Graeme Brown: Harsh times hold out little hope of homeless decrease

It IS not a good time to be homeless. That might be a surprising statement. After all, there is never a good time to be homeless. And hasn’t Scotland been praised for leading the world on homelessness policy?

It is true that Scotland has been in the vanguard of progressive homelessness legislation. By the end of this year, we will scrap a decades-old arbitrary distinction between “priority” and “non-priority” homeless people. All homeless people will get a service simply by virtue of being homeless. At the same time, homeless people will be entitled to additional help – housing support – as well as to a permanent home. Keeping people in a home is as important as getting one.

But these are staging points in a journey the end of which we have not yet reached. Unemployment continues to rise and on its tide, it carries debt, repossession and homelessness.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies is forecasting real stretching of household budgets as the full impact of the recession takes hold. The UK government’s cuts to housing benefit loom large, part of a wider package of “reforms”, the purpose of which is to cut costs. New housing supply is at rock-bottom and the flow of lets of social housing has fallen by 10 per cent in the last five years. Our Housing Law Service is reporting a surge in home owners contacting us, worried about repossession.

So why, according to the Scottish Government’s statistics, has recorded homelessness fallen by 20 per cent? Times of recession and welfare cuts don’t usually result in homelessness falling. Certainly, in the 1980s, the toxic cocktail of rising unemployment and benefit cuts for the young resulted in a very visible rise in youth homelessness which scarred a generation. I have no reason to expect any difference now.

Part of the explanation may simply be time-lag. It takes time for unemployment to manifest itself as homelessness, as families cling on – even as their savings or access to credit run dry. Welfare benefits cuts are still either very recent or lying on the horizon. The direct effects are still to be felt.

But my main contention is that it is simply not credible that homelessness (as opposed to homeless applications to councils) has fallen by as much as 20 per cent in the space of 12 months. My credulity is further stretched by the recorded falls in individual councils – a massive 56 per cent in two cases and 53 per cent in another. There is simply no way that the underlying homelessness pressure in these areas has fallen so dramatically in such a short space of time.

So what is the reason then? There is some good news. It is possible that an increasing focus on homelessness prevention has helped people before they reach a crisis point. Councils can and should do more to head off evictions and repossessions. Those councils which have embedded homelessness prevention in how they work should be praised.

But a bigger answer is surely more prosaic. The measurement of homelessness is an administrative function, inevitably. The extent to which homelessness is recorded is the combination of an underlying social reality – how many people are actually homeless – and the decisions a council makes about how to manage a service and classify the people who use it. Quite minor changes in practice can result in massive and rapid changes in numbers, even while the circumstances of the people using the service remain the same.

I really want to believe that homelessness has fallen by as much as 20 per cent. But I am almost certain that changes in recording practice are the biggest single reason. So what is happening to the people who were previously classified as homeless? Are they simply dropping out of view, offered short-term help then being shunted from municipal pillar to post?

If we can demonstrate that people are getting a real service without being labelled homeless, then I’ll raise a glass to real progress. Otherwise I suggest ministers and council leaders should leave the champagne on ice.

• Graeme Brown is director of Shelter Scotland