 Rydw i'r gael. Dwi'n rwy'n gael o'r iogledau i fyfyddoch yn gydag. Rydw i'r gael o'r iogledau i fyfyddoch i fyfyddoch, mae'r gael, mae'n unrhyw, mae'n hyn i ddim yn gwneud rydw i'r eich cwmnydd i'r gael o'r ysgol. Mae'n dwi'n gael eich gweithio'r ddwy birthdayd ac mae David Whittle yn gystiwn. Rydw i'n meddwl ddatblygu peirwyddo i pobl i chi? Rydw i... Rydw i'n meddwl i'w... Ar y hub, y gilyddon ni'n ad길bent ni'n cael ei ffordd o'r prinsen. Rydw i'n meddwl i'r reddy, mae'n meddwl i'w gilydd o'n meddwl i prinsen. I take a very close look at how we can be more effective at supporting and advising people as they go into the prison estate to prevent homelessness when they leave the prison estate. That is a piece of work. It is one of the themes that we are looking at in the West Hub. It is tied into a bit of work that is happening at a national level. One of our colleagues in that hub is representing us on that national group. I think that one of the things that are a bit of a chat would mean at the break, one of the issues that probably attacks us as most is the numbers of people who are in homelessness and actually staying in temporary accommodation, who then go back into prison. It is usually short-term sentences, and they go in for a few weeks and then come back out and present again. We need to find much better ways to work on the best means of supporting those individuals as they go through that process. What is quite clear is that, for people who are in prison for long-term, the services that wrap around those individuals when they are coming out are generally of a pretty high standard. It is the issue about people who are in prison for very short stretches of time. They will lose the momentum that they might have gained, because we have done a lot of work with people to resettle them, to get them ready through support to move into the community, and then they go back and get sentenced again. You are absolutely right that that is an area that we need to focus more effectively on, but I think that the opportunity that we have been given through the hub arrangement is enabling us to do that in a way that we could not have done it before. Is that something that could be rolled out across all the hubs? Yes. The opportunity that we have, because periodically all the hubs come together in a single meeting, is that that is a really good opportunity to share the practice that is developing across the other hubs. That is really interesting. Does anyone else want to comment on that specific issue? Or at least give committee some information on the national project that was referred to. It is the ministerial group on offender reintegration and it is looking at a whole range of services for prisoners, but housing is one of them. I believe that it is Perth prison that is being used as a pilot project for it, and that will be where your colleagues from Perth and Kinross hub, just for your information. Okay, that is very interesting. Thank you very much for that. Did you want to come in on something more and then I can do my next question? No, on you go. Can we move on to talk a bit more about young people? Because both the committee and the Equal Opportunities Committee have heard evidence to suggest that housing options is not always the best way to deal with young people and it does not always give the best outcome for them. What specifically are the problems that local authorities and RSLs face in dealing with young people who quite often have quite complex needs and circumstances when they become homeless or are in a position where they need support? It could be through leaving care or quite often young people leave home for a number of reasons, whether it is family breakdown, drug or alcohol misuse. I would also be interested in your thoughts on young people and this definition around intentionality and what effect intentionality has on supporting young people who are homeless. I am beginning that as well with my microphone doing things. One of the things that has gone wrong today is that the people from the housing options hubs did not turn up this morning for your informal briefing session. I am sorry about that because it would have helped to allow the committee a really good understanding of how the housing options hubs work. I think that there are five of them. They all are a bit different. Their practice is different. They are bringing together a practice of the 32 local authorities and some of them are further ahead than others. I know that in the hub, certainly in Tayside, there is a focus on helping young people and there are people who are expert in that particular role. By coming to the housing options hub, by the housing options service, you should actually get plugged into the other services that you need. A young person turning up for a housing options interview should be directed, if you like, to the social work service or the community work service or whoever it is that they require to help them and provide the support that they require. There is the housing support duty as well, which is written into legislation. I think that that is probably not right to say that the housing options are not the best approach for helping young people. It is one way into the services. If they are leaving care, they should be under the corporate parent of the local authority and the local authority should therefore be providing support and there should probably be somebody with them when they are seeking advice about housing. Arguably, if they are leaving care, they should not be anywhere near the homelessness system because they are not homeless. They are simply moving into the next stage of their lives. If they are getting into the homelessness system, then something has gone wrong. I know that some local authorities do it that way, but I do not think that it is a particularly good way to do it. The housing options approach ought to fit young people as any other group in society. I know that Janine could probably provide some more information about the way that housing options hubs work, which might replace some of what you would have heard this morning had they turned up. My concern is that the reality of what should happen is not what you have expressed, because we have heard that people leaving care, young people leaving care, do end up homeless. They should not, but they do. There is not that continuum of you leave care and then you move into your own house and all the support is there. While there may be areas where it is, it is best practice and you are plugged into all the support. The evidence we have heard is that it is too fragmented. There needs to be improvements made in that, so it is an automatic thing. It is not if you are in one local authority, it happens if you are in another local authority, it does not. Young people are falling through that safety net. Housing options is obviously a bit far more than housing options. Housing options, as I said previously, is about taking that holistic look at the needs of an individual. Probably better serves young people more than it serves anyone else because of the access to services that gives them irrespective of whether they are young people coming through care or another young person coming from the family home. One of the first things that we are looking at is what is the best interim arrangement for this young person. We now recognise in local authorities that, for all young people, the last thing that we want is for them to be sitting within homeless accommodation. It makes them more vulnerable than they already are. The point of a young person's approach is that, even prior to approach, we are trying to do quite a lot of work around getting the message out to young people about the realities of homelessness and how they access housing services. However, what we are also doing at the point of approach is looking at what the presentations of that young person are. We are determining first off as to whether or not that young person would be best placed back within the family home. If that is the case, we are looking at things such as mediation services and family support services to ensure that we can keep young people at home to try to ensure that they do not become more vulnerable and get them on to their appropriate housing waiting lists. However, what we are also recognising is that young people cannot stay at home and there are a number of young people who just cannot because of the circumstances within the family home. We need to look at different models of accommodation for them because we need to ensure that we speed up processes as quickly as possible so that their life is not unsettled. Again, that is where housing options come in because it is ensuring that we are looking at things such as employability. We are looking at not just the financial resources but the social resources, the equity that is out there for them, where they have their support networks, where they are linked in with whether it is extended family or friends who can provide the assistance that they require to help them to continue to develop within their lives rather than to stand still. That is what housing options does. It carries out a far wider assessment that was ever carried out before and it links people in with services. I pick up your point about care leavers and the fact that there is different practice across the country. However, for a number of years now in the local authority for which I work, young care leavers have not gone through the homelessness route and that is because we are working with young people whilst they are in care and we are doing that housing options work at that point. What we recognise is that even though young people are in care, they still have an element of social equity within certain communities. We are trying to link them in with housing in those communities so that we can ensure that they are not vulnerable and that they can be successful into their adult lives. I think that you are absolutely right to allude to the additional challenges for young people. There are a range of new challenges, some of which have come about through welfare reforms, that affect the options that might be available to young people. We should not shy away from that. That has created additional difficulties. I suppose that what we are trying to do within the hub networks and through the sharing of good practice is to talk to each other about what you have tried in your area that has worked and can we replicate that or can we look at something similar in our own area, notwithstanding the fact that you cannot just translate something that has worked in one place and ensure that it will work everywhere. However, we are looking at things like flat sharing options as long as they are supported. There is a good recognition that young people, one of the reasons why a lot of tendencies fail for young people is really just because they feel so isolated. We are looking at different types of support that are tailored. We in North Lanarkshire have Barnardo's delivering housing support to our young people when they move on and they go into our children's houses and do pre-work for young people. Those kinds of services are available out there. You cannot overlook the fact, though, that, even having gone through that process, some young people will fail. The difference is now that they can come back into services and they can come back to us and say that they work out for whatever reason. We can go on giving them services until it does work out. That has been a real change over the past 10 years in terms of how local authorities and their partners respond to young people. However, there are huge challenges and the challenges may increase for young people. Some of the options that you can offer to older-age people and to adults are not suitable for young people because they are not going to be suitable for them. For that reason, the shape of the stock that might be available in an area does not necessarily suit. We need to do more to ensure that young people can be supported to sustain a home. Does not need to be a local authority home? It could be in the private rented sector. I think that the issue is about ensuring that there is a bit of support to go along with whatever offer of accommodation that they get. Clearly, we have a big challenge coming up. We are hearing from the Conservative Party Conference that there might be a proposal to stop housing benefit for 18 to 21-year-olds. I urge the Conservatives to think that proposal through very carefully, as it could have some very difficult unintended consequences for people who are in the situation that you describe in young people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Another thing that is worth pointing out is that young people who have had no contact with the social work department, who fall out of their families in one way or another, are actually very hard to help because the social work department and the council in general has no background on them and does not really know much about them. They might not know very much about the council and the services that it can provide. One of the presentations that we have had at the Homelessness Prevention Strategy group was from Shelter's Safe and Sound project, which is based in Dundee as it happens, but it is a concept that they hope to roll out much more widely. They seem to be very good at plugging young people into the services that are available. Another thing is that this is skilled work at the housing options hubs. The Scottish Housing Regulator, and I know that you have already heard from the regulator, pointed out that not all the hubs are as effective as each other. It is still early days, everyone is still learning, best practice is still being shared. I can imagine as a young person going in and Jeanine telling me, we would like to get you back to your family and maybe panicking and thinking, I am not going back there to the family but I have been abused or I have just fallen out with them completely and then going away and telling all their friends that no, all they want me to do is go back home, there is no use. That would be a complete misconception because actually what Jeanine has said is the reality. That is the intention, is that a range of services will be provided and we will try and find a solution for that young person. The way that we communicate with the people who use their services, whether they are young, middle-aged or old, is really important. It is quite a complicated thing, the whole homelessness and housing situation, it is like understanding a whole new market, the housing market in any city or in any part of the country is complicated. Unless you have been exposed to it before, you do not necessarily understand it easily. I think that as when you go to the doctor, you forget half of what you are told, when you go to any kind of council service, there is a risk that you will forget half of what you were told and go away with a misconception so that people go away not realising that they are entitled to temporary accommodation and not realising that if they are entitled to it, there is usually a way of paying for it. The way that we communicate so that people who come to our service is hugely important and personally I would write things down so that they can go away and look at it later and remember what they have been told. These are simple basic things but I think that there is good practice which we have to spread out and the national guidelines that are coming for housing options I think will be helpful. That is why we support their introduction. It was a bit of a ramble but getting back to the young people I think absolutely it is really important that we get this right and I think that if you are aware of examples of poor practice it would be very helpful if you do them to the attention of your local authority because I think that they would want to respond to that. You need to share good practice and the national guidelines. Are enough to improve the practice or is there something else that could be done to make things better for young people? I think that we need to survey our customers. We need to do the market research, in other words we need to find out from people who have used our services how they found the experience and I think Janine has something to say about that but the way that we are trying to involve service users in quality control if you like. I think organisations like Shelter have a role to play as well. I used to work for Shelter years and years ago and one of the things that we used to do was force local authorities to do their job by threatening to take them to court or by actually taking them to court. Now I am hoping that those days are over because I think local authorities have a much better attitude to homelessness. It is now accepted that providing a good homelessness service is part of the culture, part of our duties in local authorities and I am not aware of any local authority that is kicking against that but having said that it is good if there is external scrutiny so that if somebody is coming to Shelter and saying that I had a bad experience in Shelter or then sharing that with us and helping us to work through it then I think we can improve things that way so it's a matter of us understanding the experience our customers are getting but a wee bit of external prodding from agencies like Shelter or the Citizens Advice Agency does us no harm. Service user involvement consultation is something that we're looking at within the west hub that I represent. We have developed a service user involvement empowerment framework and it's moving away from the old fill in a questionnaire to try and test what people think about our services to ensure that our customers are integrated into how our services are developing so that means that we're trying to collect the customer voice throughout the journey and taking that a stage further and developing them into a group that can actually be consulted when we're looking at developing policy, procedure and strategy. Within the west hub we have just recently undertaken our first peer review of one other local authority and that was really really interesting because that's about developing good practice and sharing good practice but what we did was we used that service user group to go out and undertake the mystery shopping and the learning that came from that was probably the most powerful part of the peer review. The national monitoring framework which is obviously developing. We'll also have a role here to play in terms of identifying trends, identifying where there are authorities that are outlying in terms of parts of the performance and there's also the developing agenda on benchmarking which should focus in on where there are differences in performance that should be reviewed and with a view to improvements so I think there is a developing framework there that should support the spread of best practice. I think we need to move on. Sorry, it's okay. I just wanted to add in addition as a formal structure for the good practice sharing there's the annual conference which brings together the hubs and that's been regularly ongoing and it's always a very intensive day with the strong commitment from all the actor including the political side so that offers a formal framework plus of course the homeless prevention strategy group which brings together you know at a fairly high level, of course, everybody around the table here has dealt with individual cases which were presented where there were concerns being raised and they have then been taken quite quickly up to the to to to cause those executive group which brings together all the elected member from the 32 authorities so there is a structure of moving up any concerns really quite rapidly and a formal structure for the good practice sharing. Okay, you're finished. All right, Gordon. I want to ask about the effects of welfare reform on the duty to provide settled accommodation for all unintentional homeless households and reading through the written evidence I was taken by the statement from Elacio which said a difficult task at the best of times made all the more challenging by the worst recession since the 30s and some of the most regressive welfare reforms ever enacted so I'm keen to hear how is the diversion of resources to mitigate welfare reform impacted your ability to implement the homeless legislation. Getting the settled accommodation isn't quite as hard as getting the temporary accommodation but maybe Julie, would you want to dance through that? There is actually a correlation between the two because there are people who are staying longer in temporary accommodation because previously we used to be able to offer them accommodation perhaps with an extra bedroom and people now are saying I can't take that offer or and it's not only people who are currently unemployed but it might be people who lack security and employment and fear that in the future they may not be in a position to actually pay for that extra bedroom so it has had an impact in both areas. People are now saying I can't take that choice and that might be the only option that's available to me in that area therefore I'll need to stay in temporary accommodation. The recent change in terms of the sort of full mitigation that's being offered by the Scottish Government has certainly assisted however the guarantee of that is only for this financial year and whilst we hope that there's a guarantee for the future as well people are still a bit reluctant to count on that just yet. You mentioned about temporary accommodation but is the supply of temporary accommodation is that growing or is it restricting? I mean if you're saying people are staying longer in temporary accommodation is there the amount of temporary accommodation there to cope with the problem? I think there's a couple of difficulties with temporary accommodation too. One is that in some areas for example in my own area we didn't divest ourselves of available stock for temporary accommodation because we recognised we needed to keep it because although there were fewer numbers presenting there was a higher proportion of people presenting who were actually taking up the offer of temporary accommodation so I think at the moment it's around 85 per cent of everybody that presents to us needs that temporary accommodation and they need it for longer so we held on to their supplies. The next difficulty relates to how in future we're going to fund temporary accommodation because of the sort of caps and thresholds and changes to how that's funded as universal credit is rolled out and we did a specific piece of work actually a lateral did a piece of work in conjunction with the homelessness prevention strategy group to look at what the real impacts on revenue would be for councils and you know through a very sort of detailed process of building up the evidence as to what it actually costs to provide temporary accommodation we conclude that there will be a shortfall of around £25 million minimum to actually fund temporary accommodation in the future so you know we have that the sort of conflict that is potentially going to arise in future and local authorities around the country are currently trying to plan for that and it's been quite difficult to do that you know to balance your how are we in future going to balance the books especially around the continued drive to have good quality temporary accommodation you know that has all the facilities that people require but at the same time that there's the ongoing issues around making efficiencies and and the squeeze the real squeeze that's likely to come around as a consequence of welfare reforms you talked about the £25 million shortfall you've identified to fund temporary accommodation if the proposal that councillor black talked about earlier on about the possible removal of housing benefit for 18 to 21 year olds came about what impact would that have especially on young families it doesn't bear thinking about in terms of the impact because you know we just need to look at the shift in the the profile the characteristics of people who are now in the homelessness situation especially those that are staying in accommodation and they are of the younger age group they tend to be increasingly younger working age households a lot of them under 35 including quite a lot under 21 or rather under 25 and there is a huge potential here to create homelessness in Scotland in a way that we've not seen for a number of years you know that there is a limit to how much local authorities and their partners can support individuals who don't have any income a good example of that in recent months has been the rise in the numbers of particularly young and vulnerable people who have been sanctioned and the impact that that has on their ability to retain their status in their family a lot of families are fragmented not because they don't want to pull together but because frankly the the impact to the reductions in income and family households creates additional strains and some families are really just struggling to cope with that what I'm not sure about because the announcement was only made a couple of days ago and we don't have any of the details I suppose you would want one would want to assume that there would be safeguards for for young people under the age of 25 who have children for example and safeguards perhaps for young people of that age that have come out of care but until we see the details it's going to be difficult to know if it was just a blanket policy that anybody of that age group wasn't entitled to housing benefit it would have a huge significant impact because what about the people who are currently in homes settled homes and their communities that would potentially be affected by that so until we see the detail it's difficult to work out but it sounds as though it would have a devastating impact in Scotland for numbers of housing benefit claimants age between 18 and 21 without children and it's nearly 7 000 in Scotland and presumably a number a decent proportion of those would be in work in low paid work it's again just to we don't always hear that so it's a sense of in work or out of work and of course I think nationally the figure I don't know about younger people but certainly nationally I think there's a figure almost 50 percent of people on but on housing benefit are actually in work so we've kind of moved on to temporary accommodation so mark you had some questions around that anyway we'll take those just now yeah thank you cabinet just to ask how local authorities use of temporary accommodation has changed or if it has changed at all since the abolition of priority need and the expansion of the housing options approach? Earlier the majority of local authorities stop profile has stayed the same but what has been discussed within hubs at the moment and what seems to be happening is that local authorities are recognising that we need to change how we are delivering temporary accommodation and the support mechanisms that go into that temporary accommodation and that's because we're cheap work we're actually responding to a different client group that we did 10 years ago what we're finding is that the clients that we have now are far more complex than they ever were before they've got far higher levels of addiction issues mental health issues high level support needs and some of the models of accommodation that we have don't necessarily meet their needs we have to balance that with the resources that we have and obviously the impact that welfare reform is going to have on that but there's a high proportion of local authorities who are currently looking at models of temporary accommodation yes gavin linked issue to this is obviously one means of relieving the pressure and temporary accommodation is obviously to increase the supply of good quality affordable housing for rent and the councils are doing their utmost working with housing associations to increase that supply and within my own authority we have a plan to build 1150 new homes by 2020 and that programme is making good progress so that is a I think an important factor that will link in with the development of temporary accommodation and relieve the pressure on that and as we've seen just now we're seeing people stay longer in temporary accommodation because of as we've heard the impact of welfare reform and limiting choices but also the limited supply of good quality affordable housing you're absolutely right to allude to that that there is a sense and Janine's touched on it too that because the client group has changed the profile of people that are now staying in accommodation has changed but what we need to ensure and guard against is a rush to create large scale hostels again which in Scotland we've been very successful in getting rid of certainly in Glasgow but even in my own area we took steps to really remove large scale concentrations especially when you've got people with very complex needs that's the last thing we would want however the welfare reforms that are coming down the line appear to be pushing us in that direction again and it would be given the balance between you know having to provide services and the huge constraints and pressures on on the available resources it would be quite tempting for some councils to say well let's just go back to having you know but these big hostile environments where we can somehow we can find a way to manage financially it would be extremely damaging to go back to that and we must within Scotland resist any pressure to do that and find other ways more innovative ways of managing with the stock and the resources we've got and that I think even if there's no money at all to pay for temporary accommodation and somebody will correct me if I'm wrong we still have a duty to provide it we have to provide accommodation that it's practical for someone to live in and that gives local authorities a big dilemma in the future if if we're being faced with people who are homeless who have absolutely no income whatsoever no way of paying for the service that we're going to give them how do we pay for that so that's one thing the second thing is that the a lot of the money which we bring in through the rents that we charge for temporary accommodation goes on staff and for example we have a unit in Dundee which is 24 hour supervision because the people in that particular tenement it's a tenement but you know it's got people who have fairly high support needs require that 24 hour supervision and support and it's difficult to pay for that kind of thing if the amount of money available to pay for the temporary accommodation decreases but that brings other problems because then you know maybe you can't put these people into that accommodation and then what do you do with them so that's another problem the other thing is the quality of temporary accommodation we've worked really really hard to bring the quality of temporary accommodation up to a very high standard but if you take away the income which pays for it through welfare reform or any other means then it makes it more difficult to maintain that high standard of temporary accommodation but there are things that we can do to move forward be a bit more imaginative sometimes in some authorities the temporary accommodation is one size fits all you know it's maybe all furnished rented accommodation actually that doesn't always suit people who have some furniture or who can't afford to pay the higher end that furnished accommodation with tracts I think we need to be flexible about the kind of accommodation that we provide so that it fits the families and the other thing is we have to look at the length of time that people are spending in temporary accommodation six months is not on typical a year is sadly quite common as well and ask ourselves does that really make any sense and maybe there's a better way of doing that I don't have the better way but I think as a politician I get to ask the question my colleagues here get to provide the answers okay we remain in the same but in the Scottish houses in regulators report and they found that some local authorities had reduced the provision of their own properties for temporary accommodation and just to ask the panel how wide how widespread that is in terms of 32 local authorities and how that will then impact on their ability to then provide temporary emergence to accommodation differ across the 32 local authorities depending on the reducing levels of homelessness in north Ayrshire we were one of the first local authorities to start reducing homelessness and that was because we were one of the first authorities to embrace housing options so we went from 1800 homeless presentations a year down to 700 in something temporary presentations a year but we only reduced our temporary accommodation units by 40 so we ensured that we had left enough leeway within our temporary accommodation firstly it was because we didn't know if things might switch back we didn't know if this was going to be an onward trend and it was when we were going to continue with those reducing levels or whether or not we would need that accommodation again but what we've actually we've been we were glad that that was the decision that we'd taken because of the the impacts that jillies are already spoken about and that we now need that because we need it for more of the clients who actually require the accommodation and they're there for a slightly longer period of time finally touched about touched on different models of temporary accommodation and ones that are pretty undesirable and I think you're right would be disastrous but in particular would you say is there a particular problem with young homeless people and their experience of temporary accommodation and are there are there any alternative models out there that you think would work and would that Scotland would benefit from their introduction around the country there will be a range at local level to meet different types of needs and that's as it should be and it's the same housing markets vary around the country and and that's what you would expect. I think over the last few years we have developed more environments that are more conducive to young vulnerable people most in most local authority areas they have one or more smaller supported accommodation places for young people we've also moved away from necessarily having people put in a concentrated place to having more floating support services so a lot of us commission floating support services from you know expert specialists in the field to support young people when they're accommodated in their own communities so that there is there is a really good mix I think of approaches and and you'll have varying degrees of success each of them depending on local circumstances the there is there is a definite push to shift we definitely need more intensively supported accommodation and we need it in small environments rather than large scale environments and that's something that we've maybe not quite managed to get to we usually have a selection of different types of accommodation environments some of which suit young people more than others but probably we need more of that and we recognise in our own local authority we've got a temporary accommodation strategy we refresh it annually we look at all of the different factors that affect it on an annual basis and we're just about to go through a process of renewing it again and that's because we recognise that the client group that are using it has changed and that the complexity of need that a lot of people bring when they make homelessness applications has changed as well how we're going to fund all of that remains a perennial challenge it'll always be a challenge for us thank you for your patience as well this morning I've got a question for solace although if other witnesses want to come in on the back of that I'd be welcome their contributions um you say in your submission or rather you you recognise the Scottish housing regulator's position that all potentially homeless households receiving housing options should also make a homeless application however you state and I quote many local authorities suggest taking homeless applications from people who do not need them is neither a cost effective use of local resources nor is it necessarily in the best interests of households who neither want nor need to be identified as homeless or potentially homeless I'm just wondering what the thinking was behind that statement are you looking towards changes to the reporting system for homelessness applications or are there other ways in which you think we should measure the risk and incidence of homelessness through you chair it's really the rationale behind that is it really be reverting back to a mechanistic approach to you know statutory process of assessing and determining homelessness rather than looking at each case on its merits and through the housing options approach providing you know a full range of preventative measures and support so I think it is it's reverting back to a system that I think everybody recognised was was not working as well as it could and but in saying that it is important that there is an effective system of monitoring and reporting on outcomes and the introduction of the framework following the regulator's report I think is a positive step towards providing the type of information that should provide assurance to councils to partners to service users that the system is working and producing better outcomes rather than going through a mechanistic approach of simply recording applications basically for the sake of it so are you saying that you're against the recording of applications per se or simply that that should be stating that not every case should require a homeless application when somebody comes looking for assistance and support the first priority is to provide that assistance and support rather than going down the route of an application being completed isn't there danger then that you under report the instance of risk of homelessness as I mentioned that that should be covered through the framework and the information that will be produced through that framework and understand the first reports from that should be available in the not too distant future so that the information should provide assurance as I said to councils to service users to partners that the system is working and delivering better outcomes and we're not in the business of trying to suppress a demand or present figures which are not accurate that view shared by all the witnesses thanks people to housing options interviews when they come to see me at my surgery who are not homeless and nowhere near being homeless they're people who who's current housing arrangements are not suitable but they're not homeless by any stretch of the imagination if you then if they then had a homelessness assessment completed for them it would just completely skew the figures and it would also mean that we would only be able to send people who were homeless or threatened with homelessness for a housing options interview housing options is meant to be preventative so therefore you have to get in before people actually become homeless or threatened with homelessness I think there's a danger actually that would distort the whole thing what I would say though is that anyone who comes and says that they want to apply is homeless even if the person on the other side of the desk doesn't think they are if they want to apply is homeless and fill out a form and be assessed then I think they should have that right absolutely but you would change the nature of housing options if you insisted that everybody who went through a housing options interview had to fill out homelessness form actually it would be absurd so do we have a consensus across the panel is anyone considered as part of housing options and it has to be presented to every person that approaches us for housing options advice so people clearly understand that they've got the right to make that homeless presentation but people choose not to it's not about local authorities deliberately steering people away from homelessness there is no concern about taking that homeless presentation if that's what the customer chooses I would just add also that I don't see why there needs to be any conflict I think the regulator alluded to the prevention of homelessness guidance that was produced jointly by Cosly and the Scottish Government in 2009 where it was very clearly laid out in that guidance that there doesn't need to be a conflict a housing options interview is just if you like a complementary advice service to the homelessness system the homelessness system hasn't gone away it still sits there the services that are provided are still there um that the housing options approach is just a much broader um more diagnostic approach to ensuring that we can deal with whatever issues an individual might present to us including the option of going through the formalised process of completing a homelessness application that it doesn't need to be one or two other it can be both and and I think that's something that within the developing guidance we would want to reinforce and you know make clear for any authorities that have have made that assumption and I don't know that any have but that those two things are complementary and you know not a conflict I think your point is well made but I think the reason why we're even having the discussion um rather than because it's clearly the acceptance or common sense flexible approach is the position of the Scottish housing regulator am I right in saying that and do we all agree that the guidance is the best way of of providing the clarity that we need on this issue I think we've reached the point and development of housing options that guidance would be the right thing when we embarked on on the process initially around 2010 there was quite a strong sense in fact the very first event that was held in Edinburgh that brought all the different partners together to talk about housing options it was very clearly expressed at that event that the last thing that local authorities needed was more guidance more regulation more prescription about how they do their business what came out loud and clear was we want the freedom and the space to be able to develop these services bearing in mind that the homelessness services were still in place and are still intact that hasn't changed what we're doing here is developing an improved process that sits around the homelessness service but it's recognised now that you know two or three years in as we've begun to develop things that probably now is the right time to develop guidance and we've actually got some guidance that we can put together that is coherent we've also developed something of a national training framework which wouldn't have happened without those freedoms in the early period of housing options development and now is the right time to bring forth guidance that will just support some of those authorities that have maybe lagged a wee bit behind new organisation and COSLA are both working to develop the guidance through the working group can you just give us very briefly and finally a summation of where that work is at? Actually the progress has been very encouraging we have quite a detailed draft already prepared we've got a further meeting later in October where it would be hoped we would finalise that draft and certainly the intention will be to present that work in draft to the next meeting of the homelessness prevention steering group and there'll be an opportunity there for a number of other stakeholders who have an interest to comment on it in fact there'll be an opportunity prior to that for some of those other stakeholders to comment on it it's quite a firm draft already we're quite pleased with it and there's been a lot of consensus about how we built it so I'm very confident that it will meet all the requirements that the regulator set out and more and actually I think for local authorities it will be a really valuable resource for them in the future that when it does come to the homelessness prevention strategy group the test that I will apply when we're assessing the guidance is when do you know whether you've done your job and if the guidance says that you've done your job when you've ticked a number of boxes that won't do if the guidance says that you've done your job when somebody has found settled accommodation that's what we want so it'll be very much about outcomes and I think that's actually how Julie's been writing it under colleagues. Alex you've got a couple of questions I think we've covered some of the subjects but if I could go very briefly we spoke about housing options earlier and we sort of skirted over the issue of gate keeping now without mentioning any names a number of stakeholders have blamed some local authorities for using the housing options process as an opportunity to do a bit of gate keeping. Are there any examples of that or do you have any response to that? I'll be brief. When I first heard about the housing options approach in Dundee I was not in administration there and I was extremely suspicious and cynical about it. I thought that this just sounded like a way of avoiding our duties to homeless people. I'm completely convinced that I was wrong partly because we are now in administration therefore it gives you a different perspective. I think that it's actually a really good innovative imaginative approach but it could be used as gate keeping and it may well be that in some offices of some local authorities that may have happened and what we need to make sure is it doesn't and that's what all the good practice stuff and the guidelines and all the work that our group has been doing and our colleagues have been doing is aimed to prevent but that's also why we need people locally to scrutinise us and if that's a local MSP dealing with somebody at a surgery and not getting satisfaction from a local authority over a specific individual case then I think I would certainly be interested to hear about it. I'm sure my colleagues would as well. Have we donged that bullet or have we not donged it yet? Bullets are always flying around and it could easily happen because with the pressure on local authorities to meet targets and so on it's always tempting isn't it to find an excuse to put somebody one way instead of another in a marginal case you might think but that's really important that we do have the good practice guidelines and that we do follow them and you know we have our job to do it's been laid down in statute we have to do it and I'm very keen personally that we do fulfil our responsibilities and obligations and if anyone is gate keeping then we've got to stop that one way or another and I think my colleagues would all agree with me. I would just also say is that prior to housing options gate keeping happened across the country in some instances and in some places I suppose despite you know intensive support and training for people there will always be you know somebody out there who didn't quite understand the instruction they were given it's certainly not the intention of any local authority to gate keep going back to the prevention guidance that I alluded to there there are some very clear statements in there that our intention in Scotland was to develop preventative services that were not about gate keeping and in our hub the west of Scotland hub we have developed a joint protocol a joint statement that says what you know alludes to our ethos and one of the clear statements that are made in that protocol is that this is not about gate keeping your services this is about ensuring that you focus on the individual and you get the best outcome for them so it probably will happen and there'll be instances that will still occur however I think at least we've got the opportunity through the hubs the regional joint work that's been done the sharing of practice and the development of this really comprehensive training toolkit to ensure that we get to as many people out there that deliver services as we can it has to come from the top as well in local authorities so we need to ensure that senior managers get it and that that filters down through the whole organization but you know I think nobody would suggest that it's never happened I think what we would simply see is that that's nothing new that's been brought about because of housing options that was always a feature of the system that people would encounter I think there was another skepticism about housing options two three years back which was the fear that or the sense that how can you have a housing options approach when we know that most people don't have many options and but what was what we were being preoccupied there was thinking about people moving and I don't think we appreciated the extent to which a proportion of people could be supported to stay where they were with you know with the right support not everyone by no means everyone but I think we we all underestimated that that we all thought about well you know what what options are there for people to move private rented sector and not much else you know in some cases we did underestimate the extent to which it was possible to to support people to stay where they were when it comes to the delivery of the housing options approach what role do rsls have in that at the moment and could they be doing more to participate in the delivery obviously housing options began with with homelessness prevention and therefore was embedded in local authority practice I can only speak for for the Glasgow and west of Scotland area now where there there are real real steps to roll that process out so that anyone applying for a house from a housing association and indeed applying for a transfer in some cases can can can have the benefit of that of that of that same approach and it really is it really is a case of doing something differently occasionally you you might hear I think again a year or two ago you might have heard one or two of our members or sfha's members saying well we kind of do it already but I think what what our members have realised is that it really is quite a different way of doing things that that notion of spending an up to an hour with somebody or more if need be rather than 10 or 15 minutes to look at the current situation to look to look at the options that really is happening it needs it's I think at its best it happens when there's a really well coordinated approach ultimately taking the lead from from the local authority with all their experience of starting this process a number of years back of training there's usually a significant amount of training needed for housing officers for letting staff within associations but the benefits I mean it is there are challenges you know for a very small association to suddenly be spending that long with people that they've only spent a few minutes with that needs some realignment of services the benefits will be there quite apart from the benefits for the individual probably a lot of associations are going to start finding that they don't get the same applicants coming back every month asking about their application which quite frankly in a lot of cases probably isn't going very far because they've been dealt with properly at the outset so it really is a win-win situation but not to underestimate some of the challenges for smaller landlords is it possible to assess the landscape across Scotland and see whether that is the experience or whether there are specific problems in some geographical areas the feedback we get isn't without exception positive from both sides when we're speaking to local authority colleagues their relationships are fabulous on the ground right across Scotland I was thinking the other assistance that RSLs can give of course is they don't just provide social rented properties they provide mid-market rent and full market rent too so they can get involved in all sorts of different ways and I know in Glasgow they've talked about setting up a local lettings agency through housing options and things like that so there are many many ways in which RSLs can get involved but I think they fully embrace the concept to be honest can I just add to that RSLs are now so diverse so that they might well be involved in a local lettings initiative but it could also be an employability project or it could be any number of different kinds of voluntary activities which they get involved in now with what they used to call a wider role so given that people become homeless for many reasons not just to do with the lack of a house it may well be that by involving RSLs you can plug people into services which would otherwise not be available I mean there's a project in Dundee called making money work which helps people get through those early stages of employment you know when you haven't been paid yet and you don't have any clothes and does financial inclusion stuff and budget budget work you know it may well be that actually RSLs bring more to the table than just their houses and sure in the early stages I think there was a certain level of grumpiness between RSLs and local authorities because you know you'd refer someone to an RSL as homeless and they would say oh we don't have any houses this week and take them back well you know that that's still going to happen because the housing market is complicated now there are all these different providers but it seems to be working much better and RSLs are cooperating well with local authorities and local authorities maybe have a better understanding of what RSLs are able to provide so yep things are much better than they were thank you okay and Gordon convener um in evidence to another committee the legal services agency raised a concern about a crisis in provision of temporary accommodation in Glasgow they say they have been advised this is because the council is unable to obtain permanent accommodation from RSLs and then they want to say that while the local authority may have a duty they do not have the wherewithal to meet the duty so i'm keen how well i know what you've just said the councillor black about the relationship but how well are local authorities and RSLs working together to ensure that permanent accommodation is available for homeless households especially in places like Glasgow where the council has no house in stock and on a practical basis how could that work in relationship be improved duty is to provide settled accommodation it's never been to provide settled accommodation in a council house and i think there's been a certain level of misunderstanding about that over the years but i mean there are people here from Glasgow who can give you the exact answer to your question i don't see a problem in in in turn it's not a relationship problem there at all i think there's a willingness on the part of the housing association sector in in Glasgow to make its contribution but but you're right stock transfer made things much more complicated you're talking obviously about one larger association and 40 to 50 smaller ones and that's a process that needs really quite intensive management and coordination you don't you don't want to get to a situation where uh you know a referral a referral for instance goes to an association which may have 15 or 20 lets a year um you've got to have the right um marriage if you like between a referral and the stock and the turnover and the rate of turnover that a particular association has and i think that that does need a lot of coordination now what we've seen in Glasgow in the last year or two is is a really excellent coordination of the housing options approach and i think that i think um as long as we can get a similar um input of of coordination if you like which which has a resource implication to harnessing the stock of associations and i think we'll see a fine tuning of the system that probably is needed just to make sure that stock can be can be maximised but if you think about it it is complex if you're an association that's got 15 lets a year ideally you might have a you might want to come by a situation where if you have a void that that that day that week you want to you want to get in the sense offer that as a as you know so that the initial impetus then comes from the housing association says look we've got a property and i think for the system to be able to to to work both ways uh um so that a void led system and a demand led system that comes from the council these these are complexities that and a little bit of ironing out is needed but certainly i don't there's no sense of a relationship issue at all in Glasgow but for some fine tuning i'm sure it's needed yeah okay and else what you're coming out i would just say in north lannock sure we've um largely got round some of those sort of technical difficulties because we've got a common housing register and we've also now got a common allocation policy with our rsl partners and to put that into context of the 46 000 social rented houses in that in the area 80 percent are owned by the council and 20 percent by rsls so we would never expect our colleagues in rsls to pick up an undue share of of you know people requiring housing but what we have been able to do is ensure that because we've got this commonality of approach that we are prioritising people consistently and that means that whoever has the vacancy when a person needs a house offers that vacancy and that's you know that's been a really really beneficial outcome in terms of developing the chr for the clients because they get you know they only need to go to one office to apply and speak to somebody about their options rather than go round perhaps you know 15 different places within north there's a common house now just a common allocation policy as well and what we have done is we have set the same targets across all social rented housing for homelessness which means if we need to increase that target the rsls will increase their target at the same rate if we decrease it they decrease their at the same rate so for homelessness it works really well but from a house in options perspective it works really well also and what we have is a lot of really good examples of joint working between the rsls and the local authorities to try and find outcomes for specific individuals who may well be threatened by homelessness within two or three months without actually having to get as far as crisis okay thank you very much okay madam okay good i'll talk about housing support duty and regulations understand there's just been some new revised guidance published very recently could i ask what impact has the housing support duty had on the provision of support for homeless households and is there any scope for improved practice authorities were already providing housing support before the duty was even discussed and i would say that the majority of local authorities are probably providing far higher levels of support than the duty actually directs us to not only because we provide support to an intensive society intentionally homeless households but also because we go we above and beyond the support needs that are actually lead out within the guidelines yes i think there is room for improvement there are challenges that i think we've already discussed around about budgets around about welfare reform and around how we're going to continue to resource our services however we also recognise that there are opportunities that may well come from integration of health and social care which will ensure that we'll get integrated access to wider support provision that's something that councillor black had mentioned right at the outset do you want to maybe add to that councillor the whole aspect of housing support it doesn't appear to have dropped the bomb that some people predicted it would into the whole system i remember some fairly unexpected predictions of you know whole teams of new staff after having to be taken on and i think that was always a misapprehension what it's made us do i think is understand our duties to homeless people better and it's ensured that other bits of the council and other volunteer organisations locally who provide services get involved in a way they might not have got involved before so it's not just the housing department's job anymore it belongs to everyone and i think that's absolutely crucial in the same way as there's a doctor surgery in Dundee just now which is able to provide an advice session at the citizens advice bureau for their patients i think actually sometimes you have to prescribe something which maybe the housing department itself might not be able to provide but there's a whole lot of things and just practical things it's fine to give somebody a house if there's no furniture on it and they don't have any way of getting any then that's just no use to them at all and these kind of practices have gone on and maybe still do go on and we have to try and make sure that that is available to people the furniture the electricity the power the the help that they need to actually live in a house and sustain that tendency and that support might be social or it might be practical it might be welfare benefits advice or it might be knowing a mentor that can actually help you get through a specific situation so people are different everyone's an individual that's why the support duty is good and that's why the fact that you have to assess people's individual needs is good because there's more chance that you'll actually provide the service that they require this is still early days and i think the guidelines will help the new guidance will help and it's going to develop and i think it all is very much bound up with the integration of health and social care if we get this right then it'll make a huge difference if we get it wrong then it'll just be depressing so i take it as all parts of the personalisation agenda as well though janine had mentioned earlier about housing options being very much person person centred approach so in terms of people going through the housing options route as opposed to the homeless route would you would you detect a difference between how people are supported i think the assessment is slightly different because the statutory responsibility isn't there but i think the assessment is still happening because that's part of the housing options approach the housing options approach is it's about looking at more than just what the housing support duty says it's about saying what is it this person requires what are their needs entirely not just what are their housing needs and where gaps are recognised so for example if someone requires assistance with budgeting money management debt issues the referrals will be made to those agencies if it's recognised that someone at the point of housing resettlement is going to require housing support then that would be organised because it's not just about the housing outcome it's about sustaining the housing outcome to ensure they don't become homeless again in the future so yes the assessment has been carried out and services are being provided and that's something that we intend to pick up within the guidance to ensure that across the country there's the same approach to how we carry out that assessment regulations are in many cases being exceeded but really the challenge that's already been referenced and just to emphasise is the funding pressures facing local government and public services generally and being able to sustain those services is everybody's absolute committed to personalisation agenda not just dealing with narrow housing solutions but providing full support and covering all aspects of support that individuals and families require but given the financial outlook and the savings requirements there's going to be a challenge in sustaining those services and protecting them because if that doesn't happen the costs both human and financial will be much greater in the years to come yeah i mean i think we mentioned um keeping temporary accommodation stock um but the pressures on the housing stock in general still exist i mean david earlier said that you know the more person centre approach um was really important and we just don't part people on waiting lists but you know in an ideal world that person centered approach would mean that waiting lists people didn't stay so long on waiting lists and waiting lists actually came down but the pressure on housing stock means that you're not really making that impact on the on the waiting lists or it'll be interesting to see whether the rollout of the housing options approach across housing lists following on from rolling it out through uh with the homelessness system where it began does have an impact because it may be that what that in a sense it you'd like to think that that if lists in some places um are full of people who really realistically haven't a great chance of housing that instead of instead of them it's just in a sense sitting as a name on on that list that a more proactive approach to looking at what what they can do about the housing situation um may well take them off off that off that list um uh and and have that have the problem solved elsewhere we've all got a reservation i think in in as national housing and representative bodies we've all got a reservation when we use waiting list figures uh because we all have a notion that the extent to which they they are a true representation of of real acute housing need varies literally from one case to another so we all use those figures nervously but they're obviously a figure that that that we do use but in theory housing options should have an impact on those lists not that it will have it will what it will do is mean that what the people that are left on lists that will be a true representation of people in real real housing need and i think the shortfall will still be there for all to see but if we can if we can reduce it in terms of people that really have got to have an option somewhere else or in their current situation that will help so when do you think we might be in a situation to make that assessment how it's working yeah i mean if i take glasgo as an example then with the rollout programme for housing options is you know is over a good a good two years or so um it would it would be nice to think that within within that period we we may get a better sense of of of the impact on on housing lists but that doesn't mean to say we take our eyes off the ball in terms of making as much new provision um both in in the social rented and in other in other intermediate 10 years that we know we'll still we've still got to do that um but i'd like to think that in in two to three years we might get and the same across local authorities that we might get a more realistic impression of levels of need within the housing list and i mean julian you were i mean all local authorities i take it now are covered by housing option hub and all rsls but obviously there are different stages as you said and you're going to try and roll out best practice i mean what kind of timescale are we talking about hopefully getting to a situation where everybody is really working to the best standard well i think when i mentioned earlier that we feel as a group that we're probably at the best stage to develop guidance i think that's on the basis that we now recognise that everybody at least has jumped on the train um but some are way at the back of the train still and and you know the guidance will help to bring them up it's difficult to you know to to sort of cover all 32 local authorities what i certainly do get a sense of when we go to the the hub leads meetings when we meet up um in our sort of localised regional groups i get a really strong sense of commitment um a really strong enthusiasm for it a sense that people are saying you know my job is is improved because of this because actually i'm able to assist people in a way that i used to just feel as though i was just turning people away and saying no all the time so all of those things in the development they train in and the support for people that are delivering services um you know all moves us along in terms of starting to see improvements on the ground in north Lanarkshire for example we do feel that we're starting to see improvements already um and it can be illustrated in our waiting lists our waiting lists have come down by around 2000 um over the period that we've been you know really sort of promoting housing options and serving services and people in that way so it's early days and we wouldn't want to sort of put that out there and say this is a definite impact of housing options but some of the signs are there that if you really implement it properly and support people to deliver it because at the same time as we're seeing that reduction in our general waiting lists we've also seen that a continuous reduction in homeless presentations so those people you know the sense that those people are being gate-kept and have to you know are getting lost somewhere else isn't really born out in that case because they would pop up somewhere on the waiting lists if that was the case so i think it's early days and we wouldn't want to be too um you know we wouldn't want to make claims that could that we couldn't substantiate but definitely think that we're on the way on the right trajectory which is positive. Jim, is there anything that we haven't covered you much? Pretty much covered everything. Just on the housing options hubs I'm just wondering if you felt that we were getting value for money for the Scottish Government's investment of just under a million pounds and also whether you agree with the suggestion that they should be widened out to include housing associations and voluntary sector organisations? There's value for money I think the economy's a scale that we're managing to achieve but the joint working is considerable and we're now in the position that we're not only working at local hub level but we're also working at integrated hub level so we're looking at not only trying to pool resources for four or five local authorities but to take three hubs together and look at how we can do things like procure training programmes and produce materials to promote services. Value for money, yes. RSLs being more involved in the hubs, that journey has already begun. In the west hub we'll let Julie speak to that because that's her hub. Glasgow is one of their partners however RSLs have become more involved I would say probably over the last year. We have consistently ensured that RSLs have been kept abreast as to what's happening in the hubs but what we have now done is guaranteed that we would have at least one event annually that RSLs would be a part of and as part of those events we've identified key streams that RSLs want to be involved in so that's doing things like ensuring that if we're developing a core competency framework around about training RSL partners have got access to that or if we're looking at how we develop our policies and procedures around about housing options we're doing that in tandem with RSLs so they'll be key focus pieces of work that we'll do in tandem with RSLs both at a local and a national level. The hub that I sit in has two stock transfer authorities that was a bit of a challenge for us because it was quite difficult for us to try and determine which RSLs would be best to sit round about the table with us so what we have done is we have just invited everybody and the RSLs who want to be involved have become involved. Something about the composition of the homelessness prevention strategy group it includes the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, it includes Shelter and the homelessness action, what's that mean again? It used to be called the Scottish Council for Single Homeless and that's how I always knew it as but Homelessness Action Scotland so that they provide that kind of consumer viewpoint it also and it has producer viewpoint from the SFHA and it has the local authorities and it has the Minister for Housing and so all of these things that we've talked about today are important to the group and these are all the things that we're trying to drive forward and we're trying to drive forward good practice and we get reports of poor practice and we try and deal with them. Not on an individual basis we're not set up as a casework agency but what we're trying to do is establish what's going wrong and sort it and actually it's been very good working together because we don't all represent the same interests but I think we all want to achieve the same result and that's been fine so in terms of spreading good practice yes we'll always do it but convener I don't think we'll ever get to the point where we should stop because good practice is something you have to keep topping up and you also learn I think housing options and Mr Johnson's constituency is very different maybe from housing options and Mr McDonald's because the the territory is very different the options that are available are different the landlords are different what we need to do is be imaginative about how we increase supply building new houses absolutely trying to match people up to the right houses absolutely there is one of the good things a housing options adviser can do is a housing options adviser can help someone to be more realistic about their housing choices and people will come to me as in my surgery and they'll say I have to have a semi detached house with a garden and I say this is the indeed we have very few of those and we have lots of two bedroom flats would you like one of those and they say no we can't possibly have one of those it won't work for us and what we then have to do is have a discussion about why it won't work and and that's where housing options can come in because somebody with the expertise that really knows the housing market knows what's available in a city can say well look there's no point in holding out for that house with a garden with gas cooking and what you need to do is think about what you can find in a different area of the city or a different type of house it might actually do the same job for you and you might be housed in six months instead of in five years so I mean I think that that's what housing options can do it can prevent people getting to the point of crisis and it can help them make help them understand the market in which they're operating if you want to use that kind of word I'm not sure if my colleagues would back me up on that at all but I hope so yeah I would I would always support what councillor black has to say on the matter but I would also in in response to your query about what sorry can I just ask councillor black specifically about the hubs and whether they're what impact and difference they're making well you asked if there value for money if you look at the cost of somebody becoming homeless and then having to be taken through all those processes and procedures and be housed that's phenomenally expensive it doesn't take long to get your money back in the hubs the fact that people are not sitting in their own local authorities and sometimes in their own district offices again to use mr johnson's constituency or area of operation where I used to be involved myself as working for Nigel Don different offices can have different practices people can be isolated and things can be done the way they've I've been and that's what the hot the hubs actually do they bring people together they spread the good practice out and they do it on a Scottish level but they also do it on that kind of regional level and it gets out to all the local offices and that's what they're for and I think it's really really important to have that network of distribution of ideas and information in good practice because if we simply kind of discuss things at the homelessness prevention strategy group and make a proclamation it won't actually ever reach the front desk where people are being interviewed so yeah absolutely I think the hubs are very good value for money support them 100 percent okay miss hunter you the point yes simply um that you talked also about voluntary organisations um and although as part of the sort of development process RSLs are becoming much more linked to the hubs voluntary organisations and maybe still a wee bit further down the line but that's not to say that at a local level we don't have partnerships that involve voluntary organisations they're just they're just at the end of the queue for getting really plugged into the housing options process any other members have any points okay anyone else want to say something that they've wanted to say last chance no for listening to us it's always a pleasure to talk about housing people don't always want to talk to you about that in the pub it's not the most exciting subject but it's really important and we appreciate the committees taking the time to hear us today no that's been very very useful to us in our inquiry and our next our meeting next week is with the housing the minister for housing and welfare so we'll take the opportunity to discuss with her many of the issues which have been raised today can i apologise again for the interruption it has led to the meeting being a bit bitty but i hope you think that we've covered everything and again thanks very much and i close the meeting meeting next week as i said with the minister and we've got that meeting on Tuesday informal meeting and Tuesday morning close the meeting thank you very much