Homelessness Prevention Task and Finish Group: final report and recommendations

Priority 2: Recognition of the importance of a home

A home is core to a person’s health and wellbeing. Without a home, people are not as well as they could and should be.

As has been evidenced^[9], without a secure home, people do not thrive, and instead spend much more time needing to access health and other support services (which they wouldn’t otherwise do). And yet, as a society, we have been accepting that for many, it is the case that a home is out of reach. This must change, with a focus on the importance of a home. To clarify, a house does not always constitute a home, and therefore, we emphasise that the focus is to be ‘a home’.

This focus should be clear across all of both the primary solution providers to this – builders, planners, local & national government. But also, as outlined further in our recommendations, this should also include education, health, policing, justice, and every sector area with the opportunity to embed this.

Action 9: Including a home as part of someone’s broader health and wellbeing needs

• Placing the importance of a home at the heart of someone’s health and wellbeing should be key within the structure of the proposed National Care Service.
• Community is part of a house being a home, and local community organisations have an important role to play in homelessness prevention. This requires a clear statement from Scottish Government on the importance of third sector and community organisations, with accompanying support provided to those organisations. Guidance should be developed which sets out the need for public bodies to work with community organisations, housing associations, RSLs, private landlords’ community groups, and wider networks that surround and support an individual.
• No-one should be blocked from receiving assistance to prevent homelessness because it is judged they have created the circumstances that have led to the potential loss of their home. Scottish Government must give very careful consideration to the interaction of the various duties and legal tests (such as intentionality) and ensure that the tests are not applied inappropriately, with a focus placed on having and retaining a home.
• Temporary accommodation (TA) plays an essential role in supporting people when experiencing homelessness, but too many households in Scotland spend long periods of time in temporary accommodation (13,954 households in TA for 2021/22 reporting^[10]). As noted in the recommendations made by the Task and Finish Group on Temporary Accommodation,^[11] there must be a spotlight on reducing the amount of time any person/household is in TA, with a focus on accessing and retaining a home.
• Accessing a house and maintaining a home are not always easy steps. We need to recognise and act upon the importance of having specialised staff who are well-connected to services and focused on prevention. For example, some local authorities have hired Homeless Prevention Workers focused on streamlining processes between third sector and staff based in local authorities, which has led to clearer support packages and helped provide ongoing tenancy support. Community Link Workers are also in a good position to identify housing risk and act on it, as well as being an accessible referral option for health staff. When we look at a home, some people will require short-term, long-term, and in some cases lifelong housing support, to maintain a home. In many cases, these provisions are as important as the physical building.

Action 10: Continue to build, acquire and update housing

• We must continue to build, acquire, update and adapt a better range of housing that meets the needs of people across our communities; an agenda to prevent homelessness must have the housing stock to enable it to work.
• We must also have a continuous focus on the eradication of both entrenched poverty and shorter-term financial crises. It is only by putting these priorities at the core of our policies that we can achieve the life changing opportunities a cross-sector prevention agenda offers.
• Strategic Housing Investment Plans (SHIPs) support the implementation of the Affordable Housing Supply Programme. The framework for resource planning for this programme includes consideration of homeless households in temporary accommodation and who receive social lets. In planning its investment in affordable housing, the Scottish Government should clearly set out the outcomes it expects to achieve through its investment including reducing homelessness and poverty.

Action 11: Define what affordable housing is, and increase the availability of this, as well a social housing

• Alongside the legislative changes, we need to address wider structural and systemic drivers of homelessness, in particular supply of and access to social housing; some of this stemming from a lack of building enough new social housing.
• With no one universally accepted definition of what affordable housing is, in terms of affordability to the tenant, the term comes with ambiguity and risk of misuse. Work must take place to agree a legal definition that can be used, that places the affordability from the tenant / buyer perspective.

Action 12: Forward planning to access a home must become key to every person leaving all types of institutions

• We need a healthcare equivalent to the SHORE (Sustainable Housing on Release for Everyone) standards, which provide a nationally consistent approach to meeting the housing needs of people in contact with the justice system. With people with experience of homelessness and other partners, Scottish Government should develop national guidance for hospital and healthcare discharge planning in order to prevent homelessness, as well as more hospital in-reach, learning from the work of Cyrenians and Shelter about what works.

All recommendations that come from the current SHORE pilot must be acted upon by all partners, encouraging those in SPS care to engage voluntarily. This includes a shared focus on exploring digital opportunities across prison settings for better engagement between Local Authorities, third sector organisations and prisons.

• Systems and protocols should make it impossible to leave an institution, without having access to safe and secure accommodation, and all relevant welfare plans in place.

Action 13: Home must be at the heart of our education system

Without ‘home’ being a topic throughout the National Curriculum, we currently provide a postcode lottery in terms of what knowledge our children and young people receive around housing and homelessness.

‘Home’ should be a subject taught throughout someone’s educational life, and be evident across every year in the National Curriculum, covering what a home is, legislation and rights, maintaining a home, paying bills, understanding domestic abuse, general repairs, a loving household, etc. This will deliver the skillset required to access and maintain a happy, safe, secure, loving home.

This sort of education should also be encouraged at a wider level across all educational establishments and any institutions where there are people who have been there for some time, for example, prisons.

Action 14: Normalising Housing Support, with broad access throughout communities, employment, and other relevant settings

• Work is taking place by colleagues in the Shared Housing Task and Finish Group around housing models, some of which will incorporate housing support. However, it must be recognised that the need for both housing support, and access to housing advice is required out with these settings.
• We would recommend that work takes place to make accessing housing support on a short-term, long-term, and lifelong long basis, much easier.
• As a country amidst a cost-of-living crisis, we must look at ways to provide a national approach to funded housing advice, with a consistent approach to this across the country. We need to debunk the myth that housing advice is only for people renting, or with lower incomes.
• Tying into the culture change section earlier in the report, we must look to change the public narrative around who support and advice services are for. Early access to housing advice, or being referred for housing support, could be the difference between a home being retained or lost.