure the programme meets the objectives of the Task and Finish Group in moving people on from temporary to permanent accommodation. There are also opportunities to extend the programme as part of a pre-action protocol for private landlords looking to sell, for example making it a requirement for a landlord starting eviction proceedings in order to sell the property to have considered selling their property to the local authority first. This could be used as a mechanism to prevent homelessness and therefore reduce the number of households in need of TA.

There was a minority view expressed that a new policy and action plan might be unnecessary and a suggestion that the same policy intention could be achieved by a ministerial circular or an amendment to the Scottish Government's Local Housing Strategy guidance.

Recommendation 3: Local authorities should assess and report to the Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR) on whether their Rapid Rehousing Transition Plans (RRTPs) and Housing Need and Demand Assessments are directly informing and influencing their Strategic Housing Investment Plans (SHIPs); and how the delivery of the required social homes through the AHSP programme is reducing affordable housing need for all households, including those with protected characteristics. In particular, reporting should focus on how the delivery of the AHSP is assisting households experiencing homelessness to move to permanent tenancies.

The important element is that all local strategies relating to housing and homelessness are aligned to provide a comprehensive approach to reducing affordable housing need, in this case illustrated by numbers of households in TA.^[19] Generally, there should be a focus on better use of data to more effectively tackle need.

Given the often-unmet requirement for larger family homes and adapted properties highlighted by and to the group, recommendation 3 gives further opportunity to stimulate targeting of stock acquisition and new supply to groups in greatest need, and crucially to give the ability to assess progress in meeting the needs of these groups.

When coupled with recommendation 6, this recommendation should also encourage and ensure appropriate usage of all the tools available to local authorities especially where local authorities are currently failing to meet their statutory duties.

Recommendation 4: The Scottish Government should publish data annually on how long households who are currently living in TA have been there. This data should be made available at a national and local authority level and be broken down to households with and without children and should include the distribution of time spent in TA as well as average days. It should also include a breakdown of time in TA for those who have been in TA for over a year.

Currently, the Scottish Government statistics only publish time in TA for cases that are closed. Publishing data on those households currently living in TA will better reflect the population of people in TA in each local area and give a fuller understanding of the scale and extent of the issue. This will help to inform responses to TA and permanent housing supply in local authority areas. This information about all households in TA is already gathered, so this would not require any new information from local authorities.

Recommendation 5: The Scottish Government and local authorities should work together to review how they could standardise and improve collection and recording of data on people experiencing homelessness with disabilities and/or support needs.

This will help to inform decisions on how to meet the accommodation and support needs of people experiencing homelessness to support them in moving on from TA and/or homelessness.

As part of this review, the Scottish Government and local authorities should consider:

• Issuing detailed guidance to local authority staff on how to assess and record support needs, specifically disability and health requirements within the home for people experiencing homelessness.
• Reviewing the current questions on support needs in the HL1 data returns, considering if they capture these needs accurately. If not, these questions should be consolidated, sharpened and/or extended.
• What would be proportionate for local authorities to collect and report back on to the Scottish Government and the SHR
• Incorporating existing good practice: some local authorities have completed homelessness support needs assessments and research into local disability needs. Other local authorities should be encouraged to follow suit as part of their Housing Need and Demand Assessments and Local Housing Strategy priorities.

The evidence we heard

Statistics and lived experience

(Recommendations 1, 2, 3)

Households with children spend longer in TA than households without, and evidence heard by the group indicated a particular issue for households with specific needs relating to disability or household size which may mean the pool of potential accommodation for them is not available in current household stock or allocation lists.

Challenges to be overcome

(Recommendations 1, 2, 3)

The SHR outlined the perfect storm for LAs and Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) with Brexit, the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, the Ukrainian Refugee super sponsor scheme, enhanced regulatory requirements for social landlords, and the rent freeze. We therefore must look to other innovative ways to drive up supply such as the acquisition programme.

The group heard that often local authorities' RRTPs do not fully inform their SHIPs, meaning that the two may not be aligned and so affordable housing need is not being adequately targeted or tracked.

The 2023/24 Scottish Budget outlined a 16% year-on-year cut to the housing capital.