 Gweldwch i amhlyg, yn gaffer ddiweddygol ar y cwrwg deiligion cymh requiredyr â eich ddydwyd yn 2017. Mae'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod o gweithio ei ffordd, ac mae'r geitiannwch erbyn oherwydd mae gweldwch yn unig o borffod oesol yn cael ei ddweud o syrntio gweithio'u ei dduwi'n gweldwch yn ei ddweud o cael ei ddweud o gweithio'i ddweud o wgwyr cyfrifordd o'r gyffinodol. ond tiProduct sidewalk i'r principaliau cyhoedd, yn fyоеch gyfarig mwy mae gennym ni'n f advice gyda penggol blynyd i ddechrau yn i米g gy ferddwys gweithredu o'r brob metre dweud Dydw i'n gwneud jithio ti'n meddwl dangos trafodd i chi adael i Foes இukeubol y blash由翻odlau Cymru. Y cyfoedd ynmateb i amddir Fyff rendrechwilonto rydyn nhw struggle ac llaie rwy'r employers co-ordinating y visit a get an access to the information. A summer of the committee's visit to Finland, it's available on our web page. I'd also thank the committee clarking team for organising and supporting that visit as well. I'm sure we'll talk about housing first at some point during the evidence session this morning, but we wanted to put that on the record. Pass mynd i gweld gyda'r riwethaf. The first agenda item as indeed agenda item 2. Homelessness in this is정 1, so can I welcome councillor Kelly Parry, spokesperson for CUNITURAL being and Nicolle Dickie, Policy Manager at Cozillar, Patrick Mackay, Operations Manager, Turning Point Scotland, Dr Adam Burleigh, Consultant Clinical Psychology College, The Access Point and Lorraine McGrath, Chief Executive, Cyngor and Community Scotland. I thank all of you for being here this morning. I understand that COSLAW would like to make it an opening statement. I have no indication of any other witnesses, but I assure you that you have lots of opportunities to put your thoughts and views on the record here this morning, so I do not know who is making the statement by half of COSLAW, is it Council Parry? Thanks, convener. First of all, good morning and thanks for the opportunity to be here to provide local government's perspective on homelessness. I am councillor Kelly Parry, I am a councillor in Midlothian and I am here today representing COSLAW and the role of spokesperson for community wellbeing. Throughout my time as an elected member, it is very clear to me the sense of responsibility that everyone in local government feels to our communities. That responsibility drives councils to continue to achieve the best outcomes for those who are homeless or, perhaps more importantly, at risk of becoming homeless across Scotland. Yes, we have a statutory responsibility and a duty around this area, however, councils recognise the wide-reaching effect homelessness has on families and individuals in our communities. That is why councils are more than seen to our statutory obligations and access to good affordable housing. It is a place to call home. Those are the things that we know that lead to strong, stable and sustainable communities. Local government, certainly in my view, exists to serve all members of our communities and that is very much what we are striving to do. In our written submission, which I hope the committee has received, we advocate an integrated whole-system approach to preventing and responding to homelessness. The causes of homelessness are seldom simple. I am sure that the committee is well aware of that. They are certainly not singular and it is only through working together that we can support those in need and work to address the social inequalities that affect so many of those who find themselves homeless and impact on the reasons why people find themselves homeless. With that, I look forward to our discussions this morning. Thank you very much for that. Thank you again for coming along. I will move to our first question from Andy Wightman, MSP. We have heard a lot of talk of housing options and how it has gone and there has obviously been quite a bit of success in that programme. We have also heard that with more difficult groups it has got its challenges. Is there a need for a programme of improvement for housing options? If so, what might that look like? Thank you, Lorraine McGrath. Good morning. I think absolutely. Sam Community Scotland and the street work that I am now involved with as well here in Edinburgh are both concerned with working with people with intensive, extreme and complex needs. Our experience is very much that the housing option system and approach works for the vast majority of people who come through the process, but it is extremely challenging and difficult for people with complex needs. It is not easy for people to engage with, it is not easy for people to keep appointments, respond to that, the flexibility within the support arrangements that we have does not allow us the time necessarily to spend the significant amount of time that it takes to work through that process with someone through the housing options. In short, the answer is yes. I would absolutely welcome a specific approach around housing options for people with complex needs and that to be tied very closely with a direct access to housing and a rapid access to housing approach on the basis of the housing first principles. Dr Barley? Just to support what Lorraine McGrath is saying, from a psychological point of view, as with many things in this area, sometimes the idea of homelessness is something of a red herring in that it covers up what has brought somebody to be in the position of being homeless in the first place and the problem with missing that is that we start to provide the provision of absence if you like, so we try and provide housing with an idea that housing is the problem and there is a range of difficulties around housing, but for some of the people that we are talking about, the homelessness is a late emerging symptom and is probably the best way to think about it and to try and understand what it is that has got somebody to the point where they cannot or they struggle to make use of the existing housing service. Those are factors and variables that we can describe and know a fair amount about, but I still do not think that we organise some of our housing provision based upon a sound formulation or understanding of what the psychological and emotional needs are of the people who require that housing. In simple sort of lego land terms really, if some of your experience of being in a house through your development has been coloured with huge amounts of trauma, anxiety and adversity, then the craziness would be for you to go and stay in a house and sort of exist in it in a very straightforward anxiety free way and we see that a lot of people sort of bouncing in and out of houses and we keep trying to understand it as a housing problem rather than as being a human problem, I guess, in some way. Okay, thank you. Anyone wants to add an addition to housing options? Councillor Pan. Thanks, convener. I think in general we think that housing options works very well. I think we would like to see perhaps improvements in the housing options service. We completely appreciate the needs or certainly a desire for a standard protocol. We understand the need to be able to measure outcomes, but I think that I would reiterate what colleagues have said. Certainly from a statutory point of view, councils quite rightly focus on homelessness but we need to be looking at people who are at risk of homelessness because we know that when we put in preventative measures across all areas of social policy we know that that has a real impact. Perhaps it is sometimes difficult to measure that in terms of output because when you have put preventative spending early into the system you do not necessarily have a positive outcome, it is not necessarily very easy to record. I think that that is something that we have to focus on and really look at and find a measurable way to do that. We do quite well in other services that perhaps a shift in focus and a shift in language and terminology towards those at risk of homelessness rather than at the crisis points that we have mentioned. Not everyone has to answer that question but I do not know if Nicola Dickie or Patrick McKay wants to add anything to that before I bring Andy back in. Andy Wightman? That is useful. Can I take it from your responses in general? You would see no particular advantage in putting housing options on a firmer, statutory footing. For example, what it has done, the delivery, what it has delivered, the flexibility it has got, improvements that might be possible to make can all be made as it is at the moment and that for groups with very very different needs then we are looking at possibly other issues like housing first, which we will get on to later to address. Would that be a fair summation of your views? I suppose that the only thing that you could say in terms of the group that housing options particularly fails, which is those of the most complex needs. One of the interventions we know that works best is when you reach out to that group so that there is much more of an assertive outreach component to it. There is nothing to stop a housing options model being used in a different way so that that group still gets a quality of access to it. I very much agree with that. In principle, taking something on that footing would not be an issue. I would just urge that the one thing that local authorities do very good is around local flexibility and knowing what is right in our local locations. As long as the flexibility is built into that, it is a really important aspect. I agree with that. My only other comment would be that sometimes that local flexibility leads to massive variation in how people are responded to and the way that people are… that the data is recorded as well as a result of housing options in the prevent one. There is a major variation in how that comes through and we are not then able to use that intelligence in an informed way to plan for the future. Absolutely. I echo everything that everyone has just said there. I suppose, from a cosly perspective, what we would like is standardisation of process. You are not going to get standardisation of outcome because of the complexities that you are dealing with. What we are looking for is everyone approaching housing options in a consistent manner. The difficulty with a statutory obligation is that statutory obligation becomes a bit of a blunt instrument perhaps. For us, the success in the housing options where we are seeing success is that subtlety. It is that local ability to respond well to those complex needs and to those different circumstances. I am yet to see the bit of legislation that does that effectively. From a cosly perspective, we are about using the good practice that we already have. We are about spreading that across Scotland and making sure that we can get consistent processes and consistent recording so that we know that we are looking at apples and apples but not to be using a kind of blunt instrument that is something written in statute. That is not what we have seen working to date in this arena. Andy Wightman Thank you very much for one final question on this part. I will come in later as well. On the question of refugees and asylum seekers, there is quite a bit of evidence on that in the written evidence that we have received. Do you have any observations on the particular priorities that we need to address in relation to the housing needs of that group? I think that there is somebody speaking from the Scottish Refugee Council in the next panel, so that might be something that they would be best placed to answer. We will not push in comments on that, but we just want to make sure that we cover the range of questions that we will be dealing with within the inquiries. I do not know if there are any additional comments in relation to that style. Thank you, Andy Wightman. Jenny Goulders Thank you. Good morning to the panel. Cozzler, in the written submission that we received, Kelly Parry and Nicola Dickie, you talked about this person-centred, a local partnership basis that you mentioned in your opening comments. Dr Burley, in your written submission, you spoke about if a person experiences high levels of trauma, abuse and neglect through the first 10 years of their life, then it is highly unlikely that 18 months in a supported unit will be enough to change their mind. With regard to that, what is the panel's view then in terms of how care experience young people are dealt with by the system currently in terms of homelessness? Dr Burley, yes. I think exactly as I said there, to take the phrase or the term psychologically informed properly and to actually use it to design housing and care services for people who we know have had those sorts of experiences, you would never come up with a sort of time limit on supported accommodation that was just some arbitrary number, like six months or 18 months, for which there is absolutely no evidence base, would in any way fit in with an understanding of how human psychology works or how the sort of length of time and care that might be required to modify somebody's experiences of relationships given the sorts of backgrounds they may have come from. So really I think that sort of my position on it really is something about maybe an idealist position, but how can you get to a point where you actually have housing and care services that are informed by a solid sound understanding of what the needs actually are, rather than a sort of top-down or this person's homeless, so therefore they need this and they've got care needs of this, this and this, so we'll provide them with this. Without any real articulation or formulation of how is it that this person has found himself in this position in the first place? As I said, these are not variables that we don't know about. We do have a fair amount of evidence that would tell us what kind of interventions might be required and what sort of timescales might be required to actually address the underlying issues that so often underpin the symptomatic presentation of homelessness. I think it's important to acknowledge as well the difference across different local authorities that one of the things that we see, for example, within local authorities which are bigger like Glasgow and the city of Edinburgh County, so is the ability to commission specific services for young people who've been looked after and accommodated and where I suppose Turning Point Scotland would see sometimes a difficulty is that in smaller local authorities, where there's less purchasing power, that those young people who have been looked after and accommodated become part of another type of service provision, often services which are more for people affected by homelessness, sometimes with a different age range within that actual setting and I think that can be hugely problematic. What might be an answer within it, something I've often thought is that your greater flexibility for spot purchasing right across Scotland so that you had where there was maybe one of the pan Glasgow local authorities identifying a good service within Glasgow, I think that we should have flexibility to enable young people to go into those services. I would certainly reiterate some of those points and I think, for example, the recent announcement that Nicola Sturgeon made on council tax for people, for young care experienced people is certainly welcome and that just shows where local authorities can make quite a big change and I think it's right to pick up the point about what we do before people get to that crisis point and I say that both from a cosly perspective and as a care experienced young person who left care from that point of view. So I think it has to be the right things in place but I think it's very much about following the person rather than the system and I think that's something that you probably found on your recent trip as well, convener, that the resources should follow the person, what's right in one local authority won't necessarily work in another local authority, I think sometimes it's very easy to look at standardised frameworks and think that will fit everywhere but it has to be the person at the centre of that and that's more important. Okay, anyone else want to add on that? Lorraine, with regard to your submission from the Simon community, you know in your evidence submission that we are beginning to see evidence of increased housing access barriers for those to RSL and private rented sector accommodation. This is resulting in largest days with temporary accommodation. You also say that we are already seeing significant deficits in funding due to the impact of welfare reform. Welfare reform has already been flagged to this committee previously by Shelter who said that the Government in Scotland can only do so much in terms of mitigation and the national audit office has previously alluded to the impact that those welfare reforms are having in terms of England's homeless population. With that in mind, I'd just like to ask the rest of the panel what impact welfare reforms and their experience are having on homeless this more generally. From a causal point of view, that's perhaps a very obvious point. We certainly looked at universal credit quite a lot recently. Not only does universal credit have an impact on a person, a person's experience and how much trauma they experience in the system but also has an impact on council budgets as well and where the Scottish Government is mitigating a fair impact to welfare reforms but slower local authorities. That squeezes our budgets at a time when welfare reform is having a higher impact. We need to be focusing and targeting our services more. For example, we know that if we spend money on the front line looking at benefit uptake, we know that that brings in more money to our local authorities but we're spending money mitigating welfare reform and that obviously harms local authorities' ability and resources to be able to tackle that. From a different point of view, we know that people are getting into rent arrears. We know that not only are there more people in rent arrears but the amount that they owe significantly more in some cases is much higher. The statistics that COSLA collected recently when we wrote to David Gough about universal credit to ask him to pause that were startling, they really were. That has an impact on our long-term house-building strategies as well. The only way to mitigate that would be to look at rent increases. As far as we are concerned from a COSLA point of view, it is a perfect storm in terms of local authorities. I cannot reiterate how much that impact on people is but there is an impact on our resources at a time when we are already challenged. Any other comments on welfare reform, homelessness issues, opportunities, page of the kind? I'll give you one specific example. I think about sometimes what you see with welfare reform is us changing behaviours from other organisations. Even one of the obstacles that service managers in Turning Point Scotland have spoken to me about is the fact that we think ASCOs are stock transfer local authority. Obviously there is a reliance within the RSL sector. In instances now, what we see is that homeless people, people affected by homelessness, make that transition when they are at their poorest and having to pay a month in advance. For me, that creates another additional obstacle to somebody's access in housing. I will move on to a deputy convener. The use of temporary accommodation was mentioned. I am conscious that crisis has recently called for the use of obligations to be taken forward by the Scottish Government and local authorities in relation to the unsuitable use of an appropriate temporary accommodation in this place just passed an order, reducing that from 14 days to 7 days for pregnant women and families, but not for others. At a recent event that I had with crisis, we were talking about eradicating what is a costly and appropriate use of a network of B&Bs where people aren't even allowed to stay in the B&B throughout the day. They have to leave. They have no way to wash their clothes, no way to cook food. It is hugely expensive and hugely damaging to the individuals. Is there a key asset there that crisis has made us? Dr Burley wanted to make a comment on that. In terms of clinically, it is not uncommon to hear people talk about the accommodation that they are in. If you were coming up with an informed way of addressing, and I am talking, I guess, about some of the most multiply complex people, and you were trying to think about what sort of provision you might want to give that might address some of the underlying issues. Knowing something about the backgrounds that people have come from in terms of the levels of deprivation and adversity, the very, very first thing on your design sheet, if you were going to try and design something to address that, would be not that, not the history that somebody has come from. And yet when you hear and look at some of the accommodation that is being offered to people, some of the most traumatised and damaged people in our communities, the temporary accommodation that is offered is often a direct replication of the adversity that has brought them into our services in the first place. That is helpful. Lorraine McGrath, hold on to that thought, because I believe I made enough steps in the toes of one of our members who wanted to ask about temporary accommodation. Graham, is there anything additional that you want to add in relation to questions on temporary accommodation before we bring the witnesses back in? Pretty similar to your own convener. It was really to ask you to give us your views on the quality of temporary accommodation, because we have certainly heard evidence that it is often sadly lacking. I would like to hear about that. Just if I may, convener, I would also ask if COSLA has done any work on analysing the cause of rent arrears—Councillor Parry mentioned rent arrears—and, of course, there can be a lot of different reasons why people run up rent arrears. Has anyone done any analysis of what the percentage of rent arrears across Scotland might be as a result of welfare reform or other reasons? Lorraine McGrath, you were going to come back in there. Sorry for stopping you. I was just conscious that I wanted Mr Simpson to explore some of this area as well, so Lorraine McGrath. Just on the point of quality of temporary accommodation, and connecting those two queries, it is absolutely about the quality. The problem that we have is that local authorities are so constrained that they are commissioning very, very poor quality accommodation, and it is really a challenge to them to work with those commission services to improve them. There has been a lot of work done in Glasgow to improve the quality of temporary accommodation. There is also work on going here in Edinburgh to improve the quality of bed and breakfast accommodation, because we have such a huge reliance on it here in Edinburgh. It is not so much about saying that all bed and breakfast is bad as a stop-gap emergency response. It is good for some people. One of the unintended consequences of housing options is that we now see a much more concentrated population of people with complex needs coming into homelessness, and that means that the nature of the temporary and emergency accommodation that we need to look at needs to change the days of people being able to cope with, even in the short term, a bed and breakfast where you cannot even stay during the day, and the quality of the environment is really poor. Picking up on all the points that Adam has just made are gone. We really need to think about the positive constructive environments that we put people into from the very first point of contact. We would not do that with any other people with care needs population or any other care group. We would not consider that for a second as a nation. We are looking at the vast majority of people in homelessness now having significant and complex needs and their mental health needs, their physical health needs, their long-term enduring trauma and impacts. We would not consider placing someone who enters the health system as a result of those needs into the type of accommodation that we put people in homelessness into. I think that there has to be an absolute massive agenda around improving the quality of the accommodation and not just the nature of it. Thank you, Dr Barley. It is really a code to what Lorain has been describing. I think that one of the things that is problematic that we have health and social care integration but housing is not part of that. We do not start thinking about housing as a health intervention. Somebody is in housing with some idea that that is separate from their health needs and then they are meant to go somewhere else to get their health needs addressed like we could in some way split those bits off. But for some of the people we are talking about one, we know that they really struggle to make use of mainstream services for reasons that we can elaborate. In terms of the fundamental healthcare provision is often provided by housing but often I guess the housing is not in any way engineered or geared or organised or designed or funded as being a healthcare intervention but that is fundamentally where a lot of the people we are talking about spend a good deal of their time and so I think it's about how we could integrate health, social care and housing together for this most vulnerable population to understand that their needs are not discreet and don't happen in silos but we are talking about whole people. Absolutely, that got a reaction Dr Berlow, this is a good thing. There's also a theme about the quality of temporary accommodation wrapped around that as well so you just kind of bear that in mind. We all can want to look at complex needs further. Patrick Mackay followed by Councillor Parry. I wanted to maybe, it's a matter of precision what we mean by temporary accommodation that some people talk interchangeably with temporary accommodation and supported accommodation so there's something about I think if you look at it as a whole system there is something when people are being referred into supported accommodation some of which is very very good but I think that there's still a failure within that system for individuals who have the most complex needs and ironically often what happens is those people who have the greatest need finish up in bed and breakfast and there's something I think that's a very specific reason for that is one of the things that bed and breakfast offer is a notion of something being high threshold low tolerance and within that it's about their ability to be able to stay alongside people but and we maybe come on to this I think that the key to all of that is that if those people with the most complex needs are never put into supported accommodation but instead put into a housing first model which has an appropriate level of support wrapped round I think that's a much better outcome. You're going to explore that for the next few moments, Councillor Parry. Yeah, I guess I would urge some caution around temporary accommodation statistics for some moving at temporary accommodation can be the right thing to do and I think the important thing to focus on perhaps is what happens after that and if that leads to a stable tendency for example in a stable period in somebody's life then sometimes that's the best thing for that person so I think it really has to be an outcome focus approach when we look at temporary accommodation but we're absolutely right to focus on the standards of that accommodation at the time as well. Just to pick up your point on rent arrears, COSLA has collected some statistics on rent arrears and I'm sure we'll be happy to share that with the committee. It's perhaps somewhat limited in terms of it focused on universal credit but what it did do was it made comparisons between rent arrears where people were on the older system of housing benefit and the newer system of universal credit and I think that gives us a useful insight into what that might mean in terms of the whole impact for Scotland because I think you know we're certainly talking quite a lot about what we need to do reactively but actually I think we need to start a plan and forward thinking approach and we know that universal credit is likely to be rolled out across Scotland although COSLA would like that to be a much slower pace because of those particular issues so I think that there's work that we can do around that and work that we can do to plan that and I think that the other group just to finish convener that we need to look at as people who are now struggling from in-work poverty now because of the very nature of people who are in work poverty they're not people that are normally likely to come in contact with other sector organisations or local authority points where we would see that they're at risk of homelessness and I think that's one of the messages that's quite clear from us all today that's where we need to focus on but for that group it's so difficult they tend to be the people that will only come forward when they're you know they've exhausted all their family friends all the other options and so it's really difficult to try and get to a group that don't normally come in to contact with us but be happy to share those if the committee would like. I like Niclidic, do you want to add to that? It's just really to pick up on the unsuitable accommodation and I think we have to be really really clear on what we mean when we talk about temporary accommodation. I think that the other panel members are absolutely clear we use these words interchangeably and I think from our perspective we would be looking for a proportionate response so in order to get a proportionate response you have to have an evidence base that tells you what is the unsuitable accommodation and where is it because there are some local authorities in Scotland who don't have any what we would talk about as unsuitable accommodation there are some local authorities who do and I think a lot of those local authorities are on a journey but I think for us it should be about how can we help those local authorities to move forward and get people out of unsuitable accommodation and minimise those who are actually in it so from our perspective it would be really helpful if we had a kind of definitive evidence base that we were starting from here to try and kind of unpick that a bit because I think we do get ourselves kind of we muddle up supported accommodation, B&B accommodation and temporary accommodation some people in temporary accommodation are in what is effectively a scatter flat and it looks exactly like the one next door that's a mainstream flat so I think we just have to be a bit a bit cautious about that evidence base is it there and can we use it helpfully? Okay, Llyriam McGrath? Just one small point and follow up to that I would my added caution would be who deems it unsuitable and whether or not the people with the experience of living in those accommodations are the best place to tell you whether or not it's suitable to their needs and that takes us back to the impact that it's had on their health and wellbeing and their anticipation for the future. Thank you and I know where deputy convener wants a supplemention on this but Graham do you want to follow up first? Just to say I think from Cossill's point of view if you could provide that information that would be very useful. I remember when I was a councillor in South Lanarkshire and we were regularly given these figures and sometimes it was quite surprising because you might have expected that a large proportion of rent arrears were a result of welfare reform and very often they weren't so it would be useful to have the facts. I think it's fair to say that the evidence we were gathering was specifically around about universal credit so it was about us looking at what is the percentage of rented arrears for people who are on the old system, what is the percentage of people who are not claiming any benefit whatsoever, what is the percentage for people on universal credit. I think it was in and around about the idea that the universal credit programme has the universal credit, the arrears go up and then you get your first payment and they go down so the information that we have is specific in and around about that. We also have evidence around about how much more Scottish welfare fund is being used in the areas so I think that that gives you the human cost, not just the housing cost, the human cost potentially. We will do that, we will do that, we will really appreciate that. We will go forward with that one, absolutely. Elaine Smith, do you want to follow up on some of that? Yes, thanks. It was actually on the point that Lorraine McGrath made but I wished to ask Cossill about it. It was for example if temporary accommodation was a so-called scatter flat in a local authority area and if that accommodation actually was suitable for the family, so a family were in it and they were accessing local school services etc, would it make more sense then to try and turn that into permanent accommodation and then find for other temporary accommodation to replace it? I guess Patrick Mackay is nodding so maybe. I'm from Turning Point Scotland and I'm sorry but it's absolutely yes. I think that everything that we know what Adam talks about are in attachment and that kids are going to school, there's long periods of time in which they're in and again it's been very specific, we're talking about temporary furnished flats that people can be in for over a year and for me it just seems the most simple thing in the world, why can't you convert that into a proper secure tendency but it's I suppose a symptom that's... From a Cossill perspective there are some local authorities who do that to a greater or lesser extent. The problem is that we don't have pre-made furnished temporary accommodation units just to replace them and I suppose that brings me back to the point that Councillor Parry made about the affordable housing supply programmes, so I think yes that's the most natural thing in the world to do and I think it sounds quite simple, I think some local authorities do do it, I think that really very much depends on what is the housing market in and around about what is the needs presenting in your area, so I don't think we're saying that that's a bad idea, I just think it sounds quite simple and I think in practice we need to explore that and again I don't think we can direct it nationally, I think local authorities have to look at their own housing market and what they have available to them. Sorry, convene, but is that something that Cossill could take an overview interest in to find out which local authorities are doing that, how they're doing it successfully and sharing good practice and maybe sharing that kind of information with this committee? I think that's absolutely something that we can take away and I suspect that probably a lateral may well be best place to tell you where that is effectively standard practice, so we can certainly take that away and come back with what information we have. That really helps, but I can also apologise to deputy convener because when you asked the question I started answering it and my job to ask the question is not to answer it, but I also know from my own constituency case where I'm coming to that point, I think that our base in Mary Helen Springburn, you've got an office there, is a lot of vulnerable people enter temporary tenancies, sometimes they make it work, sometimes they don't. It does seem crazy that when they make it work they're built up a network of friends, they're not acting out in the community, they're being good neighbours that they're then moved on for another vulnerable individual or family to come in who might or might not make a success of that temporary tenancy, so there's actually less of a burden on communities and more of a community cohesion if those temporary furnished flats are flipped into secure tenancies for individuals and families. That's certainly my experience within my constituency and that's been indulging a lot about his chair, deputy convener, I do apologise. But I did mention vulnerable people there, and well Alexander Stewart wants to explore some more in relation to that. Thank you, convener. I'd like to explore the idea about this whole multi-agency approach which has been very successful across some parts of the areas that we're looking at. In practice, how that multi-agency works, and do we need to be thinking about restructuring, how we budget, how we commission services, to ensure that that is taking place? I'd like some views on that from the panel. Oh, flurry of hands. In the last minute, we'll take Lorraine McGrath first. In my evidence, obviously, the written evidence, we submitted some detail about the Canon initiative in Glasgow that both ourselves and Turning Point Scotland have just recently joined. We've been operating that along with other partners in the city for nearly three years now. That was specifically targeted at doing better with what we have, rather than thinking about what more do we need and coming together to work cohesively and collaboratively to target those most extreme needs and the people that were known to everybody has been within the system for a long time and for whom no solution could be found. What makes that work is attitude and culture and flexibility and the freedom for the front-line staff to engage, act and devolve power right to the front-line staff. That's what principally makes it work, that people are empowered not to be constrained by four hours per week or x number of people per week. It's flexibility within the system and its flexibility within professional boundaries to be able to work across in the interests of the individual. It is person-centred approaches at its most extreme is what works for that person. That includes a housing response as well, actually, so that what's talked about with that person who has extreme needs is what accommodation will suit you best right now and then the teamwork to make that accommodation option happen. That doesn't happen within the homelessness system in any other place, it's what's available. Generally speaking, because of pressures within the system, that individual goes and invariably for people with the most extreme complex needs, that will then break down repeatedly. What we're seeing is a greater increase in stability for people over time, people who were entrenched off sleepers, consistently offending, bouncing in and out of the system, in and out of hospital, in and out of prison. It is the cohesion very much that we've been able to achieve at that front-line service delivery around the key workers and the professionals that are engaged who come together to work in a collaborative way. Do we need to change the way that we commission services? Absolutely. One of the key things in Glasgow obviously is that we do have homelessness as part of the devolved powers of the health and social care partnership. I think that that's critical. I think that this would be much more challenging in other areas where that is not the case and that's certainly my experience where homelessness sits much more in a housing agenda rather than a health and social care agenda and that's already been mentioned. Another thing that we're doing in Glasgow that is built on the principles of the can is moving to an alliance contracting position for the whole of homelessness commission which should, if we get it right, empower exactly that type of working where organisations can come together to look who's best place to do what around a grouping of people or an individual to get the best possible response. Personalisation is at its most extreme level and there are options out there around the commissioning of services that would allow that to bring statutory services, third sector services and independent sector services, if need be, together around the table to empower that flexibility and opportunity. I think that there's two points to that. There's how we work together before somebody reaches a point of homelessness and then how somebody or how agencies can work together after that to make sure that people go on to have stable tendencies in life to make sure that they don't become a recurring homeless person which is incredibly common and what often leads up to somebody rough sleeping. So we know that when we take preventative measures it works very well. We're now seeing integrated joint boards and local authorities beginning to work with housing and that's working incredibly well. I think that it takes some time to see data in terms of what that means in terms of results but certainly anecdotally it's working and the work around the Scottish Prison Service is doing at the moment as well. Community justice partnerships and local authorities has already seen incredible results so we know that when we put the preventative measures in there it definitely works. I think that there are some barriers in terms of agencies working together and either perhaps not having the resources to put preventative spend in even when it will then affect their service further down the line and sometimes there's a legislative barriers to doing that and working better together as well and I think once people reach the point of homelessness and a local authority steps in and for example houses that person you know we can't just house a person and then just leave them there's likely to have been a level of trauma and crisis up to that point gets there and often when you speak to people who have become homeless you find that they've got a story where they've went through five, six, seven different agencies so I think we have to stop thinking about homelessness as a housing issue and start thinking about it as a whole society issue and start talking to a range of different sectors about what part they play and lead up to that. I would echo a lot of that. I think interagency work but interanything work begins with a shared understanding and I think fundamentally we don't have that. If you take the health service for example which I was brought up in professionally at least it still runs on an institutionally autistic idea I think fundamentally that everybody can make use of care in a completely anxiety free way. We set up our clinics and our services based on an idea that people can come along and get into relationship with care completely ordinarily and most of us can do that without even noticing. I guess one of the things that we know about people who've come from very adverse experiences is that their relationship with care is fundamentally compromised by that, that the trust they have in getting into relationship with another is massively disturbed by the experiences they've had. I think typically the way we respond to that certainly in the health services is by doing things like discharging people who don't turn up without sort of becoming interested. I wonder if you're not turning up is telling us something about your bigger health problem which is you don't trust care and those are sort of things that underpin the inverse care law in that the people who can make good use of care get all the care and can deal with fragmented siloed services because they can easily navigate the relationships between them. I think the population we work with really articulate in this area the need for a shared understanding that is fundamental in its nature about the relationship with care that the relationships that anybody has and their capacity to trust and make use of other human beings are the fundamental rate determining step in all health would be that relationship with housing services, health services, third sector services. It is the rate determining step. If it would be shared that understanding it would be very obvious that we'd all have to work together and you know based on that sort of principle and we wouldn't set up services that required people to engage in relationships in particular sorts of ways we would know that we might have to adapt the ways in which we relate to others to provide care to people. The personal centered care package is exactly what we should be trying to aspire to and some areas are managing to do that extremely well. We've taken evidence from individuals to tell us that sometimes agencies work against them in what they're trying to achieve and they don't get what they want from one so they end up having to go somewhere else so this whole multi agency process doesn't work for them but they have to identify themselves where they think they can get the support. You've touched on how local authorities can manage this forward and yes there are many local authorities who still look at the housing process and believe that that's the solution but in reality that isn't the solution for the individual. The individual just wants the process to be less and to examine that so how can we examine that and look at that and say well you need to change. Some areas have changed but other people are quite resistant to change and make that happen to ensure that there is that multi approach. I think an example of good practice is where and what we hear within some local authorities now is talking of vulnerable adults so rather than all these multiple labels of thinking about people in terms of their mental health separate from their criminal justice separate from their homelessness and I think that when you harmonise that with commissioning processes then I think that we start to achieve some of the stuff that was identified way back within the Christy report where people stop thinking within silos but in order for that to truly become implementable it's not just about thinking in silos it's about actually funding differently moving monies in a different way. Dr Parly. There's a lot to say on this I think but I won't say it all but I think some of the resistances are specialisms are very interesting one you know we can get very invested in the business of doing something specialist and so I think again I think our services drift towards being specialist services like in mental health services with alcohol services, eating disorder services, depression services like they're different like in some way we're talking about different discrete elements and of course let's say the people who can go along and navigate those sorts of splits and do those different relationships do quite well actually within their health service and it works all fine. One of the main reasons I guess I come across in terms of the people I work with is why they have not been able to make use of care there's plenty of care out there one of the things I noticed when I first came into the homeless sectors it's not short of care provision it's plenty of goodies on the table but there seems to be a problem in terms of the relationship between the people who need that care and the people who are providing it. We discharge in the in the 15 years I've been working in the access practice we have managed all of the people who come through the access practice of a history of trauma how many do you think we have managed to get into the specialist trauma centre in the NHS up at Morningside? I mean it doesn't happen because what is required for you to access a trauma service is to get an appointment letter go up there sit in a waiting room go into a room with somebody talk about yourself go away come back for next week's appointment and do that for a period of 14 weeks to get treatment and if you don't do that then you are discharged because you weren't engaging rather than you happen to be engaging in an ambivalent way based on the adversity you had in your history we don't operate along those lines we assume that everybody can make use of care and if you don't make use of care it's because you either don't want it or you're not engaging or some other kind of thing that's located in you not in us and how we set up our services. Thank you for being a very interesting, fascinating stuff. Supplementary, Kenneth Gibson? Yeah, yeah, a supplementary actually on that was basically I mean in the COSLA paper this is partnership working between agencies an area based level is the best way to deliver improved outcomes and local authorities are clearly wish to encourage partnership working at all levels we've heard about that and I think everyone would agree with that so I'm just really wanting to ask is there any way where this doesn't actually happen I mean where are there gaps if there are indeed gaps in partnership working across Scotland then as a third sector and private sectors are they both fully involved in terms of this partnership working across Scotland? Yeah I mean I think if if there wasn't gaps then there wouldn't be an issue so of course that we've got points that we need to learn about and I think particularly people in multiple and complex needs we know that interventions need to combine different approaches particularly around anti-poverty measures because even when we look at we know the biggest cause of homelessness is relationship breakdown for example but we know that there is different factors that contribute to that particularly anti-poverty measures mental health support and money advice are all things that need to work better together I know the committee is going to come on to the housing first model but that is something that a few councils have looked at and have viewed very positively and I think that that would be really helpful in terms of both the last questions I think there's obviously a resource implication there that councils are aware of but are very keen to look at and I think it's the very next question we're going to come on to is housing first. Excellent and just on the last point on that it's just around psychologically informed environments and how much that can help positive incomes as outcomes as well so I think yeah it's right to say that there are a few gaps there because if there wasn't the system would be working and we wouldn't have homeless people I think we know what they are and you know it's just sometimes about taking that leapy face to go forward with them and fund them. What I think the housing first option is something that we know we need to look at and I think it comes back to the point about welfare reform as well so you know we knew these things were coming but we perhaps didn't plan for them particularly well enough again I would say that comes back to resources and having the ability of joined up thinking in people to sit down and take the time and work through these issues with a multi agency approach community plan and partnerships are doing that very well in local authorities that's a model that's well integrated across Scotland and it's something that's continuously being built on so we're now seeing integrated joint boards working with housing working with mental health working with the Scottish prison service but there's more people that need to come around that table I mean we're talking about welfare reform but we've not really talked about DWP and their role in this and how they're working with local authorities now I'm hopeful and certainly feel reassured that in the future when some of those issues are devolved to Scotland that we might see a different relationship that's more positive and that involves local working but at the moment we've still got a long way to go to make sure that we can just keep the system running until we're able to do something different. Llyrain McGrath and Dr Burley want to give additional comments this, Llyrain? I think there are absolutely gaps and I think one of the, I would echo that across the country, I think one of the challenges that I see all the time in being able to respond is a lot of local authorities retract to their statutory duty and that is not, the statutory duty is not enabling, it's disabling and within the system particularly for people with the most extreme needs. I'm really good examination of how local authorities can better manage their statutory duties and actually work with front line service partners, third sector commission partners, to actually help them deliver their statutory duties rather than us having to pass a service user to the local authority in order for them to discharge their statutory duty and effectively then being then passed back to us to be able to have that direct access at the first point of contact, which will generally be a third sector organisation, you know, a crisis intervention will generally be a third sector organisation, but we then have to go through a process. And it really is, you know, it's been echoed already in the evidence that's been given that's we take people in the most extreme circumstances of their lives and make it the most difficult for them to access services, whether that be engaged with a health response because they have to visit a building at a defined point in time. And if they don't do that, then they're not compliant. They have to be in a particular state in order to be assessed for any particular thing. And if they can't do that, then their situation's just rolled on. They have to be able to engage with an online system for much of the housing access that we have across the country. If they have no experience of that, of no skill with that or no ability to concentrate for any short period of time, never mind the length of time it takes, if they are not able to go at that point in time and engage with a homeless access arrangement with the statutory sector, then they don't get the housing, the homelessness response that they require. All of those things make it difficult for people at the worst point in their lives. If their point of contact happens to be a street outreach support worker in any of the cities or a day centre in any of the cities, then it would be really powerful for that organisation to be able to do the work there and then with that individual and get them access to the services that they need without having to jump through a whole load of other hoops. So a real examination of how we can support local authorities to devolve that responsibility and not retract behind it in the way that they respond. People have to go through this process so that we can discharge our statutory duty. I think that that would be really helpful. Dr Barley, I think that it might be a slightly more abstract idea of GAB, but it echoes what I was saying before. It's something about an integration and understanding of what we are actually trying to do here. I think that one of the things that we've done is that we've integrated, we do integration sort of horizontally. One of the things that I think we forget about is a sort of more vertical integration where we, for example, would integrate some of our understandings about the good data we have from Harriet What University, for example, on adverse childhood experiences and all the material we have about that, and how that relates to some of the symptomatic presentations that we try and deal with here, which are often become very disconnected in terms of our interventions from an actual understanding of how they have evolved and developed. So it's about how do we integrate across the board vertically horizontally such that anybody who's working in this business has an understanding that can get them past the kind of diagnostic overshadowing that tends to happen when someone presents with a big symptom like, I'm homeless, or I use heroin, or I've got this problem here, and we can all get very involved with that symptom and start to become slightly amnesic about this person has come from somewhere. I was just going to say—I mean, I know you're going on to housing first, so I'm not going to ask a question like that as our colleagues would, but I would just say that I know that Dr Burley said that it should be commissioned without delay, that Simon Community has said that it provides the best sustainable outcomes, Turning Point has said that it should be the default model of choice with those as multiple complex needs, and housing first is an exciting model with a lot of potentials, so it caused last time an interesting discussion that I think we're about to have. Yes, absolutely, and I'll always start off with some questions on housing first. I know that some of my committee members want to come in and ask about that as well. We've said that at the start of the session, the committee had a visit to Helsinki to look at the finished housing first model, and we met with a variety of agencies and people. We met with Mayor Vapavuri, who's the Mayor of Helsinki, who's the former housing minister there, and he took the view that, basically, he said, get an implant on a door, give people a permit tenancy and give them all the supports that they need, and do it at the first instance, rather than jump through lots of hoops. The explanation that he gave of the previous process in Finland was that someone may appear as a rough sleeper in Helsinki or in another city, and they may get into an emergency hostel, or take your chance on a nightly basis, and they may get a more stable hostel, and they may get some form of temporary accommodation, and they may get some form of long-term temporary accommodation, and they may get a permanent tenancy, and, of course, all those hoops the individual had to jump through never really happened. Housing first was about that first opportunity, where people were presenting with multiple complex needs of rough sleeper, even if they were in recovery from alcohol addiction, significant and complex mental health needs in recovery from other substance addictions, or dealing with offending behaviour. We very quickly get the permanent tenancy and wrap support around them in the first instance. Their statistics showed that there was a dramatic increase in the health and wellbeing and the tenancy retention of those individuals. It was a significant financial investment. I am very conscious that Patrick McIce here from Turning Point Scotland, who, on a very small scale, for one section of a homeless and vulnerable community, has been modelling some of that work. I am not very keen to hear what your experience has been, but a key question should be in the witnesses' understanding of housing first. It is not just housing first, it is housing and everything else first, because one of the things that they did in Finland is the employed 300-plus additional support workers, whether that was of a medical discipline or social work discipline. They are an individual with a cross-cutting expertise to support individuals. It was not a silver bullet, and we will come on and look at some of the issues with housing first in a moment. That sets the scene of what I think the committee discovered in Finland. We are quite keen to hear the initial comments from Mr McIce and how Turning Point have managed housing first, and what your experience has been as well as some initial comments from other witnesses. Mr McIce? It is interesting, because I have also been to Helsinki and looked at the housing first model there, which is certainly an interesting model. I think that it reflects a lot of what we have learned and what we have been doing within our first and most mature housing first service, which is in Glasgow. We have been operating since 2011, but almost the thing that you have to say first for me is that it is about understanding a system, everything that we have already said, which is a staircase model that makes people have to demonstrate that they can live independently in their housing ready. I have worked in homelessness for nearly 30 years and I know that there is a whole group of individuals, whether we are describing as multiple complex needs or whatever, that there is a group of individuals who that system fails. What housing first does and what we have did is to take those people who actually sometimes aren't in recovery, who are still interveniously using and we are giving them a house, but the key part to that is we're wrapping the right level of support around them. There are specific components that have to be within that support, I believe, to make it work. One is you have to have regularity of contact. It has to be assertive. For example, some of the stuff we've touched on is how do rough sleepers engage with, for example, a choice-based letting-housing initiative. The can is too difficult, so what we have to ensure is that we go out and that we are meeting people where they are, if it's their begging sites, if they're sofa surfing, if it's where they pick up their prescription for methadone, so we go and meet people where they are and we take them through that whole journey of housing. Another key element that works for us, there's some research that says that without it housing first still works, but I think a peer support worker, where we employ people who support workers who have lived experience, that is overt within their job title and I think that they bring a different level of authenticity and authority to the relationship, which I think can genuinely be transforming for people and there can be a contagion, a hope around recovery. One of the things that Harriet Watt showed within the research of our Glasgow housing first service was that even though we're not telling people to give up substances, the very fact that you give people a house, they do give up and suddenly a quarter of the people within the cohort they looked at went into recovery, they stopped using and there's basic things that just having a house achieves, having a registered address to have a GP for the first time, which gives you access to all kinds of other services. For Turning Point Scotland, although we accept that there's a magic number, which is often used, which is 8020, our belief is that 80 per cent of provision should be in a housing first basis, but that 20 per cent you will always need to have some kind of person-centre response to people who have got complex needs, so you do have some supported accommodation. I think that that should be direct access and should be emergency based and it also think it should be pie, it should be psychologically informed, so if you have fewer services that are supported accommodation in them, you then spend more money to make them better. Before I take Dr Burley and just for the public record, a specific client group that you're dealing with? Yeah, so our client group was weed, I mean if you look at housing faster across the world, it's often people who have complex mental health, but our client group are people who have got substance misuse issues, but remember everything else that we've said? I think they're the same client group. Those guys that we're working with all have complex trauma, have been diagnosed many of them with personality disorder, hate that label, but that's the label it's given. These are very, very similar groups, but what it did make it challenging for us and there are specific issues in Glasgow because it's a stock transfer local authority, we were having to go to RSLs and say, listen, we have individuals who are intervening drug users going to give us houses for them. That can be a hard sell, as you might imagine, but for some RSLs they did come on board with this, in particular note to GHA, to THENU and to Queen's Cross Housing Association, who'd ran a pilot with this, and that pilot, once it became demonstrable, allowed and the success is demonstrable, it allowed other RSLs to buy into it. Tenen is in these situations? So it's a secure tenence, it's got a secure tenence to give to the tenence and if you look at those key principles of housing first, and one of them is you separate housing from support, so even if somebody was to lose that tenence, the support that we would give them would continue, and in the five years we've had one eviction, talking about a very complex group, we've had one full eviction, we've had three people also who we have supported to give up their tenences because it's a better option for them rather than going into rent areas because things were failing, but the rest of the individuals have sustained tenences or moved on successfully, you know, maybe met somebody who needs a bigger house, but we, the failure rate is very, very low, I hate the word failure, sorry. Yes, I understand. Dr Burleigh? I'm sure you'd just say it's worth reminding ourselves that housing first was really developed from a sort of moral and ideological perspective rather than a theoretical one, but by marry happen chance I think the reason it works is because theoretically it's very sound and makes a lot of sense and is by accident perhaps psychologically informed, Winnicott in the 50s came up with a profound idea that home is where we start from, and I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that that is actually the case. In terms of the population we're talking about what we know, again what we know with a reasonably capital K is that this is a population whose start in life was not good, and so they present with a range of symptoms, as Patrick said, be that homelessness, drug use, mental health problems, whatever it might be, and we keep trying to address those things without addressing what is the fundamental ailment that has led the person to develop these symptoms in the first place, and often is where did they start from, and I think what housing first aims to address is not a restart, but to provide something that has been absent, to say here is a secure base which you do not need to worry about, it is there, because often what we do in housing in homelessness I think is a bit like in many of you have children, be like bring up your children in your own home and every day saying to them you do know that this won't last forever, and then expecting them to do well at school and be able to focus on friendships and develop and grow, we do a lot of that in homeless services, we expect people to address high end things like drug use, mental health problems while at the same time saying you do know the ground beneath your feet isn't going to be there, like tomorrow and the next day or in a month's time, as opposed to saying here's a secure base, here's something that you can attach to and is not going away and you can be confident is around, and then even when you engage with it in quite an ambivalent way and are in and out about it, we will not give up, we will hold this line and say here is something you can rely upon, and then in time once that becomes internalised the person may then be able to address other bits and bobs, so for me my belief in housing first is one, the evidence space shows it's very good, but actually from a theoretical point of view it's incredibly sound, and I think that's probably why it works. Okay, thank you Lillian McGrath. Yeah, I think everything that's been said is absolutely, and your experience in health thinking I'm sure endorses the value of the model. I think one of the things that we need to be mindful of in Scotland is that issue about the 20 per cent, and that 20 per cent don't need to be excluded from housing first in our view, it's more about the models of housing first that we apply in Scotland to the context, and we do have a lot of really good quality support and accommodation buildings and environments out there, why can that not be permanent housing, why can we not recognise that that person has a long-term support need in the way that we do for mental health, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, older people, we don't consider people who are long-term supported in their home and any of those other care groups as homeless, why can we not apply that same methodology to people who have come through the homeless' route but who also have complex needs, and see them in the context of their complex needs that will require long-term support, but they may not or cannot cope, may not want to live on their own in a flat regardless of the level of support around them, or they cannot cope with that for whatever reason at this stage in their lives, but why can they not still have a permanent home and not be regarded as homeless anymore, but within a supported environment, in the way that exactly that they've done in Helsinki where they've flipped models from being supported hostels into permanent tenancies, but within a supported environment. He's out a little more, I'm bringing in Dr Burleigh and then Andy Whiteman, you can take the question forward from here because now there's other stuff you want to raise, now that was one of the eye-openers for the committee in Helsinki where it sat uncomfortable, general chap, I've got no considered opinion on this yet, but it sat a little bit uncomfortable with the committee the idea of adapting former hostels into 80 studio flats in the one place in community living. We weren't sure whether that was a model that would or wouldn't work in Scotland and would that just re-intervenge a hostel system that there seemed much more limited use of scattered housing in Finland, so if you go for this studio apartment how do you then move on from that, what's your pathway into another permanent tenancy else within the city or the country if that's what you want, so it just irks a little bit, we weren't sure whether or not that would be appropriate for Scotland, so I'm interested to hear you say Lorraine that that kind of community living might have a value, so I'd be interested a little bit more about that. For the majority of people, we would always seek to support their aspiration to have a home in the community on their own, but for those taking a very personalised approach, for those who don't feel able to take that step or don't want to take that step, there has to be an alternative because the only other thing that happens to that person is that they remain stuck in all of the system and they bounce about various emergency models rather than saying, right, this is my permanent place, all the points that Adam made about this is my home and I am safe and insecure here, I don't need to be talked, you don't need to talk to me on a daily basis of your moving on plan, your forward plan, we need to start talking about housing, this is my home and I feel comfortable here and I know what I want and I know that I'm supported effectively and within a peer group it's not necessarily congregate living, thankfully we don't have many hostels of those kind of sizes in Scotland, so we would be talking much more small scale in terms of 8, 10, 15, but there is a real opportunity there to meet a need for that 20% or some of that 20% that will not sustain a traditional housing first model within a flat in the community on their own. Really interesting, in the examples we saw in Helsinki did appear to work, so that would transpose to Scotland or not and what they were saying to us was do your housing first model that stood for your circumstances rather than lift and shift was the message we were getting, Patrick Mackay, did you want to come in? It's a very interesting area and it's a very contentious area and lots of people who work in housing first have different views around it, whether you should congregate versus disperse which is sometimes described as a pathway model and then you have a thing called housing first light just to really confuse you, but in terms of Helsinki it was interesting because I also went to see a model which was described as housing first and I think there's very good housing first models within Helsinki but when you started to tease out we met some service users there and they were still service users interestingly and we were taking in to look at people's rooms which I never went because I'm not terribly comfortable doing that, but there was something still very temporary about it for them, there was still an expectation that some of them moved on in that instance, but I think that Lorraine's may be making a different point and I don't disagree with it in which you can have smaller models of congregate living which people have greater security of tenure and interestingly Samson Merys, Susie Architects of Housing First would say that as well, he would agree with that, but for me the default model must always be that people are given a house and it's even if it's not housing first, it's housing led. Now within that and it's only because there are a group of individuals who when there's a perception of support they're always put into this staircase model in which they have to demonstrate and we have to stop doing that. Well Councillor Parry then Dr Burley and then we'll come back to Andy Wightman after that so Councillor Parry. Yeah just very briefly picking up some of those points from a local authority point if you are certainly agree with Mr Mackay around not only to have the physical housing there but also the wraparound support as well. Very much from a local authority level we know that we need to take a multiagency approach but that doesn't mean to say that every single agency has to go and visit one person and in fact sometimes that has a detrimental effect so I think it's about finding the right people to work with people to get the right outcomes but not necessarily in a way that creates duplication because we know that that has not only a resource impact but an impact on that person as well. And secondly from the point the very pragmatic point of view around housing options I don't know we've not talked a lot about housing supply but obviously housing supply as an issue but I think we need to have a real debate around what new houses look like. Local authorities at the moment are changing the way that they're building houses and the recent ship plans that came forward from local authorities that are looking at more houses for single people, supported accommodation, what that means for our more elderly residents but I think we need to have a real debate around the types of properties that we have available for homeless housing, what is the shape of that and what kind of materials we look like. We need to have a very pragmatic conversation about that and make sure that we build on flexibilities to funding as well. So at the moment local authorities have a very prescriptive type of funding for the type of house that they build so that's something that the committee might want to explore further as well. Thank you and ship plans, strategic housing investment plans, just not everyone watching will necessarily know what ships we're referring to. Dr Burley, thanks for your patience. Two quick points they're both on the theme of understanding really. One I think you talked about some of the resistances to potential and I think one of those is an idea which we still labour under at times within the population that I'm referring to about choices, that we have good housing systems, we have good mental health systems and then there's this group of people who just make choices. They choose not to engage, they choose not to do this, they choose not to do X, Y and Z. It's just simply not true. It's articulated far better by Suzanne Fitzpatrick for example in a recent paper she's talking about we know what the variables are. The people we're talking about have not chosen their childhoods, they did not choose their development, they did not choose where they were born or how their mind was formed. Any more than they choose how and in what degree of repertoire they have to engage with the current sort of systems. So that's I think something that needs to be born in mind because I still think there's a cultural idea the person who's sitting on Southbridge begging is kind of choosing to do that in some way and he's just not really engaging with the proliferation of services that we've made available. I think the second point is again slightly pedantic one but I think quite an important one I come from a profession that's very interested in coming up with quite discrete models and then really inhabiting them for quite long periods of time and I think there's nothing quite like a discrete model to exclude people and I think there's a risk with something like housing first it becomes a brand and a model and there's a there's a manual about how you do it and then we can do it and the country make money about it. I think that the broader sort of definition would be something like as I say being psychologically informed of which housing first is an example of one but there are many examples of one based on good sound evidence based theory about what has happened here what is our understanding and can we develop a service that is informed by that understanding. In some cases it might look like housing first as was originally described in some cases it might look like something very very different. We've run pilot cases in Edinburgh that have been very much modified versions of what might be called housing first but it's been incredibly effective and incredibly money saving as well as human misery saving. Thank you very much Andy Wightman. Thank you convener we've covered a bit of the ground there. I mean one of the things I noted from Finland look at their action plan for 2016-17 were the costs so the cost estimate for their plan for 2016-17 was 78 million euros that's broken down into 54 million of investment service development of 24 million euros. I mean for country 5 million that's those are not big numbers and I think I'm correct in saying the Scottish Government when it announced its short life working group for rough sleeping was talking about a budget of 50 million over the life remaining lifetime of this Parliament. So we're talking about sums of money that are in very much the same ballpark and are not huge sums of money relative to other things we spend money on. We also heard and I think we've yet to receive possibly and read some work that had been done in Tampere in Finland looking at the cost benefits the fact that if you spend this money you are saving also some substantial sums of money in public services that are designed around the traditional approaches that in themselves cost money. So I just wonder if you could give some kind of sense of your own understanding about the cost implications and the cost benefits of a housing first approach to substantially eliminating homelessness in Scotland. Okay, Patrick Mackay followed by Dr Barlow. Yeah I mean I think that it's important to be clear that the group that we're talking about within housing first are often people who will use services for a long time anyway. So the idea that and it is important that you don't have a finite time with the support that it has to be ongoing. I know that can make commissioners nervous but what we would say is that that support would be picked up in some other way by some other silo funding so we have to be open to that. In terms of savings I mean a basic saving like the example I gave you about or provided in terms of people being registered with the GP. Neil Hamlet public health doctor will often talk about the graph that he shows people and it's about who uses acute services and it's people who are older and it's people who have complex need. So just by registering somebody with a doctor you know I'm not saying they will never use acute services but you will see a diminishment of that and that in itself that saving definitely you know will exist and will happen. I think sometimes with cost benefit analysis some of the challenges are that the people who are commissioning you might not be the people who feel the saving and that becomes a challenge in your argument but again it goes back to Christy for me if you return to the idea that we should stop being so siloed that you know and accept that that saving will be to the public purse and not to one silo within the public purse. I mean really what what Patrick said at the case example the pilot studies we've done were actually but two of those cases they didn't actually register the GP but in terms of the basic security that was seemed to be provided by the accommodation and our formulation some of what how the person was using things like for example regularly calling a Scotch ambulance service regular attending A and E in ways that they would call inappropriate and were very high cost regularly using the criminal justice service would be ways of getting involved with people in a sort of ambivalent type of relationship. The intervention that we provided seemed to address that to the point where on all of those points hospital admission ambulance call hours A and E attendants days in prison days in hospital days in court all dropped but that's before you even get into the human cost of well the number of days he was rough sleeping dropped to almost zero you know and this was somebody whose longest period in accommodation was six to eight weeks maximum and then suddenly we suddenly we were able to house him for 34 months and in that 34 months everything drops to he's still drink he's still got lots of problems I mean this isn't some kind of oh he's all better and become a tax paying individual that's not really what's happened but he's certainly secure and we might if we did it for long enough things might might have changed ultimately that came to then because it was a pilot project but at least carries the potential for some kind of psychological development because you have got the fundamentals in of a secure base from which other things could potentially grow from also just diminishes the risk that he's going to be found dead in a graveyard and if he is going to die at least he he dies in a place where someone will find him the next morning and he's safe and warm that's very helpful I don't know if others wish to come in that Nicola Dughey? I mean I suppose from a from a causal perspective and picking up on the the Christy point everyone's all about breaking down silos but we don't necessarily see the same willingness when we start to talk about preventative spend around about budgets so I think the thing about it is everyone's all for breaking down those silos until it's well can you give us some of your budget to to move into that preventative spending I say that as a representative local government who are just as bad as that so I think we have to be aware that there's not an awful lot of money sloshing about in the system to to move into this and yes we will see those benefits eventually so I think we just have to have to be aware that we're not in a situation where we have some stuff that we can lift off the shelf to do this and I suppose it would be interesting to look at the module in Helsinki about how much they put in at the very start to actually stimulate that so that we started to get into that kind of type of preventative spend so I think that it's just worth saying that. That's certainly one of the attitudes here is well the Scottish ambulance service aren't giving the housing department the money that they've saved on even just on these two individuals that's not what's happening. Okay now just because of sorry Andy we want to come back and I apologize yes of course of course. I just want to affirm that you make a very very important point about preventative spending and I don't think we in this place have yet grappled properly and come up with a solution of how you do that accounting and how those savings that the police might make that help the health service how they in turn can help local authorities etc that's a vital part of all of this. I just want you know just in conclusion on this on my line of questioning here I mean we're going to have to make some recommendations on housing first and it seems you know there's one school of thought that this might be a useful thing and we could do a few pilots and in a sense I suppose Patrick you've been doing what might be described as a pilot. The other school of thought is the kind of finished one where you had very very firm political leadership where the man who is now the mayor of Helsinki was the housing minister he embraced it he faced significant political challenges but he brought key constituencies along said right we're going to commit to this and commit to this wholeheartedly because we believe we can make big big strides forward through doing it. I mean what would you what would your sense be of the role of housing first in eliminating substantially homelessness in Scotland is it something we should recommend government consider or at the other end of the scale is it something we should be recommending that they wholeheartedly endopped without with very little caveats. Councillor Perry forward by Patrick Mackay. Yeah I would certainly agree with sentiments looking at that and I think that a mechanism that would be interesting perhaps for the committee to look at as a vehicle for that is community planning partnerships and the benefit of those is that they are already recognised and they're in existence and they also provide that locally democratic layer that perhaps is something that is a key element to what's happening in Helsinki so it gives you the local democratic element as well which is perhaps from a causal point of view perhaps more important in terms of local flexibilities and the ability to be able to feed in local priorities in terms of demographics and what those local issues look like but having a consistent model in place to do that from. Patrick Mackay I think that Scotland has some of the most robust homelessness legislation in the world and we're recognised as having that but I think that where we have fallen down a wee bit is in terms of advancing housing first you know I would say that you know that of course we have to be mindful that it doesn't dominate everything that there's other ways but I think that for it to be fully successful there has to be a Scottish government commitment to actually creating the mechanisms that allow local authorities to scale up housing first at a significant level. Dr Barley I think really just to put in to echo that I mean it strikes me theoretically it makes sense economically it seems to potentially make sense evidence base wise when it's been done elsewhere it makes sense so then my question is well what are the resistances to it and that strikes me that those are some of the more ideological ideas about about why we might not try and provide this sort of level of care for this group of people but with the only caveat I think I would want to put in is something about the kind of restriction on it as a discrete idea of housing first looks like this it has this this this and this and that's it and if it's not that well then you're not true to model and blah blah blah blah blah I think something where you have the description where you're talking about theoretically evidence based informed interventions of which housing first happens to be an example is a much better way of describing it to sort of say what we want to do is commit to providing into commissioning services that have an evidence base and that are theoretically sound of which housing first is an example but as I say there and a very good example because it really addresses some of the very fundaments of what it is to be to to be to to be able to develop as a human being but there is going to be examples for particular individuals where you may have to tweak around the edges based on what that individual sort of case is so I think it'd be a commitment to the fundamentals and then freedom for services to be able to tweak around the edges for particular individuals. Eileen McGrath, do you want to answer that? I would echo all three comments I do think it needs to be something that Scotland embraces quite strongly but on the basis of the principles of housing first not a defined model because we do need to look at it both in the Scottish context and then the local context of each individual local authority and then down to the individual person and made to marry the principles of housing first alongside the national policy agenda around personalisation and self-directed support so that the adoption of the models are not just about this is what the evidence base tells us although that's really important but it's about what is this person need what is going to work best for this person and how do we create a network of responses that allows us to do that for every single person that finds themselves in those extreme circumstances. Okay Dr Burlid, before I bring in just a time check, what point can we get other witnesses waiting for the next session hoping to finish this around quarter past 11? Apologies to those that are that are waiting. We've got a couple of questions we want to mop up I think the final question will be from our deputy Elaine Smith who will talk a little bit more about the hearing now the hearing now for us sleeping and homelessness and what's actually happening just now but we'll just mop up one or two things before we close the evidence session. Dr Burlid you wanted to add something? Very quick I just want to articulate very clearly why the point I made is important one of the things that's really problematic for the population who work with it is exclusion they are excluded repeatedly from places and one of the reasons one of the things that holds an exclusion together is discretion of intervention discretion of service all the sorts of boundaries that we put in place the risk of saying right we have housing first is as soon as you put two boundaries in like that you start to exclude and that is the fundamental thing that gets in the way of the people we work with getting care is exclusion. Thank you it's worth putting on the record that when we were in Helsinki it was noted that you know Helsinki Finland developed housing first in isolation from New York who also developed a very different housing first model so it's underlying principle rather than efficacy to one lift and shift model I think that's that that's come through very strongly from the witnesses it should be set in a Scottish context with some underlying principles but there is of course a short life expert group the Scottish government has has started just now and there are some budget lines around that as well so 10 million pound a year ending homelessness together budget line and a 20 million pound a year alcohol and drug services budget line one of the underlying drivers towards homelessness and rough sleeping as well so I do want to finish with the deputy governor talking about the hearing now of homelessness but given the fact that the short life expert group is currently meeting any comments in relation to that and not just those budget lines but of course there's the affordable housing budget line more generally and how that's going to be used and then we'll finish off with that final line of questioning any thoughts in relation to the working group or or budgets just your offer you don't have to any opportunity for you though laryon McGrath well I suppose as the only member of the working group here I think the challenge that we face is the the same challenges that we're talking about round this round this room is that how do we integrate a response into a system that is designed around a different population it's designed around the kind of general population rather than the discrete needs of the of the people that that we have caught up in homelessness in Scotland just now so we're bumping against those issues already and although there's additional resources there that doesn't necessarily address the system change that's required and that's going to be one of the big challenges and that's where the cut across to those other programme for government priorities is going to prove really important that's helpful don't fully to answer to that question it's opportunity if you want to though Nicola Dickie I mean I think from a from a causal perspective we recognise that the interventions that have been made around about the action group are over time and that we're coming into winter and there's some very specific things that the group have been set up to do so I think fundamentally we recognize that we would go back to the point that we were looking for strategic interventions though so the action group does what the action group does but we make sure that the conversations that need to be had are already taken forward and that we continue to feed that sort of stuff in so I think we recognize the action group are doing something specific in the longer term we're looking for those strategic discussions to continue around about the governance structures we already have okay that that's very helpful to me thanks convener um rather than the hearing now of homelessness it's more specifically about the type of homelessness that is rough sleeping um and I have a specific question for the Simon community it's just if Lillian McGrath could explain slightly in more detail about the the reasons that you've given in your written submission about why you think rough sleeping is more visible now in Glasgow in particular well if you're referring to Glasgow in your written submission it's predominantly in Glasgow there is a perception of an increase in rough sleeping within the public but there is also um a reality that the people that that are predominantly on the streets are all been known to services for a long time um and there's a range of indicators that tell us what that's about and a lot of it is about their personal safety um but it's also a big part of it is public generosity um and compassionate responses from charitable groups where people are able to find themselves sustaining a lifestyle that is known and comfortable for them it's not necessarily a choice it's something that's become this is what I do this is where I am at and also public giving is supporting that to some degree for some and that will preclude someone it's particularly for those who are heavily entrenched in addiction where the addiction is driving their behaviours they will they will choose that opportunity to receive public giving over accessing services so what you're talking about there is um people who are rough sleeping who have begging pitches as you put it in your response because not all people who are begging are homeless it's not it was noted elsewhere no we do we do a an audit of the street begging population in Glasgow every three months um so we have a really good level of intelligence around who the street beggars are and what their circumstances are okay only about a third of them are are actively in the most extreme homelessness circumstances the vast majority are there for other reasons of desperation there you know um that vary across the board but for that third who are also rough sleepers um a big part of what keeps them in that situation for many is that opportunity because for many of them they will not have an active benefit claim they will not have active engagement with statutory services um but they will have an active engage an active addiction that is driving their daily behaviours um and that's a really difficult thing to to break when the opportunity is there i mean we heard yesterday about a young girl um that we have managed um is moved into to temporary accommodation but she would talk about you know trying to sit and do a benefit claim for her took hours because of the complexity of her situation and while she was sitting there she was saying to the member of staff I can see my pound coins walking past my regular givers walking past you know and and and I need that money I need that money because I'm now starting to feel a desperate need to feed my addiction so that's the challenge that the staff face and that's one of the difficulties that we've got in the how difficult the system is to navigate for people because it's really difficult for her to get from that situation where she's able to sit and receive money from the public and feed her addiction to quickly transition from that into a place where she's got her benefits in place she has a settled place to call home and she's got access to the health and addiction services that she needs the journey she's got to navigate from there to there it's so problematic that it's much easier for her to just stay there and and talk to her regular givers every day thanks very much is that audit information you have something that you could share with us yes thank you can I then go on to asking another specific question around that to both yourself Lorraine McGrath and to Dr Burley based on the submissions you indicate that you said in your response here that public and charitable initiatives are enabling people to sustain life on the streets but Dr Burley in his contribution also notes that actually touches for example are the ones that are showing a good model of housing for the most unchanged homeless providing basically nightshelters specifically in Edinburgh and Glasgow so I suppose what I want to ask about that is what are your views on the available support for rough sleepers is there a need for more temporary accommodation I mean I know that we moved away from that sort of model but actually right now is is there a need for looking at some of the unintended consequences it might have occurred from policy decisions in the past if I use the example of the people that we've been working through the can initiative and again even just talking about that young woman that I've just referenced she's been out of temporary accommodation over the over many years she's also rough slept for long periods of time the emergency temporary accommodation never ever worked for her it failed broke down very very quickly she's now in a temporary furnished flat which is still temporary accommodation but she sees it as a house she sees it as a as a home we were able to turn that which is not ordinary we don't ordinarily transition people from rough sleeping straight into a temporary furnished flat there's usually you know a few steps in between and I suppose if anything this endorses the the idea of a housing a housing first approach they're settled she's she's living with a partner they're much more settled now she's engaging with health service she's engaging with with responses as is her partner you know there's been some mobiles this is the first time that that's happened for her that she's been able to go straight into a flat without without staircase and then in and out of emergency and and temporary accommodation it is still temporary because it's a temporary furnished flat in Glasgow but it's a home rather than a than a room somewhere so do we need more temporary accommodation right this very second probably yes in terms of just quantity and quality quantity but is that the solution for people like that young woman then no I don't think it is I think it is being able to transition her to somewhere that she can call home whatever home looks like for her as quickly as possible and getting the support in place for her in relation to winter night shelters that are operated both here in Edinburgh and in Glasgow it's not just about the shelter it's about what goes with that shelter having someone come into the winter night shelter from rough sleeping is a real opportunity and we've worked really hard in Glasgow in the last few years to really build up the service response that goes with the opportunity for people to have that safe place of safety overnight so that services are in reaching so that we are we're there every night and we're there every morning to make sure that as many people are transitioned out of that the need for winter night shelter is quickly as possible and that's proven really successful so one of the things that the action group is looking at is whether or not we need to ramp up winter night shelter provision this year but very much in the context of how do we do that but making sure that there's a massive service response around that as well because it's not just about having a place of safety overnight it's an opportunity to affect change in that person's life as well. I specifically ask Dr Burley on that that you say in your submission that provide good basic low threshold shelter for those who need it so could you maybe expand on what you mean by that? What I mean by that is I think again from a sort of psychological understanding point of view one of the things that ambivalence leads you towards service providers is oxymorons like trying to provide permanent temporary accommodation and things like that and trying to actually provide something that addresses and understands the psychological and emotional needs of the population you're trying to serve. I think what what we call night shelters can do is allow people who are deeply ambivalent about attachment to be both in and out so they can both have somewhere where they can be in but know that they can also leave very quickly and so it's not permanent which might evoke a very sort of claustrophobic response but it's not completely absent which then might evoke a quite agriphobic response and we are talking about people who have very big agriphobic claustrophobic crisis is where when they're attached to people they feel very distressed and when they're detached from people they feel very distressed so I think what night shelters can do or that sort of accommodation can do is provide one step in a developmental pathway towards I guess what we might understand as being healthy attachment where we can do things like form relationships with people and houses and jobs etc in a way that feels anxiety free and secure and allows us to develop as human beings and the rest of it so I would understand the provision of shelter like that as being part of this broad spectrum that we talked about that might come under psychologically informed I would still say it's a housing first type approach where you're saying what we are going to provide for you is an accommodation that you can make use of and at least is sympathetic or based upon our understanding or our discussed understanding with you about where you are developmentally what your psychological needs are it's not to say that it should just then become a dumping ground because as I think Lorraine articulates it's how we find and position ourselves in relation to people and I think there can be a real skill that care staff are very good at doing that's sort of looking at people out the corner of one's eye so it's not to sort of scare them off by going right let's do lots of work and really address your issues which can make people run to the hills and at the same time not just kind of going okay they're just no hopers there's no point in doing anything with them and just giving up on them but trying to find some balance where you can exist in the ambivalence and remain interested in people who both attract your attention and disable it and I think as I say I think night shelters I think the only reason my my experience is the only resistance of things like night shelters is an ideological one of oh we just don't like that idea on that can then I ask you my final question I suppose convener if you don't mind is that at the moment in Glasgow in Edinburgh it is the churches that are providing this accommodation mainly church groups providing this accommodation so is it appropriate whilst that's obviously much needed and they're doing a good service is it appropriate that it's charitable institutions it's charity if you like that's providing that or should the state be doing it can I say I mean as I say from a from a health point of view I think it's reasonably scandalous if you look at if you thought about the consequences of adversity being a massive difficulty and be able to trust and make relationships with other human beings which I said is the fundament that might allow us to do things like get jobs live and all that and have good health then the ailment of having that is a fundamental health problem and one of the consequences of that is to for example in some cases to be jobless homeless relationship less and street living that is a bit that's a health problem and the health intervention there is the provision of some kind of shelter that might allow the person to start developing a trusting relationship with with a with a human object in some way so I think fundamentally it should be it's worth reminding ourselves the average age of death at the Edinburgh access practice over the last five years is 42 it's a really life limiting condition to not be able to form and maintain human relationships it really really is and I think something like the provision of of shelter like that if we could get our heads around it and our understanding around it we could think about that as a fundamental health intervention that was being as part of our health and social care canon. I would endorse an awful lot of what Adam's saying I think if there's a state response I would probably like to see that much more on the basis of a return to an opportunity for people to have direct access to accommodation without having to jump through the hoops which endorsers all the principles that Adam's talking about there in terms of people being able to opt in and opt out on the basis of what their experience allows them to cope with. We don't have that in any of the major cities at the moment and that I think that would be an important part of new provision or a change in provision or even to test that out this winter if we possibly could do neither of the major cities to look at what can we change if we can have low threshold services that people don't have to jump through any hoops they don't have to get any hoops to get accommodated that night they just they're there they engage with street outreach and they're able to be connected with it and they can leave the next day without consequence I come back again that next night for however many times they need to do that before they have built up enough trust and engagement with the staff there or with the staff that work in and around that service so that's a bit more structured I suppose than looking at more winter night shelters of frankly mattresses on floors in a shared space if we were able to look at some direct access arrangements for some of the accommodation that we've already have and to be able to use that much more flexibly on a basis of personal choice rather than engagement with the system then I think I would certainly support that final comment from councillor parry but even if it's the most interesting thing in the world councillor parry and no other witnesses I'm a freaking comment at this point we're going to have to close the evidence session right so no pressure then councillor parry thanks for being up I'll make it very brief and it's just to urge some questions to the committee around thinking about rough sleep winners only at a city centre problem of course it's not so we do need to think about a strategic approach but also think about local issues because we know that people will go from a local authority in a rural area to a centre in Glasgow or Edinburgh as well so just to consider that and the strategic approach thank you okay well it just remains for myself to thank all our witnesses for what is an extensive and rewarding for the MSP's enemy evidence session this morning please continue to follow where we're inquiry if there's any additional comments you want to make email the clerks contact ourselves and we can we can get that that fed into us but thank you very much and no doubt this will continue can we suspend briefly to allow the new witness panel to take their seats we'll spend for a couple of minutes thanks thank you and I reconvene this meeting of the committee and we are still on item two with our second panel who have joined us and thank you very much for your patience as we have taken a little bit more time to get here than we had thought that we would our panel are Joe Connelly criminal justice voluntary sector forum paul brown chief executive legal services agency nicky brown homelessness and housing support senior manager city of edinburgh council and jamie stewart housing development officer scottish refugee council before i ask you to make an opening statement if you wish as i understand most of you do can i welcome you to the committee thank you for coming and also put on record an apology from our convener who has had to leave as the convener's group are meeting with the first minister shortly so can we start please with Joe Connelly with a short opening statement okay Joe Connelly from i'm representing the criminal justice voluntary sector forum but i'm a chief executive of a wide people as well so but and the criminal justice voluntary sector forum is a collaborative group of voluntary organisations consists of 31 organisations who have come together and with a view to what to working as collaboratively as possible in terms of addressing with local authorities and and the scottish government some of the issues around but i just want to just highlight some of the key messages we've given and in our response and what we identified as there's a gap between legislation and implementation and one of the things i was struck with when i read the full response from from our group was how disparate the service there are lots and lots of things happening across the country but they're pretty disparate and so the standard type of service you receive depends on which part of the country you are living in i also identified imprisonment as an important risk factor for why people become homeless and that does not only for the prisoner you know homelessness can hit the families when they're left to to to defend on their own they can end up running into rent arrears and and there's a clear link between homelessness and re-offending and we as a third sector we believe that we have a critical role to play in terms of service delivery working with statutory bodies in terms of not only just providing accommodation but providing support as well the accommodation offer and i can certainly speak for my organisation that has to be of the highest standard in terms of you know it's not we don't throw mattresses in a floor we we people who will come out of prison will walk into a nice decorated flat and with all the amenities and things like that without with our wraparound support around it prevention's the key and i think especially when people arrive in prison almost the day they arrive you know the day they're going to leave so you can start to actually work towards a plan that says identifying if there are issues of homelessness as well as other issues for them and put that plan into action and i suppose last but not least to being consideration has to be given with regards to the impact of welfare reform i was talking to one of my managers yesterday and they described it as a kind of general shambles in terms of and some of the work some of the things that are having to disentangle through this new welfare reform or universal credit etc so so that's that that's i just wanted to summarise the the position of the forum Chris Conly i'm sure some of my colleagues will wish to pick up some of those points and could i invite paul brown just before i do you could also say thank you as we did visit the legal services agency as part of our pre approach to this whole inquiry so thank you for that we enjoyed the visit much appreciated i'm here to represent the service agency but i'm also a member of the campaign for housing and social welfare law reform which is a sort of flexible umbrella body but the proposals points that i'm making have been discussed with quite a number of people um i think our position broadly speaking is that a home Scottish homelessness legislation has rightly been praised as a model of good practice um the same can't be said however for its implementation that to reflect what's just been said there's a there's a disparity between principles and practices we haven't taken on boards the consequences of unintended consequences of a variety of changes and i think this is a real welcome opportunity to look at some of those the major change that we see as having happened is the effect of stock transfer in many local authority areas the local authority has the duty but not the means to carry out their duties local authority need local authorities need access to rsl stock um that doesn't seem to work often don't know why i'm not in the position to comment on that that's a separate issue but i can i think say that the legal basis for local authority referrals to rsls is weak section five of the 2001 act is if you like controlled by section six which provides for an arbitration process but that's cumbersome weak and so far as i'm aware never been used if it has been used hardly ever doesn't seem to be the right sort of legal relationship the arrangements were based on another on the requirements of another area um the other issue now i think it's been a theme that we've heard throughout the evidence that i've heard today is that homeless people have no direct voice um and it's not surprising that key issues get out of date the most obvious is the code of guidance it was published in 2005 it no makes no mention of a whole load of issues it doesn't mention equality's law it doesn't mention people with no recourse to public funds my friends here will comment on that it doesn't discuss in detail the issues about temporary accommodation and the exorbitant level of charges that are often made it doesn't discuss the major difficulties of accessing temporary accommodation and our experience in providing advice assistance representation is that lots of people have difficulty accessing the most basic temporary accommodation even though there's a clear legal obligations provided um the code of guidance doesn't adequately address the issues about um the speed that the low the low speed with which permanent accommodations often offered someone was just telling me this morning about a case where the client in the perfectly ordinary circumstances has been in temporary accommodation for well over 32 weeks that's just a wee example um the code of guidance also includes a section on the now abolished priority need concept it's a key document it should be updated obviously a fair amount of work but a worthwhile one and in terms of cost savings if you've got everything all in the one place you can give it to people and say read this and you'll understand it you can't say that to anybody at the moment because it's completely misleading on a number of important points but it is an important document once updated section 37 of the 2001 act should be amended to provide that local authorities be required to not merely have regard to it but to comply with it at the moment there's local authorities in so far as it just gives guidance do not need to comply with it the once it's updated that obligation needs to be tightened um I think we also need to discuss further prevention of homeless services research has clearly shown most homeless most homelessness is caused by factors that are out of the control of the people affected by it we've heard very clear articulate evidence to that effect we need to quash this idea that it's a lifestyle choice I we've I've heard that articulated on numerous occasions you never hear people at conferences saying oh homelessness is a lifestyle choice let's discuss this strange lifestyle but people say it that needs to be quashed that needs to be recognised um we we need to ensure that everyone's given a second or third chance and also appropriate support and I think we need to look outside the box about what the appropriate support is support at the right time saves a lot of money we've discussed that again today so there's a very strong theme how to save money a stitch in time doesn't save 10 100 but tens of thousands if not millions one um preventative service that's just popped up in discussion recently is the Seattle rent assistance program where forbearance is given to people with rentories to stop them becoming homeless and the program pays off rentories either in whole or part as part of a structured rights and money based money advice based procedure the upstream preventative measures have been documented by the voluntary organizations consent is to save large amounts of money I think that's an experiment that we need to look at and you know I'm volunteering to go off to Seattle to find out more if you're interested but actual fact there is an academic working in Edinburgh who has worked on that program so you can get information about these sorts of things really easily and I you're under the new private rented sector regime people will be threatened with eviction and possibly lose their houses for really quite small levels of rentories so maybe partly through charitable giving and part through through a government program I'm not small amounts of money might make a really big difference to stop the unnecessary homelessness sometimes well it's always unnecessary but to take one or two steps that could quite easily be taken that would make a really big difference so thanks for much it's Mr Brown and Nicky Brown has indicated you will just wait for questioning and could Mr Jamie Stewart make a short if possible opening statement I will try thanks for the opportunity first let me say I'm here to as representative of Scottish Refugee Council but I also am a member of the campaign for housing and social welfare law and have had discussions about this in the past with colleagues in that group to be clear if I could I'd like to talk both about asylum seekers and refugees who find themselves homeless although recognising that due to the intricacies of devolved reserved matters public funds that maybe the the the solutions are not necessarily be the same I also appreciate that provisions do exist within Scotland that seek to accommodate both asylum seekers and refugees however as we've submitted our written evidence homelessness is built into the refugee experience for asylum seekers this is the fact this is due to the fact that accommodation relies upon a hugely imperfect system of recognising of a person's status and this was recognised by the Scottish Parliament's Equalities and Human Rights Commission in the hidden lives report which was published earlier this year which stated it's clear that the asylum and immigration system is peppered with points as direct quote at which the risk of destitution becomes likely in the sheer complexity and inaccessibility of the process makes it unnecessarily difficult in practical terms for someone new to the UK who is destitute to initiate the process an example of this is our destitution advice service which we deliver in partnership with refugee survival trust over 2016-17 191 people were seen through that service as destitute in the impact of the mental and physical health of destitution during the asylum process is considerable and our conversations with street teams around Scotland suggest that there are significant numbers of people who are labelled under the broad rubric of no recourse to public funds which includes asylum seekers or destitutes, EA nationals, people with some other insecure immigration status and councils are struggling to know what entitles if any entitlements if any exist for these people and that we believe that something needs to be done to concertedly put people back into services that are available. When individuals are granted the legal status in the UK people are asked to leave their accommodation and our evidence under a holistic integration service suggests that at least 85% of refugees are dealt with through the homeless system many of whom are unable to access homeless assistance at the point at which they need leading to large amounts of sofa surfing and other types of homelessness those lucky enough to access homeless accommodation, face lengthy stays in hostels, hotels and temporary flats waiting often over 32 weeks for accommodation. We do work very closely particularly with Glasgow City Council being the only dispersal area in Scotland to seek solutions to this issue and last year achieved an agreement to work on a system for allocating settled housing early in the process however a year on there's been little change on the ground so more needs to be done to make these statutory services work better in practice and for these reasons we made number recommendations but to have it for the committee to consider looking at the recommendations of the hidden hidden lives report and introduce more safeguards into the system around destitution and no provision of accommodation including making a proactive approach to ensuring people currently considered no recourse to public funds are properly assessed and where possible delivered back into available support systems for them and as much as possible ensuring that homelessness is not as in the hidden lives report built into the asylum process learning from I'll just I will not have time for questions learning from local authorities experience of serving me settlement I'll echo the robustness of section five and the provisions of advice advocate support particularly around the introduction of statutory integration services for refugees who are new into the into the country thank you very much I mean I think that's perhaps something for the committee to to say to witnesses you know you have given us written submissions and the committee do a suggestly read to those and they will want to tease out some of it with questions so whilst short opening statements are welcome I think what most of you have done is maybe cover quite a lot of what the committee wanted to ask so hopefully the question session might be a little bit shorter can I call first of all Graham Simpson yeah I've got a very quick question and apologies I'm gonna have to shoot off to the to the same meeting as the convener so it's not because I'm bored by by what you've got to say I'm genuinely have to go so it's about housing options how do you think it could be improved and do you think it should be given statutory backing dear for that fact I'll go to Nikki Brown first since you haven't made an opening statement thank you I think certainly in terms of the way that housing options has been rolled out through the country what you'll see is a reduction in homeless presentation certainly in Edinburgh I think there's probably a couple of things related to it the first thing is in order to have a true housing options approach what we need to be sure is that we're maximising people's income because very much your housing options are determined by the amount of money that you have and that you have to spend and what we'll have in Edinburgh at the moment is an acute shortage of affordable housing so whilst we're whilst we are managing to reduce homeless presentation significantly the knock-on effect of that is once people become homeless and I think one of the the previous panel Ray McRath talked about this we're preventing homelessness where it is preventable by using a housing options approach and by working together but actually when people come into the homeless system because of their such an acute shortage of affordable housing in the city whether it be social housing or private rented housing it's incredibly difficult to move people into settled and sustained housing so people's housing options are very much determined about what's available in the city and how much money they have so one of the key things we want to do in Edinburgh is ensure that from the point of presentation for either housing advice or homeless assessment throughout the case management we include an employability support we're including welfare benefits maximisation support and that we're constantly reviewing people's circumstances in order to make sure they've got up-to-date housing options advice that will assist them in moving on to settled and sustained accommodation as quickly as possible but nowithstanding that within the changes to the welfare reform landscape and the unique position or maybe no unique but the certain specific circumstances in Edinburgh in terms of affordability of housing that is incredibly challenging Thank you very much. We're done with your switch to add a brief comment Mr Conley. Yeah I think in the answer the first answer is can't be improved yes but I think where it works it can work well. We've had some good and bad examples of it in terms of if the options if there are an assessment of needs is carried out properly and the options are there and the positive options are there and there is dialogue between the council and some of the providers in terms of what options are around you can place and we've had some in terms of criminal justice we had a great example of one of a service in East Kilbride which works with people with complex needs and some of them were sentenced to prison and they would normally lose their tenancy at that point. It was an outreach part of the service. I've actually visited that project myself and it is hugely impressive just to say that. Thank you, thank you for that. It's good to hear but we did some work with the council with the local authority and we were able to sustain that tenancy while the person was in prison person came out and they're doing very well so it was a good example of if it works it can work well but some of the examples given here around sleeping bags and things like that they're true examples you know so that's where it falls down but I think it is a positive and as I say we in general terms we've had some very very good experiences with it. Do you want to come in with a further question? Perhaps I could just ask Mr Paul Brown. From what you've said before do you think that the legislative framework needs to be amended to give housing options some kind of statutory fitting? Well at the moment many of the obligations that local authorities have are not implemented or if they are they're implemented very slowly so I'm not altogether sure quite sort of what sort of statutory footing housing options could be given that would change that fundamental difficulty those chronic problems that need to be addressed. The advantage of having a separate set of homelessness obligations is that you can use those to cut through any procedures or whatever it is that housing options may provide for so I would be concerned that making housing putting housing options onto a statutory footing would water down the already well the admirable principles that we have I'd like to see those being implemented and those being implemented fully. We've heard about well there I think there are unintended consequences you know the crisis of temporary accommodation wasn't planned it was a probably a good idea in lots of ways to close out hostels but the knock on effect hasn't been thought of and I think one of the witnesses was effectively saying that some people need hostels and that's fair enough. I don't think that when changes happen I don't think there is a broad enough debate we don't have enough people coming along and interrogating them possibly in a confrontive way but that needs to be done that hasn't been done and we need to do that. Temporary accommodation is a major crisis my impression is that transport is people who get into temporary accommodation and then get log jam there and I think that was some of the evidence from Edinburgh. To temporary accommodation Mr Browns I can ask you to hold that thought on that one please thank you can I turn to my colleague Alexander Stewart who wishes to ask specifically about ex-prisoners. Yes I do thank you thank you Deputy convener. Mr Connell you touched on in your opening remarks about the complexities but you know when there's an expected date for someone who leaves the custodial sentence so you can plan in advance and my question would be that you know how can we try to challenge and tackle that risk of that individual becoming homeless because if everything is put in place for them as they vacate that institution then it should be easy for individuals to process that so you know you've touched on what has taken place but there must be some real best practice taking place across the sector that has reduced that in some shape we inform. There are examples of it but I say it's pretty disparate across the country. I can give you an example we're part of the public's social partnership in Lomos with Turning Point, Action for Children, SACRO but we provide accommodation we provide temporary accommodation and the wraparound support for people coming out of the prison but that starts within the prison that starts the planning starts and then on the day of release that the prisoners met coming out and is taking around wherever they need to go to and then to their flat which is fully furnished and everything's in place and that support continues for a period and we've actually examples and it kind of fits into the aversion of the housing first model where people have been able to negotiate to keep the accommodation that becomes settled in an area and if they come to and they say we would like to keep this we will we will do that we will try we will negotiate with the it's usually GHA or cube housing in Glasgow we'll negotiate and we will get another property and so so so so that's an example of the good practice one of the things that I don't know it's my it's my speaker is it yeah one of the things I was at a seven hour impolment recently in the frustration around the room of through-care officers the whole range of providers of services who were saying there are lots of resources around but structurally it breaks down if when the person comes out if they're left out to their own devices when they come out it breaks down very very quickly and quite often people yn fwyafenni o'r cyfrifiad? Y dylech â'r symud yw'r bobl o'r cyfrifiad yw'r newid yw y cyfrifiad yw y cyfrifiad felly yw'r o Hellyth Ikrwyddon, ac mae'n gynnwys i'r unigol iawn, ond mae'n gweld, ifall, sydd efo'r unigol iawn, hwnnw i'n cefnogi, ond mae'n cyfrifiad yn ei ddwyngh oedd y ben sydd y cifryd yn cyfrifiad o'r cyfrifiad o'r cyfrifiad yw'r cyfrifiad hwnnw i'r cilio ac yn ymdilyn yn dwybodaeth. You have talked about the good practice that is taking place in specific areas, but there has to be more bad practice in reality because it is not happening across the piece. What should we do to ensure that it is going to happen across the piece? Structurally, it breaks down. I will give you an example of one of our services today I said, we have 16 flats just now for people who have come through the prison system. We've got five women's bail flats as well, and that's in partnership with Aberlory on the turning point. So I said, what's our position just now? Only 11 of the flats are occupied. There are five vacancies in the service that provides the accommodation for Romos, and there were two vacancies for the women's bail. Now, those vacancies for women's bail, they're ring fenced, so people, and again people move on to various other types of accommodation and back with families and things. So that's an example of... It breaks down because it comes into a structure where bureaucracy and I think Lorraine McRav mentioned some of it today around, you know, she was talking about when people go to an age shelter, if you were providing something much better, you would need to take the complication away of the hoops that people have to go through, reduce the number of hoops and we'll have a much more fluid system. I think that this is very similar in terms of examples of people coming out of prison bad practice and going to the housing office and being told, you have to go into a hostel. The person is saying, if I go into a hostel, I'll offend over the weekend. It's only a hostel that's available and the person's into a hostel. So that the ex-offender themselves has a lack of confidence with the system that they are given or the support that they are provided with when they get to that stage. You've chosen an example that highlights and identifies how it's easier sometimes for the individual to go back into the offending situation than it is for them to go through the hoops that they're having to do to make sure that they can get accommodation that is of a reasonable standard for them. I think that's more than just a lack of confidence. Could you answer briefly, Mr Brown? I think that's more than just a lack of confidence. Another example that I can give is that this is when somebody was met at the prison gate and brought to the various offices and the person fainted later that day with the exhaustion because of the various things that they had to do in terms of their benefits and various, they went from pillar to post and that was with support. This person collapsed with the exhaustion. So it's a rigorous process when somebody comes out and even with the supports that they have to do. I just wanted to say briefly that having experienced some of the stuff that you're talking about in the past with people coming out looking for temporary accommodation following being being liberated from prison. What we've tried to do at Edinburgh is now is make sure that many the things you're talking about about the arrangement of temporary accommodation or the sorting out of people's benefits or the housing options that we need to give to people if they can't maintain the tenancy when they go into prison is something that we're actively doing. So there is obviously good practice there and as I would say we'd be happy to speak to anybody about the measures that we've put in place to ensure that the transfer is as seamless as possible. So yes they may have to go to housing office to be allocated that accommodation and sometimes it will be on what's available on the day but the earlier notice and the earlier intervention work that we can do when people are in prison then it makes it a much more seamless process at the end. Thanks very much. That actually I think leads us into a discussion around temporary accommodation and I know that Andy Wightman wants to specifically pick up on some of the city of Edinburgh issues so if I could call my colleague Andy Wightman. Thanks very much convener. Yes, I mean the councils, Edinburgh Council's own submission notes the increase in temporary accommodation of 21 per cent in the last year and recent media reports about the increased numbers of BNBs that have been bought on a rather urgent basis. Why has the pressure on temporary accommodation increased so significantly in Edinburgh in recent years? Actually, in line with the pressure on temporary accommodation services increase in, the actual number of people presenting is homeless in Edinburgh is going down. So less people are coming in. You'll see from the submission there that the major contributing factor in terms of the increased pressure on temporary accommodation services is actually an increased lengthy stay for people so homelessness caselines are extending. If I was to sum it up quite simply it would back to the point that I made previously that there's such an acute shortage of affordable housing in Edinburgh that for anybody who's welfare dependent or on a low income it's incredibly difficult to have any other options other than social rented housing off which there aren't enough, which is why the councils are looking to build a significant number of homes over the next five years. In answer to your question, the reason the pressure on temporary accommodation is so significant in the moment and the reason that they were using bed and breakfast as outlined in the newspaper article that I'm sure you've seen is simply that people are staying longer but not getting the opportunity to discharge their duties to people by giving them an offer either permanent or settled housing and then more people come in each day. Is that part of a longer term trend within a falling homelessness population? For Edinburgh it certainly is. Average lengthy stays have increased consistently and significantly. There's been a spike probably in the last I don't know the figures there but probably in the last 34 years but it's consistently the average lengthy stay of being increasing. In terms of other members of the panel, we've heard some evidence in the previous panel about temporary accommodation, the standards of temporary accommodation etc and there's been calls for improvements in standards of temporary accommodation. Do you think that that's a worthwhile call or do you think that that's just underpinning what is a bit of a sticking plaster and a wider problem which is a shortage of full-time permanent accommodation? I think Mr Paul Brown would like to come in here. Our experience bluntly is having difficulty accessing it for clients. We get sometimes up to 10 of the moment it's five to seven people a week who just are not being offered temporary accommodation and we have to threaten judicial review, very rarely actually have to undertake it so that's the fundamental problem. The other fundamental problem is apart from the time people often end up staying in it is the cost which is horrendous which makes it unaffordable for people who are working and that is a major problem and it's due to the local authority's concerns not implementing the form of words used in the code of guidance about how temporary accommodation charges are supposed to be worked out so those are the sort of fundamental issues that I mean there's a hierarchy of needs getting the accommodation would then lead into concern about overcrowding and all sorts of difficulties but that's the fundamental crisis. If I could just make one other brief comment about the prisoners issues I would simply say that benefit payments while people in prison towards the rent is a major issue and one issue about assisting prisoners would be to extend possibly on a discretionary basis the length of time that benefits what basically housing benefit can be paid for I think that would make a significant difference for some people. I mean there is however a major problem no question about that about prisoners coming out of prison and being expected to deal with everything all once including finding somewhere to stay and it's very difficult to manage I would share that concern so if that 20% or 30% of the weight of that need to make provision can be reduced by more generous benefit payments again I'm sure that it would save a very large amount of money. Mr Stewart do you want to come in? Yes just wanted to echo or just the echo of the points about accessing temporary accommodation long terms of temporary accommodation cost however the way in which the Glasgow we are primarily focused on Glasgow which is often presented to us in Glasgow is that supply is not an issue that there are homes there and that the issue has been getting people from temporary accommodation through the system and into settled accommodation and for me a lot of that surrounds around the process of assessment we've had the sort of comments about psychologically informed and understanding the needs and expectations and aspirations of people and that's sort of more fundamental in the context that we're in but what that the comment which Nicky gave about Edinburgh and what it reflects is a quite a lot of difference between local authorities in particular as to how we approach the issue of temporary accommodation and the drivers of why people are in temporary accommodation. Mr Wightman I think you have a specific question for Paul Brown of the LSA. Just to follow up I mean you made a point about litigation I think you said in your evidence you're considering strategic litigation in relationship to a qualities legislation around the needs of people with protected characteristics and their access to temporary accommodation. Do you want to say something a little bit briefly what is strategic about that litigation? Well I suppose there's two things first of all well it relates the code of guidance which has not been updated to help local authorities and anybody else interested in working out how to manage people with major mental health disabilities for example or other protected characteristics the code of guidance doesn't explain how to manage that so there is a tendency for people who's presenting problems are very difficult for them and for providers to have difficulty accessing services I mean that's sometimes fairly obvious that they're going to have difficulty accessing services they get affected by the same appraisal of intentionality possibly to some extent even if only informally as other people do even though intentionality doesn't come into it they're unable to manage the difficulties they have so the reasonable adjustments are often not provided and it would be obviously sometimes they are I mean I don't want to suggest local authorities and the voluntary organisations are doing their best there's no question about that they work hard but on occasion the reasonable adjustments that need to be made are not made. The thing that's strategic about using a qualities legislation is it is possible to claim compensation and I think that's an important way of accountability if somebody does is discriminated against unintentionally indirectly normally but if they are it is possible to claim compensation for that and I think that's a useful way of focusing on the fact that action needs to be taken we are also going to use freedom of information requests to look into how systematic the approach is to various people with protected characteristics and well we may find out we haven't done it yet we may find out there's a systematic failure in which case that would result in a strategic approach to litigation I mean it's at early stages yet but the experience is that the system has not fully adjusted to its overall commitment to taking on board the need to make reasonable adjustments for all the circumstances of everybody concerned and the system doesn't do that I mean just a wee point about housing options filling in forms going online and all that sort of stuff some people cannot possibly do that they make them too anxious or they don't have the skills or possibly both reasonable adjustments would entail saying to somebody here's a house we don't need to what you don't need to get references don't need to have a bank account here's a house everything else will get sorted out for you like it was done in the olden days now people are expected to jump through a whole range of hoops that even if they in theory could overcome in practice they can't getting references and all that sort of stuff the idea that people are going to be moving into the private sector is I'd have said fairly naive keeping people in the private sector who have problems who need a bit of help paying off the rent or whatever I think is a important one my suspicion however is that we are not going to solve the problem or wanting to address today without there being more provision of of socially rented housing I can't see that as being any other option that would be my given time constraints I could maybe turn to my colleague Jenny go Ruth I think wants to explore some of that bit further thank you convener and graffin into the panel in your written submission Paul Brown you flag shelter's evidence of a 24% increase in terms of evictions over the past year and you say that social security austerity includes issues such as the benefit cap sanctions housing benefit reform and cuts to disability benefits and likewise Nikki Brown in your submission from Edinburgh council you talk about the implementation of welfare reform as expected it currently could potentially cause significant financial pressures on temporary accommodation with that in mind we've already heard this morning both from COSLA and from the Simon community about the impact of welfare reforms on homelessness more broadly so I'd just like to ask what the panel's views are and specifically does the panel believe that these welfare reforms are having a direct impact on specific groups so for example women or care experience young people to single those two groups out certainly in terms of the the general landscape then it seems to me all research out there will tell you that whenever a whenever major welfare reform changes like universal credit have taken place in some areas rent arrears have increased if rent arrears are increasing within a local authority boundaries I would suggest that some of those people inevitably will end up coming through a homelessness route so it is a general point I think that some of the welfare reform changes that have come out there is enough evidence out there at the moment and I know things are still getting rolled out there's an opportunity to change them but I think there's enough evidence to suggest that there is a likelihood that more people will become homeless and that will directly have an impact on temporary accommodation services in terms of the provision of temporary accommodation services it's clearly challenging and expensive to provide temporary accommodation services at the moment for most local authorities certainly in Edinburgh and as welfare reform changes are rolled out further and as less money is available to people to pay for that accommodation then it is again inevitable that local authorities are going to have to take some of the hit there and that in their budgets are going to be significantly impacted on by the impacts of welfare reform whether it be the benefit cap, LHRs or universal credit and all the evidence that we've heard from from today from the earlier panel on this panel suggests that we should be looking at how do we provide greater standards of service for people or greater accommodation options for people or better standards of accommodation for people and that is the challenge that local authorities face at the moment that if welfare reform is going to significantly impact on the ability to either collect income or actually income that's available how do we bridge that gap and I know that in terms of the creation of the national task force and then the fund there is going to be an opportunity there presumably for either third sector partners or local authorities to pilot schemes that could be either more affordable or provide better options for people but I'd like to see some detail on that because it would appear to me that the gap that we're going to have in Edinburgh in terms of the in terms of funding created by all manner of welfare reform is so significant that it will be incredibly difficult and challenging for us to do other services. Mr Stewart do you want to comment on the welfare reform issue? The six week universal credit delay thing although not introduced in Glasgow yet will introduce further barriers to lots of different groups including refugees there are new benefit claimants they will need to wait for their forward waiting period and then and then moving on when thinking about the option of whether considering whether private sector is an option for people who already have the barrier of not having a national insurance number not having the orientation language skills and the understanding putting in place a welfare benefit barrier where you're effectively not entitled to your payments until six weeks down the line creates a further barrier to doing any of that quite apart from setting people up to fail as has been sort of indicated towards there that people start with rentaviors they start with in a in a bad place in relation to but it has specific impact welfare reform has specific impact on on the different groups and certainly within within the refugee population you've got universal credit at the start it also limits the housing options available through we have now coming up the um we've currently got the what's called being called the bedroom tax which limits the number of bedrooms that someone is able to move into so limits the throughput to work to where people are able to move to and as of 2019 we'll have caps on the the local housing allowance maxima so anyone under 30 under 35 will be will only be able to access in Glasgow 68 pounds to pay for their their their rent 68 pounds a week a lot of accommodation is much more expensive than that even in the social rented sector um those are only sort of two examples of where the welfare reform stands in the way of moving people into and and but effectively stands at odds to what I think we all want to do in terms of alleviating homelessness. Cornley, do you wish to make any comment on this specific issue? I'll echo what Jamie says but we why people actually provide um we provide temporary accommodation for we have for a number of the people there specified exemptions so they haven't been impacted at this stage but where there has been impact is in larger families where they can have passed the benefit cap and there's a pressure in terms of larger families being being being housed in terms of that that's been it's been the biggest problem that we've encountered at this stage. Thank you very much Mr Pring. I will share all the concerns that other people have mentioned. My impression is that RSLs and other housing providers will have more problems with rentories they will then become more assertive. The shelter figure is masks and other set of problems which is that our experience has been that the number of cases calling in court has gone up or a bit but the assertiveness of the landlords when they're in court has increased substantially which means that one has more proofs when people have to apply for legal aid to give evidence and so forth that's very very stressful I'm talking about for the lawyers it is a hell for the families who may be threatened with eviction often it can get sorted out but who are threatened with eviction as a result of for instance rentories with talking about six-week delay. That is how that pans out is very worrying how services will be able to cope with that is very worrying so I mean I suppose the fundamental problem with benefits reform is it's all based on stick not there's not enough support and it's based on a fantasy about some about the need to discipline a small number of people for whereas most of the people we're talking about need more support more help rather than yet another set of changes my experience of changes going through the system is it takes years for people to really understand them and it isn't just the the claimants but all their advisors they maybe need medical reports for something that there's another cost and difficulty about that be years before the system is smoothly settled in and all the unintended consequences have been dealt with so providers will need to be more nimble and then will need to be more opportunity for discussing the consequence of unintended consequences we don't know what those will be but it would be tragic indeed if say an unintended consequence is RSLs evicting or having more people jump before they're pushed in a way that I'm sure no RSL really wants to happen so will there be ways out of that that's why this Seattle programme I think it's very interesting to say look 500 quid will make all the difference save very large amounts of money I think I think we need to think outside the box and think about the aspects of maybe focusing generosity we've heard about that maybe focusing generosity in a way that we know can be monitored and can really make a difference thank you I think we'll be interested in having a look at that model as a committee Jenny Gorraith with regard to that we've heard a lot about people working in their silos in terms of homelessness and that being a barrier to people I suppose working in a more integrated approach cause let's say that the current statutory framework does not encourage other agencies to support housing outcomes of those with complex needs so how can we get that better joined up working does for example the health and social care partnership model offer an opportunity there anyone much to volunteer to start to answer that specific question Mr Bray Nicky Bray just in terms of an example of the work we are doing in Edinburgh at the moment is Adam Burley talked about previously around access point in access practice he referenced and what that is is essentially a building where NHS services social work services and housing services sit together what we've established through some of the work through a group called inclusive Edinburgh from our local authority is that what we'd like to do is find a way of integrating our services in a much more coherent manner that has just exactly as was described has similar outcomes for people and no necessarily defined only by housing outcomes one of the things that we've looked at is that you know when you take an example of a case where somebody is presented for accommodation maybe 30 or 40 times within a year for various different accommodation actually a successful outcome might be for them that with intervention of the right service with the right relationship with them that might reduce to five a year and that and I think that the model that we are looking at with the Edinburgh access practice and the access point integrating those services together but also with third sector partners is finding the right service that has the relationship with a person that can follow them through the service so there's no multiple pass-offs and then what we're not doing is all working to different goals they're all aligned in the same way that's actually about making life better for that person and getting that person into a position where they can sustain some form of accommodation you've heard already from Lorraine McGrath about the different models of accommodation that we might look at as well so I think it's absolutely key that as we move forward with the integration services that we use examples like the access practice where what we're actually looking at is for a common set of outcomes that are person-centred and related to their personal circumstances rather than housing outcomes so I think there is work going on in that area but it still needs to be developed. That's very much briefly Mr Conly, if you don't mind. I suppose that an example of some of the good practice that appears to be about accommodation is some of the co-production that is taking place and there are some models around the country and around homelessness. The one in Glasgow just now we're looking at co-production moving away from a purchaser provider model and it's about involving all the organisations and there'll be a group of organisations with the council in terms of how services are developed and commissioned and that should actually, if the theory works, that should be a successful model in terms of breaking down some of those silos so there are examples around. Thanks very much, we are quite tight for time and there are other areas I know the committee want to explore specifically drilling down to some of the kinds of homelessness people experience so I want to turn if you don't mind to rough sleeping and I know that Andy Whiteman has some specific questions on that matter. Yes, thanks convener. Edinburgh Council, in your submission you talk about further work needed to identify rough sleeper profiles to better respond to the needs of a rough sleeper and we heard from the previous witnesses about the importance of that. What's the council doing to achieve that? The council, in conjunction with Sirinian's Bethany and Street Work from earlier, is instigating the first in a series of rough sleeping counts. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that you'll hear in Edinburgh that rough sleepings increase in and actually what we wanted to do was drill down into that to see if it was increasing because the figures that show the number of people who come to present it's homeless following a mighty rough sleeping are actually falling so there's two ways of looking at that maybe they are falling and maybe the numbers are falling in Edinburgh or maybe there's a gap there in getting people who are rough sleeping into the services that are going to be most appropriate for them as well so that was the reason that with our partners in Edinburgh we wanted to do a true rough sleeping count and what I mean by a true rough sleeping count is that we go beyond counting people and actually we need to understand what support would be required and how we would best deliver that support and actually as we progress with a series of rough sleeping counts I think what we need to be doing is there needs to be careful monitoring off if we manage to get people who are currently rough sleeping into services what is working for them but beyond that if we count if in subsequent counts the same person is there I think we need to get some learning for that about why they're still rough sleeping as the counts go on or as time elapses so I think there's in terms of the council we've got a clear commitment with our partners in Edinburgh that we want to minimise rough sleeping wherever possible and the count's just the first stage of that but there's an enormous amount of learning we need to get about how do we get people from rough sleeping into the services and what are the barriers that are there at the moment for example street work going to the care shelters that we talked about briefly earlier every morning and what they will do is they will pick up people who are incredibly vulnerable if we may require a housing service and they will provide advice for them in the morning and that doesn't necessarily always translate to an increase in homeless presentations for people coming out to the shelter and actually that's what we would like to see so in terms of an increase in homeless presentations actually if that is getting people from a really really insecure set of circumstances where they're having to access care shelters or they're having to rough sleep to me that would be a benefit if our homelessness presentations actually increase if we're managing to get to the people who require services the most so over the course of the winter there is an enormous amount of support going into the care shelters for a variety of services health services, GPs, district nurses, homelessness professionals will be in there as well as support workers for various different agencies and that's all being co-ordinated by Bethany who operate the shelters so I think from this year what we'll get is an enormous amount of learning about how we need to develop our services going forward to take into account the needs of the people accessing the care shelters but also the needs of the people who are not accessing the care shelters that we're picking up in the rough sleeping counts. Do you want to come in specifically on rough sleeping with migrants asylum seekers? Yes, as I said in my initial presentation there is this sort of lump of people who are referred to as no recourse to public funds and there are various different little bits and pieces of work that have been done but no sort of there's not a clear idea of A, how many people have no recourse to public funds and are therefore rough sleeping or otherwise homeless and to take the next step the why. Why are people in this position and because there are people who perhaps European Economic Area Nationals who perhaps have some entitlements to mainstream housing accommodation, some may not, you have people with insecure immigration status, you have people who have been asylum seekers and are now destitute etc and there's a need for local authorities to try and dig down and get the detail of why and how people who are currently lumped in this no recourse to public funds, I apologise I always keep doing the scare quotes because there are a number of different groups of people. Ultimately the solution that we have found in terms of asylum seekers is through our destitute asylum seeker advice service where it is an advice service primarily to get people back into current structures through the section 4 support, through the home office but the start point in that is the diagnosis, the start point in that is what is your status, how can you regularise that status, what actions do you need to take or actually are there limited options within current strategy provision then we can have a look at that and we can say well what can we do with that, that work will need to have some form of specialism in terms of immigration advice and we need to be careful about who provides that, who gives that advice in the diagnosis part of it, someone would need to be at least level 1 OISC qualified office of the immigration security commission qualified in order to make that assessment as to this controlled level of legal advice to make that assessment as you have this legal status and level 1 would give the ability for that person then to say you need to go there and signpost and do those things, level 2 would be able to provide more detailed legal advice on that but that provision and the destitute asylum seeker is level 1 qualified and that provision then allows that person to say yes, you now have for example the ability to go and apply for section 4 support through the asylum system and you go there, you make that application. Other parts of it, particularly the holistic assessment part of it that we do, allow people to access other parts of there to look at how they can progress their lives and regularise their status and address health problems and all those sorts of things, can all be packaged into that particular intervention as such but there's I think a need for a much more proactive approach and a much more delineated way of working out who has recourse to public funds, who doesn't and what does actually no recourse to public funds mean in the first place? Very much Mr Stewart. Can I bring Jenny Gilruthan at this point please? Thank you, convener. This is a specific question for Paul Brown. In your submission you say that our observation is that the number of rough sleepers has soared, they are younger and there appear to be many more young women than was previously the case. Can you account for why that might be happening? I think it's quite difficult. It is difficult for people to access temporary accommodation. There is no question about that. You can track that quite easily in our practice and we don't collect very sophisticated statistics but you can track that quite easily because things change when the night shelters open in the winter. There's no doubt that the night shelters serve a very important function. I don't know why the number of non-traditional rough sleepers has increased again that it changes but I would speculate that the vulnerability of people in private rented sector accommodation changes. Some of the people are people who have no recourse to public funds or think they are in that situation. Sometimes it's care leavers, people with mental health problems. My impression is the most vulnerable often do get services. I don't want to suggest the system is not working at all but there is a need for equality's legislation to be taken very seriously with I think housing management trainers talk about walking the walk, need to walk the walk for people in all these different situations. Having said that, things seem to have eased. I don't think it's as bad as it was a year ago and at least our experience but I suppose the problem is that if no fundamental changes are made, one worries that something will happen and one doesn't know what it is and the figures will soar again. At the moment we are coping with a number of people who come to see us in terms of the limited bit that we do. We are coping but in the past we haven't been able to cope. We've had to turn people away which we don't want to do ever. If possible I want to have a quick discussion about housing first but I'm conscious of time and we really do have to try and finish by about a quarter to two. My colleague Kenneth Gibson has been patiently waiting. I'm going to call Mr Gibson at this point. It wasn't to talk about housing first, it was to talk about obviously the rights issues. I'm going to run to housing first but I'm bringing you in first. Right, okay. Thank you very much. One of the people we had giving evidence to was a former service user, Mr Thomas Lyne, supported by a legal services agent, and he said, and I quote, I spent six and a half years on the street in Glasgow. I delivered every hostel three, four or five times each. I was never offered any temporary accommodation. I had to go to the legal services agency to get into a temporary furnished flat and he is now back in mainstream housing. I'm just wondering, Mr Brown, Mr Paul Brown, if you can maybe talk to us a wee bit about the issue of rights and the inability of almost people to access those rights simply because they don't even know those rights exist or what those rights might be? Well, there's an issue about people not knowing what the rights are and where to go for them and we've made suggestions in our submission about more systematic publicity requirements and that needs to be flexible because the situation changes and it needs to be focused on the problems that people have rather than just the generality so there's certainly an issue about that. There's an issue about enforceability because local authorities are not going to go around telling people, well, not formally saying, you know, the remedy is judicial review but there is an issue about the fundamental remedy not being built into the legislation and maybe there needs to be thought about telling people more about that. I think in England there is a statutory appeal process, there is not a statutory appeal process in Scotland. Judicial review has it serves a function but I think you've probably got to be fairly sophisticated to know about that. It works quickly once you get going with it but one of the issues is that if a local authority is systematically unable to fulfil its statutory functions it can get away with avoiding judicial review by just settling giving somebody accommodation for one night or two nights or whatever it is about the problem reoccurring and I can't comment on the circumstances of the person who's talking about it but that is something that happens on a fairly regular basis that there is no permanent systematic provision made for the right source of temporary accommodation and that is one area of strategic litigation that we maybe need to look at is not just to say this person needs this but these people need this this and this and that's maybe something that we are interested in looking into. So I suppose the conclusion about that is it's quite easy to get round a local authority that needs to get round their obligations and I'm not suggesting anybody wants to do this that needs to can quite easily do that with this group because it takes a long time for the thing to go through the system and people realise which is I suppose why people need more of a voice and it's great you've heard evidence from a service user. Cymru'n gyffin? You said in your submission as you touched on and you quote that there should be a system in place where people offered accommodation are directed to law centres to ensure they're fairly aware of the rights and the possible consequences of refusing accommodation before they refuse accommodation and that is on the back of another rights-based issue you said that homeless people are at present only offered one property which if they refuse the local authority can discharge a duty to provide permanent accommodation and so people don't really are not really given information with regard to the consequences of that. Well that can be very serious yes I mean a flexible local authority and the people going through housing options and so forth that's not necessarily the case but the statutory obligation is one offer and we have come across really terrible cases where people have said oh I wanted someone with a garden I mean an idiotic reason possibly in that context but didn't realise that they were really causing themselves major problems so there is a need for the rights or for the advice possibly a bit more formally than most housing providers want because that's a formal accountability that everyone tries to avoid to some extent I'm not. Yeah that's why you said you wanted it in rating actually in your submission. Well I think there's a fair amount of what's done informally so to have things more formal and the well that's why the Code of Guidance really needs to be rewritten to explain all the glitches in detail so that everybody knows all the advice workers can now a doctor who doesn't have an expert in the field wants to check it out and everybody knows how the system operates at the moment there is no one place to go. Can I ask Mr Nicky Brown from a different perspective to comment on that please and then I'll come to do Mr Stewart who's been catching that eye. Of course I mean I think certainly in Edinburgh we operate a choice based letting system where people are required to place bids for accommodation for permanent or settled accommodation and that is through both the local authority and our RASL partners and we do operate the system where if you are offered an accommodation flat or a house that you have bid for and you refuse it then we can discharge your duties. What I would say is though in the majority cases we will be flexible with people if there's a valid reason for that sometimes we get medical information or information from the police or whatever it might be we'll look flexible upon that and there is an appeal system and that's clearly outlined both at the point of presentation and right throughout the duration of their case. One of the things that we always do is maintain contact with people just to check that they are bidding for housing and that the bids are suitable that they're right size and they're the area that they said they wanted to bid for so we do that anyway so throughout the entire case management process we have we're constantly speaking to people about the choice based letting system and what that means in ensuring that there is clear as possible that the very definition of choice based letting system is when you choose a property to move into as a local authority unless there's an exceptional reason for it we would expect you to take that property so we're constantly working with people to ensure that they know what their responsibilities are and our responsibilities as well in terms of choosing the house that they want to move into. Okay and Mr Stewart you wanted to come in? Yeah certainly the pickup on this issue of refusals and I think there are a lot of people who do go through the system particularly in the context that that I'm in where people do refuse accommodation the reasons for again just not not always entirely clear the understandings not entirely there and return to the idea that when we when we have that when support systems are in place they don't seem to to to be consistent they don't seem to regular to to properly assess people's needs and their aspirations and their and their expectations and that there is and it does seem that there are statistics we've been given certainly that that's quite high the level of refusals within refugee populations and we need to dig down into why why is that the case certainly level of understanding has got to be part of it and level of understanding of what you can expect and what and what is going to be given or going to be available to you that you what to what extent choice you know choice we talked a lot about choice talked a lot about options and things like that and do you have a choice or do you not have a choice as a one and that's it and that should be made very very clear to people and that people need to be supported independent advocacy and support has a huge is a big place in this at the moment I think some of that is being taken up by housing support agencies and but I don't think that's necessarily what the the intention of the housing support legislation was all about supporting people to to to to get that said to decide you know should I accept this property and and a system which allowed people a small amount of time we've had situations where people have said right I don't like that house because and I can't and I and I and I don't want that house because and the housing association is saying well you've got until tomorrow to decide you must must make a decision do you want it do you not want it with someone with limited understanding limited orientation limited language abilities that's incredibly challenging add into that effect the community community misinformation I think there are still there are still lots of people who think you know what you're in Glasgow you're going to get three three options you can get three choices never take your first one because the first one's going to be rubbish yeah so it's just that level of of of community misinformation we need to be doing work on that and there needs to be more support and advocacy around it thank you mr gibson do you have further lines of question it is actually to mr student it's about the the about refugee specifically and you've said in your submission in section 16 you talk about the two tier approach between the schemes given to Syrian vulnerable persons relocation scheme for which local authorities have been secured able to secure settled housing from day one and the those who claim protection through the asylum process it's just about the differences between that and just also on this you've you've talked about the needs for the creation of a Scottish anti-destitution strategy I wonder if you can touch on that too without going through all nine points because we've obviously gone down here thanks philosophy behind it we are rather a rush now so the philosophy behind the with the Syrian vpr is I think there's there's there's first of all need but Syrian vpr to to have a look at practice because practice isn't consistent across the country to look at where the successes are but people have been and the information that we've been getting that there are really good examples of practice where people have been provided with accommodation usually sublet by the council from a housing association but not in all circumstances and then after a couple of months once people are settled and once people have got their their benefits and and all those sorts of things that accommodation is effectively flipped from a from the council through to a full-time tenancy and those examples where we that we've seen have been very successful so to look at those examples I think we do need to because it's not consistent across the country by such imagination some local authorities using more private learning sector than others some putting more using more different and the issue of silo working there's different levels of silo working some of the local authorities we see have got so many different agencies involved in all this that there's that we could be using that as an example more widely as to how you get lots of different agencies involved what was the other part of the question again well the bit was about the destitution strategy about destitution strategy yeah and it touches on what I was saying but there are not I don't think there are at the moment in the current statutory structure it is not it's not it's not possible to to necessarily deal with to to say there's a solution across across the board so long as people don't have access to public funds and some people do but to put in place a destitution strategy which looks at what is the possible what is the possible for for Scottish Government to do to pick out of there of of their responsibilities and there are lots of areas where Scottish Government can and does get involved or Scottish local authorities do for example through social work services through the allocation of funds for advocacy and support and advice services and those sorts of things for people who wouldn't be able to apply as homeless but might their their destitution might be alleviated but going all the way through to after people have moved on from temporary accommodation people still find themselves destitute taking into account the stuff that we talked about with universal credit people will be destitute well past their well past their their 28 day move on period and where we with that strategy can target those areas and it's not just and and I don't think it is there and the the committee wasn't just dealing with refugees and asylum seekers as well it was dealing with people with insecure immigration status as well and which is an issue which I don't it hasn't really been touched on really kind of really really really really kind of focused on how how do we delineate this how do we how do we work out your destitute because you're of this issue this is your solution and uh the that's I could ask mr brown to very paul brown to very briefly comment on that status the immigration status I think you made some comment in your written statement on this well when people get status housing doesn't necessarily go along with it on various occasions we've had 10 people waiting in the waiting room saying you know I'm homeless there doesn't there is a joining up that needs to be done I think there's willingness on the part of the local authority to do that it just needs to happen I mean it sort goes back to the needs to really systematically look at unintended consequences and unfortunately you know those sitting on the horizon is the as welfare reform but there are other issues as well we're well over time now and I'm going to ask my colleague Andy Wightman to finish off this session with some quick lines of questioning please yes I'll just ask three brief questions and it's up to you which which if you want to pick up which one first of all on the back of Kenny Gibson's question there are Thomas Lyon ended up in his 10-year cycle of homelessness et cetera because his private sector landlord went bankrupt and the creditors evicted him that remains a grounds of eviction in the new legislation private tensies legislation if you're wondering if you agree perhaps just Paul to address that that's still valid grounds for eviction second housing first brief comments we had discussion in the previous session but your feelings and views on that briefly and third have you any comments on the Scottish government's proposed indeed it's setting up of the short life working group to end rough sleeping take the first two questions first I'll ask specifically Paul Brown to respond on the specific question that was put to you the grounds for eviction do you mind if I send a written submission on making that absolutely clear because I don't want to in any way there's nuances and complexities but it's certainly an area of concern so the second question housing first general comments I don't think I'm positioned to talk about housing policy issues I mean we focus on legal issues I have personal views thank you very much but Mr Nicky Brown does wish to call me very quickly just to say that it's housing first I think from a local authority perspective I think most people are bought into it I think that's absolutely something that we'll consider as a local authority we've just set up our own task force as well on Edinburgh so that would be elected elected member led and one of the key things that I require to do a briefing for them is on housing first and the different models and just quickly it was really interesting to hear about the Helsinki model because the the other reports or the other academic work that's being going on is very clear about the process you need to follow for introducing housing first so it's really interesting here that Finland have chosen to do it differently. Thank you and before I come to the Scottish Government's short life expert working group can I ask each of you if you wish to make a comment on that can you also then make a comment any last comment that you want to make that you feel we haven't covered if there's one point that you would like us to consider that we haven't covered now is your chance I'll start with Mr Connolly. Can I just make a comment on housing first? Of course. It's a model that many of our members have, organisations have adopted and I suppose as Mr Brown there said the early the early kind of implementation of housing first was pretty fundamentalist and rigid I think in terms of implementing it there has to be a flexibility and I think you know Lorraine McGraw highlighted that very succinctly so yes we would support it 100% for the Scottish Government to do it because our members have embraced it but not in a fundamentalist way that there is flexibility built in. And the expert working group do you have some opinions on that? I don't have any opinions on that. Is there anything that you want to just put on the record that we haven't touched on very briefly? I just think in terms of also was talked about smalling the psychology and foreign environments is a very valid model which is being rolled out in the voluntary sector so I would like to see that the Scottish Government embrace that and promote that because it focuses on the emotional and psychological needs of people and not just about all the physical stuff. Thank you very much Mr Stewart expert working group and any final short comment that you feel hasn't been touched upon? The housing first thing focuses really on multiple and complex needs and to get rid of this idea of tenancy readiness what I would like the sort of focus of that I think that's absolutely valid and should be an ongoing theme moving forward particularly for the for the short life group as well but to have this idea that although the the rest of the people the people who maybe don't have multiple and complex needs they those people still need to have needs and have support needs and that the idea of that assessment should still be central to do that you need accurate assessment you need to be able to get at people's needs and aspirations and all the other things something which I think in the implementation of what's going on is not happening now what that will have an effect on doing is if we can push people through homeless systems where there is supply in the same Glasgow there appears to be that the that it frees up this it frees up temporary accommodation it frees up the the rest of the system and is and is we talked about preventative spend and all that it is a form of preventative spend so the the message I think is yes housing first is important but there's also this this this rest of the of the the homeless population who won't qualify for housing first they don't have multiple and complex needs and all those things they do have needs those needs must be assessed and by assessing intervening early in those cases we will we will in turn free up the rest of the system to to to deal with things that are perhaps more difficult to deal with and there are people with multiple and complex needs who fall within the refugee population it certainly is true and those and we would like to see those people being dealt with intensively the the other body of people who might need support with orientation they might need the advocacy on their behalf that that itself has a has a knock-on effect and is able to kind of get people what they what they need but also systemically it frees up the system okay thank you mr paul brown expert working group in any final remark um well i think any working groups great news but i would hope that it's done in an open way one of the fundamental things that we lack is lack of debate and discussion i wouldn't see an expert working group is functioning well if it just goes off applies its expertise and produces a whole load of proposals it needs to be an open system possibly taking evidence individually possibly having a series of conferences or workshops that's what needs to happen um there is no one person who is an expert and everything about this in fact a fundamental problem has been on the occasion when people have thoughts they are so that i would say that's a fundamental thing and the other thing that i would hope and i'm sure everyone shares this is to try and get over to the public as a whole and policymakers the result of all our experience and research is that this problem is caused by poverty and disadvantage and this isn't some sort of strange peculiar personality defect that people have which has too often comes up as people's answer to everything about it and we have the great advantage that i think recent research has been produced that shows that pretty comprehensively so we can go out there with 100 confidence and say that i think we can get that message over and get that approach in the code of guidance and any further reform i think some real things will have been achieved thank you very much and last word mr nickiproed i would just echo some of the stuff that paul was saying there about poverty and disadvantage but just finally i'll keep my comments on the working group until we've seen some actions coming from it thank you very much and can i thank you all for coming along i apologise again for the delay but i think that we have managed to allocate sufficient time as much as we could to this particular session and panel so thank you all very much for coming along and can i now move the committee into private session for the next agenda item thank you