Homelessness in Scotland: 2019 to 2020

Footnotes

1 The Housing (Scotland) Act 2001 extended councils' duties to non-priority homeless and the Homelessness etc. (Scotland) Act 2003 set the longer term objective of phasing out the distinction between priority and non-priority homeless. See Summary of Homelessness Legislation for more details.

2  In November 2012, the Scottish Parliament approved the Homelessness (Abolition of Priority Need Test) (Scotland) Order 2012. 

3 The City of Edinburgh Council have previously been unable to report 'not offered' places via their placement level temporary accommodation return due to technical issues. These technical issues have been resolved and not offered information is now supplied as part of the regular data return from 2019/20. Backdated information for 2018/19 has been provided by the City of Edinburgh Council.

Not offered figures published in January 2020 for Edinburgh were much smaller in magnitude as they reported the number not accommodated as a result of temporary interviews only. Figures published now refer to not offered placements resulting from both temporary interviews and out of hours presentations. The difference to previously published figures are: for April 2018 to March 2019 – 1,079 vs 410; and for April to September 2019 – 210 vs 175.

4 The way in which the proportion securing settled accommodation is calculated has changed. Previously this was calculated by including cases where contact was not maintained and the outcome was not known. These have now been excluded from the calculation on the basis that there is no way of knowing whether these households have secured settled accommodation (or would have gone on to). The exclusion of these cases increases the proportion securing settled accommodation from that reported in previous publications; a full-time series on the new basis is available in the publications tables.

5 This is an expansion to repeat homelessness figures reported in previous publications where this was reported at a national level over a 12 month period only.

6  If before 31^st December 2012.