 Y Llywydd、 wrth gwrs. Fy llwodol nhw'n ddigital y ffordd ar y cyfnod hais chi'n adeiladau ar gwyn iaith tawr dangos mwy o ddawc yn gyffredinol, ac mae gennym ond hyn yn cynnwys ymlaen llawer yn ddigital y ffordd, cymdeithasol yn digwydd y teimlaethau gyda chi yn gwlygiau. Er gofyn yn adeiladau i chi y ddweud o'r ffordd yn cyfnod, yn cyd-deg cré'r ddweud. Felly mae'n ddigital iaeth wedi myfyrdd yn cyfodol o'i gwasanaeth, ac mae'n cyfnod ychwanegwch yn eu bwynd i fel yn ddigon. f fynd i'r bwynd i arall fel y cyfnodau. Rwy'n rwy'n ddych chi'n edrych bod rydw i'r ysgrif Azerion gael ymddai'r sefydliadau ac rydw i'r hyn yn mynd i'r perthyniadauedd. Diolch yn fawr i fynd i'r fasglau fwylau'r ddych chi'n gael yn ein cyfnodig. Rwy'n ddych chi'n meddwl, mae'n gweld iawn i ddweud i'r cyfanau aeth gael i'r prydysg hynna o ddweud i'r ddweud. passed on to the Church's Action for the Homeless foundation, which was the organisation that we met and the chief executive, Brian Cawley, who gave us an hour and a half opportunity to meet with some of his senior staff and to talk through their issues and their concerns. They were very honest, frank about where they were, and then had the opportunity to see their charity shop. Andy Wintz went to Skwm and I went to Burnham to meet some service users and individuals had wished to have a conversation. That was also very frank and very fulfilling. I think that that event proved very beneficial, as far as I am concerned, I am sure that Andy felt the same, that they went the extra mile just to make sure that we were being accommodated in what they were trying to tell us or the issues that they have, and it was an excellent opportunity. Alexander, for putting that on the record, I thank Andy Wightman for going along. We We should, at this stage, of course, put on the record our thanks to the Simon community in Glasgow for their frank and honest discussions, particularly in relation to women at risk of homelessness and rough sleeping in the city and, of course, to street work in Edinburgh, which allows me to move on seamlessly, almost, to introduce our witnesses today, which is Janet Wiggumson, head of services street work. Janet, thank you very much for allowing our committee to come along and see the good work that you do in Edinburgh as well. I appreciate that. Thank you to the rest of our witnesses for coming along, which is Adam Lang, head of communications and policy shelter Scotland, Tony Cain, policy manager, North Lanarkshire Council, association of local authority and chief executive housing officers, Lee Clark, manager conflict resolution services and Mark Kennedy, manager homeless prevention services, Syranians, and Jan Ewing at the bottom. I'm almost going to introduce you twice there, so I was. Thank you to all of you. There are no opening statements, so we're going to move straight to questions, but before we take the first question, it's also worth putting on the record that we will, whilst we'll explore themes today, and we've got another evidence session in a couple of weeks' time. The committee is looking for themes to explore in further detail at a later date and almost certainly call for evidence Scotland-wide to do a substantial and robust inquiry into homelessness in Scotland. So if you don't feel we're necessarily digging down enough on some of the themes and issues that you raised today, rest assured what we're hoping to do is allow you to jointly with us in partnership set an agenda for a future robust inquiry. So hopefully that's a reasonable dose of engagement for what we're hoping to do today and we can work in partnership with you in relation to that. So now that we've put that on the record, can I ask our deputy, Gwunar Eileen Smith, to open up questions? Thanks very much, Gwunar. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for coming along to the committee today. I just want to sort of ask a general question at the beginning, and I notice in the submission from Shelter Scotland, Mr Lang, you're very clear that there's an urgent need for the Scottish Government to refocus on homelessness. So my first question, I suppose, would be could for the record, we put on the record some of the reasons why people become homeless. I just want to start with that and maybe Mr Lang could start. Certainly, statistically speaking, in terms of those that are recorded, the single biggest reason that's recorded for people becoming homeless in Scotland is relationship breakdown within the home. It's closely followed with a range of other issues that are bundled with the same rough percentage rate, if you like. Arrears is a big problem, financial arrears, but it's relationship breakdown that is the dominant issue, which I think is something that, in terms of assumptions, people might have about the reasons why people become homeless is not always the one that people might come to first. Could I explore that slightly further, convener? In terms of that, then, would that be more single male homeless or would it be women fleeing violence? What would there be underlying statistics there? There are underlying statistics from the Scottish Government. There's a certain limit to them. They don't go into a huge amount of detail, but I believe—forgive me, I don't have the breakdown in front of me—that single male homelessness is a big part of the official homelessness figures. If the rest of the panel wants to comment on that. I would go a little further. That is why individual households become homeless and sometimes present as homelessness, but I think that the question is more interesting if it's why some households become homeless and most others do not, although the rate of homelessness is astonishingly high when you look at the figures. It's something about the choices and the routes to accommodation that the housing system offers. Some people have choices and options and they have the capacity to exercise those options and stay in control of their journey and others do not, and that's because of the way the housing system works and the extent to which it offers choice, supports choice and allows folk to control that journey. One policy is not going to end relationship breakdown, it's not going to end the moment when a young person decides to leave home. The issue is, does the system offer to all those individuals the degree of choice and the degree of control that they need in order to make the decisions that they need and secure the housing that they actually want? Is that an opportunity for other witnesses to make some general comments and responses for deputy convener's opening question, if anyone wants to come in? I think that you may see a difference if you looked at the reasons for females and males finding themselves homeless. Well, it would be relationship breakdown, but violence being more prevalent for females would be a bigger underlying factor. Okay. Lee Clabman. For 18 to 24-year-olds, it is relationship breakdown within the family. Mark, don't feel obliged, you have to say something that would love you to There are actually one or two things I wanted to add there, and I think there are things that have become more evident in recent months and years. I think we are finding in homelessness prevention services that there are a lot more people in danger of homelessness because of recent welfare reforms, things like benefit caps, local housing allowance rates where people could maintain a home beforehand, suddenly they are finding themselves hundreds of pounds short of making their rent a month because they've had their benefits cap. I know that there were 800 families in Edinburgh affected by the recent reduction in the benefit cap and also a big underlying issue we come into contact with a lot are people who in a broad sense you could say suffer from mental health or emotional issues which make it very, very difficult for them to administer and maintain the home they have or to sustain the tenancy when they actually get one and we find that's quite a large cause of homelessness. So thanks, convener. Part of that then seems to be an issue with linking poverty and homelessness. Also, it was something that Matt Kennedy said about prevention of homelessness so would you think that if we were to be doing an inquiry we might want to look more closely at how prevention services work and how maybe they could work better to try and stop homelessness? I might take Mr Kennedy first and then I'll take you after Adam Lang because Mr Kennedy was referencing the question there. I think there's certainly an issue around there around how prevention services work and are funded and we were discussing this before we come in and there was a general feeling that the nature of the funding that we receive for example to provide prevention services in the city of Edinburgh has stipulations attached to it about the amount of time that we can support people for example. So for me a housing crisis is not something that happens one day and can be sorted six months later there are often ongoing issues there that make it very, very difficult to work with someone in a short period and resolve those issues so there needs to be a recognition that there are perhaps individuals who are threatened with homelessness or become homeless who have longer term support needs which don't quite reach the threshold for statutory services and when I say statutory services I mean things like social work but would find it very difficult to maintain a home over a longer period of time without some sort of support so there needs to be a sort of a support that's more open ended if you like. I would very much welcome any further investigation or look into issues of prevention and I think worth noting as I was highlighting some of the submissions for today and previous reports that the previous infrastructure and capital investment committee I believe did in its legacy report highlight on the back of the Scottish housing regulators inquiry in 2014 into housing options that housing options and general work towards homelessness prevention should be and would be a worthwhile area to examine further and I would definitely support that and if I may just briefly build on that to say that housing options is a very welcome approach to engaging early with people who are at risk of homelessness but I think there's much more we need to understand and unpick about how that's being delivered across the 32 local authorities about the standardisation of recording of housing options approaches because I think there is some concern that the figures on homelessness and housing options approaches when you combine those people who apply as homeless and those people from the housing options figures that have homelessness identified as an outcome the total number is up around 50,000 I think for just higher than 50,000 annually which goes in the face somewhat of the recorded decline on the official homelessness statistics because I think if you look at the two sets together you'd see that the actual number of people at risk of homelessness or in housing need has remained fairly high. I think that we've moved on to the area that you were quite keen to explore. I'm happy to take on that back now if you want to sort to yourself. We don't rehearse this, I promise you. We were very interested in the housing options model now. It face value and actually in my own constituency experience sometimes it can work very well. It can sometimes have vulnerable constituents look at other options perhaps they hadn't considered before on a one-to-one basis and build up a relationship but not always so. I'm certainly keen to hear what bits of housing options have been starting to work well because if what Mr Lange is saying about the figures is accurate I would want to know how many of those individuals who have gone through housing options are getting a better service than they would have done had they went through the alternative homelessness route or is it making any difference at all? We're keen, as a committee, to grasp what's really happening with housing options as the quality of experience for vulnerable constituents. Any better under housing options, where is it working well, can we get some examples of that and how should we monitor this as a committee going forward? I suppose that Mr Lange's point was perhaps yes, there might be some good parts to it but we're not grasping precisely what's happening with housing options just now. I might take you last on that, Mr Lange, because I know that you've spoken about it before and you'll have more to see on that. What are other witnesses? What's your feeling around the housing options model of your inexperience of it? Mr Kennedy? I feel that the housing options approach has created a system that's very, very transparent and in terms of people who are using it, where it works, where it works as it should, it works very, very well because people know what they can expect from it. In my experience, working in the city of Edinburgh, I would say that it's not always, going back to what Adam said earlier, it's not always the reality of the service people receive when they present themselves at the council or they make an approach to a statutory agency is not consistent and I think that over the last, I think since 2012 when the priority need test was eventually gotten rid of, there's maybe been a bit of a lag in terms of the mindset of people who are administering the housing options approach in terms of how they view their job or how they're treating the people that walk in who have housing issues. The implementation has been quite patchy across local authority areas. Lee Clark, do you want to add anything to that? One of the main things is the training as well, so it's the training and being consistent on different local authorities of that training and how that's rolled out. That's really helpful as well. Again, don't feel the need to answer all that I'm saying, but Tony Cain, I think you're indicating you want to. Yeah, absolutely. I think it is unquestionably the case that housing options is being operated differently in different authorities and you see that both in the regulator's report from a couple of years ago and in the statistics that were recently published by the Scottish Government. It is operating differently across the country. What I think is most important about housing options is a process which is intended to focus on the individual, so what is it you need, what are your particular unique circumstances, how do we act to assist you in resolving your homelessness is the ethos behind housing options? That is absolutely the antithesis of what the legislation says. As I said in my evidence, this is 40-year-old law. The homelessness legislation was passed in 1977. People tend to assume it's not that old, but it is. It is written in a way which is very clear that the process is done to applicants. There's no control in there. If a local authority has reason to believe somebody who's come to them for housing or for housing assistance might be homeless, then they are required to carry out an assessment whether or not that individual wants that assessment done, whether that's their choice for the particular route or whether they've understood what their outcomes are. The law just says, you go and do it to them and then tell them what you're going to do for them. The importance of housing options is the beginnings of a change in culture around the way local authorities are responding to the people who are approaching them for assistance. I think that that's very important. We've got a long way to go on that. It might be quite helpful. I'm lying in particular now if that's okay, but as you see, we've been trying to speak elsewhere in relation to housing options. Some get some of this on the record would be really, really helpful. I suppose that the committee would be quite keen to know really what is the substantial difference, if it works well, between housing options and traditional homelessness route. In Tony Cain, we're starting to alert some of that for what that would look like if it works well. Anything else that you can add to better steer the committee and further scrutinising that would be very helpful? I probably won't do justice to that, but in its simplest form, housing options is about preventing people from becoming homeless. It's about engaging earlier and, as its name suggests, informing people about their housing options at an earlier stage, a more preventative stage, before they reach that, potentially that crisis point. I think that inherent in that is the challenge of looking at it solely from a statistical point of view, because by the nature of good prevention work, you shouldn't end up recording the same type of outcomes in the absence of good prevention work, if that makes sense. The difference being that, if somebody is making a traditional homelessness application, they go to their local authority, apply as homeless and are either assessed or as unintentionally homeless or not, and they go through the traditional route of, usually, into temporary accommodation on the route to permanent settled accommodation in theory. Housing options is about engaging with people earlier, if it were possible, to prevent them potentially ever getting to that point. That, in its crudest sense, is the principle behind housing options. I echo that we are fully supportive of housing options. I think that it's a very positive thing. The challenge, though, is that at the time housing options were rolled out, it was not rolled out with formal guidance on how to implement housing options. That came a couple of years later. It's only relatively recently been rolled out, and it's not statutory guidance, which allows for a certain element of, and this has been highlighted by the Scottish Housing Regulator, the different ways of interpreting how to do housing options, and different local authorities, as has been touched upon, different local authorities with different resources, with different structures, with different local priorities, have implemented it in different ways. Looking at it in a purely statistical, we've now had, I believe, two years of returns from housing options data. Looking at them, it tells you something, but I don't think it tells you the full picture about the implementation of housing options. That's why I very much welcome the fact that this committee has been going out to hear from front-line service providers about the reality and the ground, because statistics and reporting can only tell you so much. From Shelter Scotland's point of view, we would like to see what impact the roll-out of that guidance now has in terms of the official statistics on housing options to prevent one statistics, and what we start to understand. However, I think that there are some concerns about just as an example, does housing options recording go far enough in telling us about the outcomes that people achieve? I believe that, in the current set-up, homelessness is recorded as an outcome in housing options, and it's about, actually, we need to know more than that, we need to know about and then what, and then did that person get the support that they need to go into permanent settled accommodation? Did they get temp? How long did they spend? We need to know more, and we've only had a couple of years of data coming back on housing options. That's very helpful. My apologies are probably asking a question that I should know the answer to, and I don't. I'm sure that my constituency might be the local housing association that might do housing options. Who does the housing options with the tenant? In my situation, it might be a tenant who is so far-suffering, staying with her relative. We contact a housing association who says, if Glasgow doesn't have a council housing stop, contact a housing association who will say, we'll do a housing options appraisal. It's not this local authority that does it, it can be the housing association movement that does it as well. During that appraisal, do they have the option of recommending additional support for individuals who might struggle to maintain a tenancy? If someone is so far-suffering and someone's couch and tenancies are broken down before and they go through a housing options route, is part of that? Would that housing options look at saying that there should be a wraparound support mechanism here to help this person to sustain a tenancy? Does that happen as part of that conversation, or could it happen? Anyone want any information, Mr Kennedy? In theory, anyone who is in danger of becoming homeless should be offered support to help prevent them becoming homeless. Within the guidelines, it does say that local authorities or whoever is carrying out that homeless assessment should be making an offer of support. We find that you're relying on the knowledge of the person who carries out the assessment, how busy they are, how that's implemented. In a lot of cases, people are offered support. In some cases, they're not. So it's not, while it is part of the regulation, it's not universally applied. I'll take you all in absolutely, Janet Wolgemson. I agree, in theory, yes. They can refer for support, but we broke down our referrals for people, street work supports people with multiple complex needs. We received very few referrals from the housing options team in Edinburgh. That's interesting. Lee Clark. Going back to an earlier point, and what Mark was saying, it's about the training and the knowledge and the skill of the housing officer that's carrying out that assessment, and their knowledge and understanding of what's available and what that presenting need is from that person. The housing officer doesn't know that there's additional options for support up there, but they may not do that as part of the assessment. That's really helpful to know. Tony Cain, do you want to… In part, this in part shows up the distinction between the statutory basis for homeless services and the entire discretionary policy framework around housing options. The legislation requires that where a local authority determines somebody is homeless and not intentionally so that they should carry out a support needs assessment, so that should be done and that's part of the legislation. That's not part of the housing options process, although a good housing options process will also include a conversation about what do your support needs, what particular help do you need to assist you in dealing with this issue. There is a distinction very clearly around support. The other important point to make is that the range of support services that are available is particularly in some areas, wholly inadequate. I mean, I would say very clearly, mental health responses, response from mental health teams, community mental health teams, is almost completely inadequate when it comes to meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged homeless people, those who are long term in the system. They do not get a response and this is not just the way services are organised, in my view this is the way clinical practice works. It's arranged around people turning up for interviews, people turning up for appointments, which is absolutely not the way in which you need to deliver services to people who are chaotic, who've got drug and alcohol related problems, who may be in and out of the community justice system. Mental health services are one of the major areas of failure around meeting the needs of this more chaotic client group. They're an important part of the client group. They're not all of it by any measure of means and homelessness has a fairly broad spread. One of the statistics, just to re-emphasise the point in my submission, my estimation is that 1 in 8 household moves in Scotland involve some element of homelessness. That's an astonishing statistic about the number of people who find themselves needing to move, who struggle to complete that move under their own steam. It's absolutely right to focus on the most disadvantaged of the homelessness client group and the failings in the services available to them, but let's not imagine that that is all about homelessness that many people on otherwise perfectly satisfactory incomes in work, who struggle in the current system to meet their housing needs. I'm going to discipline myself not to ask lots of follow-up questions, Mr Cain in relation to that, but you've got lots of food for thought to explore further. Adam Lline, do you want to add anything to that? I would just build a little bit on what said there, that I don't have anything to add in terms of the front-line expertise on who delivers housing options, but I think it's an important point to make that housing options should not be mistaken for or not confused with a genuine strategic approach to homelessness prevention. It is a welcome approach to engaging early with people who might be at risk in a range of housing issues, but it is not a whole system response to homelessness. I think that builds on what Tony is saying and what others have been saying. I would add in particular that that is true for those people who have multiple complex needs or multiple exclusion homelessness. It's important that the conversation on homelessness in Scotland isn't solely dominated by housing options. It's a welcome approach to engaging with people. There are some challenges that we've highlighted, but it is not the same as a strategic response to homelessness. I can reassure you of Housework. I know that I've got a couple of supplementaries from members in relation to housing options. There are much more areas that we want to focus on as a committee as the questions roll out. Elaine Smith, do you want to have a supplementary question? I would like to specifically ask Mr Cain. It was a wee bit beyond housing options. It was just to ask Mr Cain whether we, as a committee, should look at the fact that the local authorities have the statutory duty towards homeless persons, but in areas where there has been, for instance, stock transfer, that might cause issues. Is that an area that needs further explored? I think that we said this quite clearly in our submission. The homeless legislation, as it was written in 1977, was specifically to transfer statutory responsibility from social work to housing and, in doing so, to open up housing allocation systems. That's what the 77 Act was about. That's 40 years ago. The world has moved on. There's no question that statutory obligations around homelessness needed to be more widely cast, but I would go further and say that we need to review all our housing and related legislation and satisfy ourselves that the whole system is properly directed at preventing homelessness and creating choices and routes into housing across the population. It's similar to the way we would deal with issues around human rights. Treating people with dignity and respect is an essential for a civilised society. We write our human rights legislation into every aspect of all our legislation. Having a roof over your head is essential for life, and yet we compartmentalise all the statutory duties around ensuring that that remains the case. We need to look at the whole system again. Following on from the comments that you have made, the whole idea of individuals who have, as you have indicated, complex needs, they may be mental health problems, they may have drug and alcohol dependency, but also numeracy and literacy and the way that they are communicated to by the authority, the housing officer, how that is managed can sometimes put them into a fear or panic, a crisis situation, because they are not able to manage that process. I would like to get some of your experiences of how that works, because you could have someone who is going through the journey, who has been identified, who has gone into temporary and is then looking for, and in amongst all of that, you then find that the chain gets broken because something falls down, they don't manage to get an appointment on time, they don't manage to get what the letter is telling them to do, they don't understand what is meant to process. I think that that is quite important, because that is what we identified when we went out. The chain was getting broken on a number of occasions before we got to the end result, and people then were coming back to the system and re-engaging and reassessing. I think that that is quite important, because that was not my impression before I went out and found out more information. The clock. Often there will be one presenting need, but when you build that relationship and get to know someone, you then realise that there is more presenting need, more need that appears later on, for sure, and it is very difficult to build a relationship with a one-hour housing options interview. Potentially that is why that happens such a high percentage of time, because you cannot begin to understand complex need in a one-hour interview. I support that point. Last summer, we had a PhD volunteer work with us who did a fantastic bit of research for us looking at the East Housing Options hub in Scotland, particularly on experiences from practitioners and commissioners of services and the client group who had multiple complex needs. They were trying to understand the issues that individuals face engaging with services and how the services are commissioned. There was a range of findings, which I will not do justice to here, but the key takeaway point was that we are not currently commissioning services to be delivered in a way that supports that group, who are most vulnerable. You cannot get a full sense of somebody in an hour. Those people need sustained engagement with a constant point of contact over a prolonged period of time to not just help them through the paperwork but to help them through into secure accommodation at the other end or whatever the issue is and to address your points to try and prevent exactly that issue of them going back into the system or falling out at some point once that support is removed, because you are talking about people who, by the very nature, have multiple issues that they need to help with. We help people to get into emergency accommodation and they have to follow that up with going along to the local authority and going through a full assessment. Quite a substantial percentage do not make it along and, despite our efforts to try and help them to get there, they struggle with that. We have asked, invited the local authority for years to come and be at our centre, because if we cannot get people to you, they are coming to us. Could we think about how we locate our services? However, there are challenges around their technology and being able to do that, so we have not got there yet, but we would continue to advocate that, from people with multiple complex needs, it is really difficult for them to keep appointment times, so they end up churning through a system, just repeatedly going into emergency accommodation placements and never moving on from there. I also point out the point that Mr Lang was making about housing options has to be within a wider strategy, and there is more to it, and we will move on now to the next line of questioning, Ruth Maguire. I would like to focus a little bit more on those folk with complex needs. I hear what Tony Kennes says about that, but that is not the whole picture, but we can just talk about that for a little bit longer. The evidence that we have received and what we have seen on our visits and thanks to streetworks for having us there is that it would seem that the housing support needs of people with complex needs are not being met all the time. The other thing that I was quite shocked to hear was that a worker told me of a young man who she was told that he was too high need for any of the supported accommodation options that were available. I would like to hear what types of supported accommodation you think work well if there are some out there. What do we need to have available for folk like that? I have good examples of supported accommodation that works relatively well for people in comparison to temporary accommodation bed and breakfast style. It is about the understanding of the needs of the people, by the people who work there and their ability to be a little bit more flexible and taller than a bed and breakfast where you have to be in by 10 o'clock at night. The relationships that they can build with staff who are there is a big factor in helping them to people who understand their needs and who will support them to build a relationship with them over time and help them to address their needs. We have some in Edinburgh but there is not enough and so bed and breakfast accommodation is used for the majority of our people. That is the real root of the problem. Yes, there are great models, great examples, there is definitely not enough and the support that is available to understand and work with someone on that journey is not available either, so that is very low. Not one size fits all, so you have to have a range of options. I went to visit St Mungos in London and they had a hotel style model that worked really well and they listened to people and what worked for people. They saw that people were actually booking them in themselves into this one particular bed and breakfast that was working well and so they copied that model, so they had a range of different options for people. It is definitely the key as relationships and the way that you build that relationship and how that is maintained and that understanding. Forgive me a little bit further around where we are with temporary accommodation. I think that it is the case that Edinburgh Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, the biggest cities have the opportunity to develop a wider range and sometimes quite sophisticated and quite specialist supported in temporary accommodation. Glasgow can afford it to offer and deliver a women-only hostel, for example, but outside the big cities what you tend to find is that homeless temporary accommodation. The word hostel is used, generally they are referring to a block of flats, all of which is used for temporary accommodation, they are not necessarily shared facilities in the way that you would understand a hostel, but they are used for the whole range of clients coming through the door, so you will find some quite difficult social mixes within this accommodation. High-risk offenders, young vulnerable adults, individuals with offending backgrounds, individuals with drug and alcohol related issues, people with mental health problems, people with learning disabilities, all using the same front door and the same block, and I don't think we are as well cited as we should be on the risks around that social environment and paying enough attention to ensuring that those elements of the service we are offering are actually safe. There are all sorts of issues that could arise in those circumstances, and I don't think we are well cited on them, even though we have improved the physical quality of accommodation. Big cities have done a great deal, but it is much more difficult outside those cities where scale is an issue, and that comes down to revenue funding. Forgive me, this is some of the evidence that I gave to this committee around the budget. There are real challenges around revenue funding of these services within local government, as there are in IJBs, as there are in some of the health services that we desperately need. You are absolutely fine to put that on the record. That is not a problem, Ruth. Do you want to explore that? I am just moving on a bit, and I suppose that it ties in. It is about the health needs of the folk who are using services. We heard from you that keeping any sort of appointment can be challenging. Are there opportunities around health and social care integration for different models that can better support homeless people and improve their health? There are two areas that we need to pay particular attention to. We will get later on this year the results of a data matching exercise that the Scottish Government has been in the process of leading, which brings together health data and homelessness data. What it will show, we already know, is that the health of long-term homeless households and the life expectancy of long-term households is disastrous compared to the many. In terms of life expectancy, substantially worse than the most deprived geographical population has gone. 47 is the life expectancy of a male in the long-term homeless system. It is appalling. The two areas of health service that let them down most are GP services, where many homeless folk find real difficulties getting access to GPs. No disrespect to the deep-end GPs, such as the Hunter Street practice in Glasgow, who focus and specialise very much on delivering services to homeless folk. Outside those areas, GP services are very, very difficult to access, and homeless folk very often use A&E as their GP, with all that that implies in terms of the expense, the cost and the inappropriateness of that behaviour or that approach. The other issue is around mental health, where mental health services, as I have already said, are just not achieving the outcomes that we need. There are significant issues of self-harm, significant issues of attempted suicide, and suicide in this population feeds into their life expectancy. There is a conversation that needs to be had, but it takes you back to my earlier point, and the point that was raised earlier on, about the scope of the homeless legislation and where the obligations lie. If they only lie on housing services or local authorities, and that means housing services, then there is no great surprise that other services are not stepping up. The GP contract is currently being renegotiated. You will be aware of that. I have raised questions about whether or not those changes to that contract can be used to reinforce the need for GPs to deliver services more flexibly to homeless people. The response has essentially been a big shortage of GPs, and the workload is too high already. We probably cannot deal with it in this contract. I am not entirely convinced that that is enough. I just add a couple of points to that. I think that there is a significant role that primary healthcare can play in supporting early intervention and provision of advice and support and signposting to specialist support where appropriate to prevent homelessness, and I think that that echoes the point that Tony is making across the board. I would also add that we have also, through the services that we have provided across the country, we have also had in several instances been made aware of people who are essentially using accident and emergency as a form of overnight BNB, people who are at risk, very vulnerable people, people with a high level of needs because they know that they can get a roof over their head that way when other systems have failed them or when they have fallen through the gaps of other forms of support. If we move a little bit away from people with complex needs, what we have found working in Edinburgh is that we were speaking earlier about what our people are signposted for support through the housing options system and how that generally doesn't happen. Jan had said that very few of her referrals come in that way and what we've found is we get an awful lot of people referred to us through various NHS services but that has relied on us as an organisation going out and forming relationships with those services and making them aware of what's available to people. Now within the sort of the whole health and social care integration process or within the creation of locality hubs, which is happening in Edinburgh at the moment, there's got to be some scope for ensuring that health services, homelessness services, other social supports work more closely together in a more integrated way to ensure that when people are about to fall into housing crisis or suffering a housing crisis that it's identified because it is often the health professionals that will identify at first. We've found for example health visitors and district nurses are a really good source of referrals for us because they're getting into people's homes, they're speaking to them, they're finding out where people have crises in other areas, where they're financially stretched, where they're about to lose their home and they can refer to us but that has that has depended on us going out and forging those relationships. There isn't any sort of an infrastructure there that can direct those people to us. Thank you very much. Just wanted to double check the leak that I've all taken in but Ruth, there's been a lot of responses there, you might want to take your next route, do you want to follow up on any of that? No, I'm quite happy to just hear from them then. I was going to say going back to your question, there is real opportunity in the integration of health and social care if we get it right and I think one of the key areas there is to look at the flexibility of their approach in how people can access their service and the lowering of potential thresholds that they have for referrals into different services. I absolutely agree that there is real opportunity. There is also a challenge about the health and social care integration agenda because it goes hand in hand with other public service reforms that are either on-going or forthcoming. We have a dozen or so health boards, we have 32 local authorities, we have 32 health and social care integration joint boards, we have one police service, we have 15 prisons, we have a very mismatched landscape of public service delivery, if you like, in Scotland. Part of the rationale of why Childhood Scotland and others have been calling for a new strategic approach to homelessness is that as all those things go through in an era of less and less funding available for all those services, they are going to focus down on those things that are their strategic obligations or their statutory duties that they have to deliver. There is a real risk that in all that churn and in all that mix the issue of providing people who are at risk of homelessness with the support that they need and the early intervention that they need gets lost in the mix. I do not disagree at all that there is a real opportunity but that has to be balanced against the challenge of making sure that homelessness is a strategic priority in this time of quite significant public sector reform. I totally agree with that. That is where that threshold of referral needs to be really clear on the flexibility of the approach that they bring to the health and social care integration. I will check something, because I thought that you were in a questioning with a spot on roof in terms of health and social care integration. When we were at the Glasgow visit with the Simon community, we were saying that it started a pilot project with Glasgow homeless services where a couple of the homeless case work team were going to be embedded with the Simon community, which I suspect in monetary terms will mean money saved because you are much more likely to get a better outcome for vulnerable people with multiple complex needs as you build up that relationship. I hate to use the expression, serve as redesign, because that sounds really massive, whole systems change. Is there lots of overlapping opportunities for more of that work, whether it is mental health workers being embedded with homeless teams and Mr Cain mentioned resource issues? Yes, there may be the need for additional resources, but are we also not using current resources as effectively as we could be as well? I think that that is absolutely the case. The best example to give would be about housing homelessness and re-offending. Something like a third of everybody leaving prison, whether that is remander and sentence, is a pretty much discharged state to the nearest homeless service. That is what they do, about a third of them leaving prison go straight there. Losing your home, research published by the Scottish Government last year demonstrated very clearly that losing a home, struggling to get a home, is a substantial issue in re-offending, and re-offending costs this country £3 billion a year. That is the figure that the housing minister himself was talking about at the recent homeless prevention strategy group that I attended in this building. £3 billion a year is a cost of re-offending, which is in fact the whole five-year sum of the Scottish Government's commitment to affordable housing. That is the scale of the savings and the improvements that can be achieved if you can get the housing element of community justice processes and discharged from prison right, so that folk are not being discharged into homelessness and so that they get the kind of support to divert them from the risk of re-offending. Therefore, there is a huge opportunity to use the resources that we have better. I could not agree more strongly with that. The prison population in Scotland is roughly just under 8,000 annually, but there are about 20,000 releases each year from prisons in Scotland. As Tony was saying, around a third of them do not have a home to go to on release, and there is still the issue of, when you are making a homelessness assessment at a local authority level, the issue of local connection. There needs to be the ability for greater discretion in those cases for people coming out of care situations, prisons and others. We also know that ex-fenders are overrepresented in homelessness statistics, and around a third, if you like, who are released without a home to go to go on to re-offend, because they know that the prison institution is a roof over their head in part. Going back to what you said, having different services cited together, so potentially mental health services cited in the housing homelessness options team makes a huge difference on the way that they can achieve greater outcome, so that definitely goes back to that integration and how we do that. On the issue of discharge from prison, we are not just sitting back and ignoring that and pointing at the prison surface. There is an active conversation going on at the moment between Alachow, Solace for Chief Executives in local authorities, Prison Service and Shelter, in fact, about how we can better work together to use our resources to reduce that number and to provide a better option service in prison. There is a very focused piece of work that has been going on for the last year or so around that. We are cited on it, but it is a huge challenge. Thank you for coming in. That is extremely helpful. I want to talk about the relationship between the statutory services and the third sector in a minute. Do you have any comment on the housing first model and how valuable that is? We have had some anecdotal evidence that people are being put into getting housing too quickly. They cannot cope and they are out again, but the statutory, in the council, feels that that is their obligation to do that. You were all looking at each other, Mark, and I caught your eye first, Mr Kennedy. In terms of people getting accommodation that they are perhaps not ready for, I think I would refer to the earlier point about flexibility. There needs to be more flexibility in the support that is there for people. If I give our own example, we at the moment are limited to a six-month period where we can work with people. If you are working with someone who has quite complex needs, they get allocated a tenancy, two or three weeks in, that funding ends, then there is a very, very good chance that that is going to break down. I think the housing first model is for a lot of people a very good route to take, but it is very, very important that there is a consistency of support to ensure that people settle in to that tenancy, utilise it properly, make the links that they need to make in the local community to make that work for them, get everything set up in a way that ensures that the tenancy is going to work for them, and where necessary, continue periodically to help people to sustain that housing situation, because, as we have said earlier, there are people who will need ongoing help to sustain that situation. We would support bringing in housing first in Scotland. The research world why shows it as an effective model with high success rates for people who experience multiple exclusion homelessness, but you have to stay true to the model. You have to offer support, but people do not have to take that support to keep the tenancy. I think that it is an option that we should be exploring in Scotland. I agree with that. Ideologically, the housing first model is a system geared more around a housing system, rather than a homelessness system. Ideologically, that is an important distinction and one that shifts the provision of support. I agree that, yes, all the evidence internationally and from pilot cases definitely backs up that it is a valid and worthwhile approach, but I echo the point that it needs to be embraced fully, not tokenistically. It needs to have both the flexibility of the support and, crucially—I think that that is the challenge that we would have at the moment with this in Scotland—it needs to have the options of different housing stock—greater supply of housing stock, social rented supply. We are currently way off where we need to be in terms of the percentage share of the housing stock that is available for social rent and not just the targets for supply. I think that you need that in place to have an effective housing first model, because you need flexibility and you need options. Those are two challenges that we have at the moment. I echo that. The way, particularly in local government, that we conceive settled accommodation is too narrow—I am caricatured, but essentially there is temporary accommodation and then there is a council flat or house, and that in the housing world in local government is how outcomes are seen. We need to offer something much more flexible around what settled accommodation is, how it works and the extent to which it requires individuals to manage that accommodation activity, particularly individuals who are requiring high levels of support and who are building up to taking more control over their life and coming out of a chaotic period. I think that you also have to acknowledge that there are risks associated with housing first. If it is conceived of a model that takes somebody who is highly chaotic and struggling to manage their life and struggling to manage offending, struggling to manage drug and alcohol issues and then simply place them in a flat in a mainstream community and then expect that support services around them will prevent and avoid any difficulties arising. You need to acknowledge that communities themselves can be extremely concerned about individuals like that appearing in the flats next to them, extremely worried about the extent to which support will actually be available and extremely angry when that support is not available and those behaviours become very destructive of their lives. I suspect that, as MSPs, you have all had constituency cases where a homeless person has been placed and support has not been provided and behaviours have been hugely problematic and lives around them have been damaged. Housing First can offer us something absolutely, but it swings its successes entirely dependent on appropriate accommodation and appropriate support services. At the moment, I do not think that we are geared to deliver that, so we need to think about it before we do it. At the moment, we are placing people in bed and breakfast without support in communities. So, as an alternative, for people with multiple complex needs who are churning through a temporary accommodation system that they cannot get out of the end of to get settled accommodation, we would advocate it as a viable alternative. Thank you very much. That is very useful. I think that we will explore that further. When we have been visiting, we have been talking about the statutory services and how they interact with third sector services, such as some of you represent here. It is clear that the third sector is providing very good services. Some of the funding is a little bit vulnerable to year-on-year budgeting, and some of the relationship seems to be good but not formalised, as it should be. I have been getting a sense that the whole system is a bit vulnerable to revenue in the future. Is some of this due to the fact that, as Tony Cain was saying, the statutory basis of this is rather outdated and therefore the third sector has come in to fill in some of the gaps? Is there any merit in formalising or certainly improving the statutory framework to take in the organisations such as your own that are providing those services on a more formal or a more statutory basis? I think that there is a benefit to not being so. I think that a lot of the people that we support have a mistrust of statutory services because of their life experiences. They will perhaps more readily engage with third sector organisations, but it is true that there are challenges in the relationships between third sector organisations and the local authority because of the commissioning climate that we are in. In Edinburgh, the housing department is doing their best to work and to develop positive relationships. It is very dependent on the people who are in the post and they change and the budgeting is short-term. You might have a contract that will last for three years, but they cannot guarantee the level of income in that contract for the next three years. It could reduce year on year. That is challenging. You cannot forecast and plan as a third sector organisation for the long term easily. Any other comments on that, Mr Kennedy? It must be possible with all the analytical tools that are available to work out what the ongoing need for, for example, support services for people who are vulnerably housed is going to be. Given that it would be possible to work out what that level of need is, it must also be possible to work out what level of funding it will require to service that need. Following on from that, it should be possible to commission people to service that need over a long term. If I look at my own team of people that I work with on a day to day basis, we have been doing homelessness prevention work in Edinburgh since 2009. A lot of the team have been there for that amount of time. They have built up huge expertise in all sorts of different areas depending on the needs of clients over that period of time. Yes, I do not know that I am funded beyond the end of June this year. It could be that we are not funding that team disperses, that expertise is lost and we are back to square one building it up again when there is an emergency and people decide. There needs to be a focus on establishing what the need is and looking at what can be done to fund that over a longer period of time. That is the only way that the people who have ongoing need are going to be supported to get the best outcomes. It is a big stop-start at the moment. Going back to your earlier point about relationships and how the statutory services should work with the local authority, I think I would echo what Jan says. We have our own ethos, our own way of working. It is important that we maintain a certain distance because people do see us as services that advocate on their behalf rather than statutory or government. I echo that from a local authority perspective. The voluntary sector has brought huge diversity, real power and strength, innovation, flexibility and real quality to some of the responses around homelessness. Some of what it does simply could not be replicated in the public sector. The obvious example of that is women's aid. I do not think that you could replace women's aid and the work it does with a statutory service. It just would not work in the same way. We need to be better at procurement and offer up more certainty. We need to be measuring outcomes in a more sophisticated way so that we are not measuring the wrong thing. Longer-term funding and long-term contracts would be enormously helpful, but I do not think that you are suggesting absorbing the voluntary sector into the statutory sector. I do not know how you would cast legislation that requires a particular set of relationships without risking some of the innovation and flexibility and independence that the third sector brings. I think that the third sector would benefit from being more certain about its role and its long-term funding. I support a lot of that. From our point of view, we operate services out of four community hubs in the main cities in Scotland, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, as well as a number of bespoke housing support services in some areas across Scotland. In the past six to ten years, the funding mix for those services has changed drastically for us from a huge reduction in statutory funding for the services that we deliver and the support that we provide to a much more varied mix of grants, trusts, lottery funding and our own voluntary-raised income going into support services where there is not statutory funding available. The consequence that that has for us is that it makes, and initially it echoes the point that was made by others, because I am sure that we are not alone in this. I know that we are not. It goes to year-on-year cycles. You do not have any confidence in retaining good staff or the relationships that we have built up. I think that if you link that back to the other points that have been made today, particularly the increasing work that we are all doing with people with multiple complex needs, those people need a sense or a guarantee of sustained engagement with them. We are not currently tendering or designing services that are commissioned in a way to allow organisations in the third sector and others to meaningfully provide that support. It is a big challenge operationally that we have as a charity just now. Thank you. Mr Whiteman, do you want to follow? Yes, that is extremely useful. As Tony said, I am not through that question advocating the absorption into the public sector of those services, but in asking a question about formalities here, I think that it is a response to the fact that a lot of those services are sort of marketised now. You are talking about commissioning, et cetera, and yet you are talking about short-term timescales, and yet you are an integral part of prevention, and therefore it seems to me for a steam if nothing else. There should be greater parity perhaps, so some kind of formalisation of that role, probably embedded in statute of some kind of recognition of roles or whatever. However, I have just sensed quite a bit of vulnerability out there in a sense in which the people who depend on those services, obviously they are the people that we need to be thinking about, but the services that are being delivered by the third sector seem to be in a bit of a shugly pig in too many instances. I am not sure if there is a question on that, but I do see nodding heads. I think that Kenneth Gibson wants to explore this further, if that is okay. Yes, thanks. We have just heard about how the third sector delivers innovation and flexibility and expertise. I also think that it delivers compassion to the service users, and that was certainly came through very strongly when I was at the Simon community last week. What was interesting, though, I found quite surprising, was that in Glasgow there are 70 organisations providing homeless services. While there is a high level of expertise, for example, I asked the service users which were the best and worst organisations in city missions in the Simon community, for example, came top. Of course, there was not the third sector, in my view, at the Bellgrove at the bottom of the heap. There was some confusion from service users about who exactly does what because there are so many organisations. Clearly, with evidence earlier, there was a mention of gaps and also duplication. I am just wondering if there is an argument for the consolidation of some of those services in order to provide a more effective delivery. Obviously, that means that third sector organisations are working together, as I am sure that many of them do, much more closely in partnership. However, earlier in the session, we heard about training needs in local authorities. There must obviously be differences in each organisation in terms of the training that is provided. I am just wondering if you can touch on some of those issues. I think that so much of the funding that third sector organisations receive has to be directed to front-line service delivery. Not many funders are interested in funding to big percentages outside of that. Funders should consider that there is value in investing in organisations outside of just front-line delivery so that they can provide more training and upskill their workforce. There is an opportunity to share training across the sector, and there are good examples of how that happens already in Edinburgh anyway. I think that we need more funding for aspects of our service other than direct service delivery to support that. Part of what you are referencing or my understanding of what you are referencing is some of the charities that you are talking about. I also sit in the policy committee for the SCVO. A lot of charities in Scotland are very small. They set themselves up to respond to local need as they see it in their communities. In that regard, there probably is sometimes a lack of broader strategic awareness of other offerings in that area or on occasions joined up working. Charities are very good at working together. Quite often, the funding that comes from statutory and trust lotteries and others requires you to work in partnership with other organisations. There is a good culture and a good mentality in the third sector, but some of what you might be referencing is the reality that charities respond to need. If there are 70 organisations in Glasgow alone responding to homelessness, that tells you something serious about the local authority provision of support for homeless people. The two do not always go hand in hand. Charities quite often set themselves up, especially smaller-scale community-based charities or initiatives, and they respond to a need. If the need is there, what does that say about how the local authority in terms of the role of the public services delivered is supporting the people that it should be supporting? There is probably quite a number of interlinked points that feed into that. I wonder if there is an argument for consolidation on these services. One organisation that might be small but might be highly innovative in delivering for the people that are set up and most delivered for. Other organisations could perhaps benefit from that in terms of the sharing of expertise, but each organisation has to have its own structure, its own management, etc. Obviously, if there was less of that, perhaps an organisation was only based in Maryhill but spread out across the whole of the north of the city, for example. It might be able to deliver a better service. Some organisations may focus on specific groups. Duplication and gapping must surely be inevitable in such circumstances, even if it is geographic gaps. There might be an overall service in the city, but it only happens in Drumchapel or Castlemill or Carpola or whatever it happens to be, so that is what I am trying to get at, especially at a time when revenue funding is tight. I understand that Glasgow is going to incur its revenue and homelessness from 2040-20 million a year, which is a significant gap in the reduction in one year. I wonder whether or not this is a way in which organisations can continue to deliver the expertise that they do deliver without more pain than it is likely to come its way anyway. We are currently operating in a model in Edinburgh at the moment where we deliver homelessness prevention services as a lead partner within a consortium of agencies. That consortium approach I think was initiated to try and address some of the issues you are raising there. We are a lead partner in a consortium of five different agencies, all of whom are operating independently before we came together as a consortium. The idea is that there is a range of expertise in there that one organisation would have difficulty providing, but also that there is less confusion for people who are using services in terms of where these services are going to be reached and for people who are commissioning and referring into services. My own personal experience is that that has worked very, very well previous to that system being set up. All of the organisations that are now working under that model were being funded independently to do the same sort of work. Personally I always felt in a way we were almost in competition with one another, whereas I feel it is October 2014 we started that and it has taken a bit of time, but I feel we are at a point where we work very well together and complement one another. Really how it works is a lead partner takes responsibility for the budget and distributing that between everyone and coordinates how the work takes place and what expertise is best deployed in each situation. I feel it works well, but that is a way of addressing some of those issues. Does that actually help in terms of issues like budget? If we are an organisation, perhaps it is not so successful, but it has good quality staff, it means that that staff member is not lost, so to speak, to the service, if you like, because it can perhaps move on to work within one another as a consortium. Does it work in that regard? Well, where I would say it works very, very well is that not every organisation needs to be administratively very strong. It is only really the lead partner that requires the administrative backup to organisations. We do not need five finance departments, five HRs, whatever it is kind of thing within the service, because we have an organisation as a lead partner have taken on the finance function for that whole consortium in terms of distributing that budget and those sorts of things. So yet there probably is a reduction in duplication of work there, but I think the key to it is, for example, of the five organisations that work with us. There is one that specialises in people with substance misuse issues. There is two that specialise in people with mental health issues. There is ourselves who have worked in homelessness prevention, welfare rights, those sorts of issues. So when people are referred to us, we can assess what kind of support they are likely to need and in theory get them to the organisation that can best provide that support. Rather than previously we would have been in a situation where as if someone came to our door we were going to take them because there was funding attached to that person, if you see what I mean. Rather than sending them to the guy down the road who was probably better placed to support them. The organisation still retains its identities. Of course it does, yes. Can I just ask one further question? It is to Tony Cain specifically. Tony mentioned earlier on the huge issue of offenders going out into the community and he talked about flexibility in terms of local connection points. How would that flexibility work? I was an MSP in North Ayrshire, but I was a councillor MSP in Glasgow for 11 years. I am just wondering how that would be delivered without the situation whereby a huge proportion of former offenders, for example, decide to move to Glasgow, Edinburgh and the other cities. How would you enable that flexibility to work but, at the same time, not have a huge increase, for example, in the number of people who might go to one area or another? I was not suggesting that the local authority that hosts a particular prison should then expect to house and accommodate and deliver services to everybody who is discharged from that prison. What I was more pointing to is the fact that it is very difficult for local authorities who are likely to have residents in all 15 of Scotland's prisons to ensure that any one of their residents at the point of release of liberation gets the support and service that they need. There is a conversation that needs to take place across the 32 authorities to ensure that in every prison there is a service and that service is properly connected to the home local authority or the area that that individual wants to move to. There are some issues in here about offenders like everybody else having a right to choose where it is that they want to go and live and there are some occasions when offenders might not want to return to the home community. However, I was not suggesting that it is all about them moving out and being housed by the local authority. It is about local authorities working together and with the prison service and others to make sure that the point of their liberation is properly connected back to the homelessness service or the housing service that they will then approach. Just to respond to some of your earlier points, if I may, and you will forgive me, you said something about the level of compassion that you see in the services being delivered in the voluntary sector and I absolutely would not for one second suggest that that is not the case. I would say that you will see very similar levels of compassion and commitment in many of the people working in local government who long-term work with the same client groups and commit very strongly to doing their very best to deliver the sorts of outcomes that are there. It is a feature of everybody involved in this system, to be honest with you. Just then dealing with some of the other bits and pieces, I do not think that it is for a local authority to look at the range of charities operating in its area and start telling them to merge or do this and do that, but I do think that a local authority can use its commissioning framework and I appreciate the language coming in comfortably at the procurement framework to direct and assist and support the provider framework in a particular way, but also there are in most local authorities homelessness partnerships operating where the council will sit down with third sector organisations and talk about the way services are being developed, the direction and the needs and the gaps and encourage and discuss with those organisations how they work together and the sector itself has a huge track record in innovation and you see that already in the way they are responding, developing joint working arrangements to better support the client groups that they are dealing with. Diversity and provision is hardwired into our housing system. There are 68 housing providers in Glasgow, never mind 70 organisations supporting social housing providers and 70 organisations supporting homeless people, so it is part of the geography of the world that we work in. I think that is probably a strength more than anything else. I am keen to move on, do you want to say it? Tony did highlight the fact that people in working local authorities do have compassion. I think that you have to have compassion on what in the sector is more or less taking as red and I think that the selflessness of people in the sector is something that we have very much highlighted to members of the committee on our business. We are almost finished in this section. I just want to give a heads up to the committee members actually. I think that there is a line of questions that we promise to have to explore in temporary accommodation that we have not done yet, so I will catch my eye if you want to ask those questions or else you will just have to listen to me and ask those questions to catch my eye. Adam Langdon will like it in the second to finish exploring this, but I will just pick up this other bit as well from Mr Gibson's line of questioning. In Glasgow, we heard that there was talk about third sector organisations bidding to be part of a consortium to then look at some form of service redesign or service development in the city. It was not clear whether that was going to be a procurement or tendering process and I hate to use all the various bus words, but I remember when the prison service talked about a public service partnership that we spoke about. We always heard about the idea of co-production and mapping out current service providers in a difficult financial situation saying to current good quality service providers, here is the money that we have, take that away, what would you design a service to look like that provides the best outcomes and speak to the third sector seriously about that? Is that something that should be going on through the integrated joint boards? I know that statutory duty is just older people services, but is there a more systematic view that we will be taking across Scotland via third sector interfaces, the voluntary sector, integrated joint boards and what is happening on the ground? I am not trying to open up a new line of questioning. I suppose what I am trying to do is to follow on from Mr Gibson and see if that is something that we should explore further when we move into a formal call for evidence. Mr Lai, I am going to take you in. If you can let that, whether on divine that comment I make if you wish or you can comment on it, but I know that you did want in in this particular section. Thank you. I wanted to follow up on part of what Tony had addressed in relation to Mr Gibson's questions. There is not currently any universal provision of housing advice for prisoners in Scotland, which is a problem. There have been services in the past that we have done and others have done that have worked in some prisons. There is an abundance of evidence to say that that helps tackle those problems in a cost-effective and meaningful way. It is a challenge that we have right now that there is no provision of housing advice for prisoners. As I was saying earlier, the geography of our prison network—the 15 prisons—does not neatly align or match with our local authority and other public services. I hope that the new community justice body when it comes online will also be taking real focus on that. I would say that I think that the third sector generally has mixed experiences of how seriously it can be taken at times in some of those joint boards or community planning partners or the various vehicles that are established in theory to hear from a range of voices. The challenge comes down to—and this is not, perhaps, solely from the Scotland experience, but more generally about the third sector—when the crunch comes on funding, the provision of support focuses down on what is the statutory thing, what is the essential thing that we have to do, and how quickly we have to do it. It does not always run true that the various forums that in theory exist to give an equal share of voice. There is sometimes a sense of frustration that I know that is true from youth work, from healthcare across the range of third sector and planning, housing the whole range. Any other comments in relation to that before we move on, Mr Cain? The geography of service position around homelessness is now very complicated. In 1977, the act was about what happens when you go to the housing department. Now you will find homelessness services within housing departments in some areas, within IJBs and others, within social care services in other areas. It is a very complicated setup, so the way in which you accept that service is not consistent or the same. Understanding that can be quite a challenge. It is also fair to say that the IJBs, even those who carry operating services around homelessness, have not particularly been focusing on that area and nor have most of the process around improving the engagement between housing and health and social care integration either. Much of the work of the IHUB around the improvement service around housing and health and social care integration has been about older people and, to a lesser extent, people with disabilities. Although we have been pushing for a conversation to start around services to homeless folk, we are not quite fully yet there. There is a conversation, but we are there in terms of what is the focus of the work that IJBs are doing. How are they looking at their responsibilities around this particular group and starting to develop and improve services? There would be an opportunity for the third sector to be— The third sector would look like rather tendering for prescribed services. There would be a place in there undoubtedly. However, given the way that procurement rules work in the public sector, there will be very few opportunities for local authorities to fund third sector organisations without that being subject to a form of procurement process. That is what the law requires. Any additional comments before we move on? Okay, Elaine Smith. Thanks very much, convener. We want to move on to temporary accommodation, but there is temporary accommodation and temporary accommodation. Some of what we heard of in Glasgow was accommodation that was meant to be quite short term but ended up being longer term. I think that convener wants to explore some of that, but I really want to ask about rough sleepers. Having been a member of this Parliament since 1999, I do know that the guarantee was given then of a target of ensuring no rough sleepers by 2003. If I did not know that, the shelter submission reminds us of that. However, we now seem to be seeing figures that suggest or at least anecdotal evidence that suggest that rough sleepers are increasing. I have several—I do not want you to answer all of those, because obviously we are looking to see what we would want to explore, but there seems to me to be several issues. First of all, it seems that it is churches, Christian charities, for example, in the big cities that are providing the overnight type accommodation, which is something that I think that Jan would know about. Secondly, we have done away with the big hostels, maybe in the hope that we would have stopped rough sleeping, but again it seems that there might actually be a need, maybe we are kidding ourselves on having taken away those large hostels where people can get overnight shelter if they are rough sleeping. Those would be my questions. Do we need to now look further at the situation of rough sleeping and what the solutions might be? It is really important to recognise that, a couple of key points, there is no formal count on rough sleeping in Scotland. I am not necessarily saying that there should be one, but the numbers—I think that everyone around this table would absolutely agree, and I hope that from the experiences that you have all had, you would also agree that it is clearly rising the level of rough sleeping in this country, and it is the most tragic form of homelessness. It is important to note that it is the tip of the iceberg on homelessness. It is the most visible form of it, but it is a symptom of a much bigger underlying problem beneath just rough sleeping. It is important to look at rough sleeping and understand it, but there are more structural and systemic problems that lead to that. I would argue that part of that is because we have lost a bit of strategic focus on homelessness in the last, arguably really since the 2002 task force and the 2012 commitment. The joined up strategic focus with real cross-party leadership behind it has dropped off the radar a bit, and we are now seeing rough sleeping rising. It is linked to all the points that have been made earlier by everyone today, and it is very closely linked to the availability and supply of temporary accommodation. On the point about hostels, I would be very wary about advocating for a return to the use of hostel. I know that there have been some initiatives floated about in recent months about various modern models of hostel-type accommodation. All the evidence shows that they come with significant challenges and risks for the individuals who would go there, but that said, I think that it is an understandable question because we are seeing a rise in rough sleeping. We have to understand that the rise in rough sleeping is a system failure, and it is linked closely to the significant shortage of temporary accommodation and settled permanent accommodation. I appreciate that, but it seems that the void is being filled by churches, for example, particularly in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In my own area, where I live, Coatbridge, there was an initiative where women were just wanting to open a church hall to deal with the problem. There is a problem with how we deal with it. I think that we might want to further explore it, but we also heard from a visit to legal services. I have had some experience of that, particularly with prisoners and people being released from prison. To get temporary accommodation so that you are sleeping on the street but to get some roof over your head that you are due, you have to go and get a lawyer's letter and brandish it at the local authority, and even then you may not be dealt with and you have fallen back on this 19th century charitable provision. That cannot be right, either. That is absolutely not right, so to be absolutely clear. If somebody presents to a local authority and says, I have nowhere to sleep tonight, the statutory obligation is absolutely to secure accommodation that is made available, and that is what should happen, although I acknowledge that it does not always happen. I do not think that we should doubt for a moment that the process that shut the Great Easton was the right process. Those facilities were dangerous, they were difficult, they were inappropriate, they should not have been still in existence at the start of the 21st century, so there was no mistake made in the work that was done through the homelessness task force, through the rough sleepers work early doors around this Parliament to shut those institutions and provide alternatives. I think that you are right that there has been a growth in rough sleeping, particularly in the cities. I do not think that I see it, I do not stay in Edinburgh or Glasgow, I do not think that I see it, well, I stay, but I definitely see it and have done for the last year or 18 months in Edinburgh and Glasgow. I do not think that we necessarily understand why that has happened. I have two particular concerns, and again these were picked up in the evidence that I gave to the committee on the finance on the budget. One is that some of these individuals are choosing to walk away from strategy services so that they have opted to sleep rough because it is actually better and safer for them and they feel more in control than if they go to the council. I think that that is a very serious question that local authorities are working with the third sector needs to ask themselves. I think that there is a risk of that and we need to be open to that. The other one is, and I do not know to the extent to which this is true, that some of the rough sleepers are economic migrants whose immigration status means that they have no access to public funds, so it would be unlawful for a local authority to assist them and destitute them, though they are, because of the way that legislation works. I also know that some local authorities are housing individuals in those circumstances because officers simply refuse to put them out onto the street, not what they got into housing for in the first place. My worry is that those two elements are a significant and very difficult to deal with part of what we are seeing in rough sleeping, but I would also say that I do not think that we know enough about it, and we probably need to spend a bit of time looking at it in more detail. The rough sleeping is not the same as it was 15 years ago, something has changed, it is on the rise, some serious effort needs to go into responding to it. Okay, I know that Jan Robertson wants to come in. We might, ordinarily, because we will get time constraints. After this, we might have to move on just briefly to some question, temporary accommodation, and then we will need to close the session, but as I say, we will be returning to this, so Jan, do you have something to add in relation to that? We would agree that we see rough sleeping rising in Edinburgh, and the reasons for that is not just down to one reason. There are people who migrate here who do not have recourse to support from the local authority. There are a lot of people who feel unsafe in temporary accommodation and do not want to be in there, and it is a sad state of affairs that is sleeping on a church hall floor overnight with another 40 people is a better option. Then there are people who cannot get into temporary accommodation, because, certainly within Edinburgh, we experience often that if somebody does not have benefits in place, they will not get put into temporary emergency accommodation, and that should not be the case that they should get while an assessment is undertaken, and then the issue of intentionality and local connection as well. Okay, that is very helpful. It also leads us on. I might break my rule, but did you want to come in and add to that? No. Right, okay, excellent. It brings nicely on to temporary accommodation with a number of questions, and Jan, you have put on the record about issues in some parts of the country in relation to having to have all your benefits in place before you qualify for the temporary accommodation, so that is sitting there and we, as part of our inquiry, ask more about that. I suppose the bulk of my constituency case work in relation to homelessness are families that may not have multiple and complex needs who are just in small temporary accommodation flats, quite often tenement flats in my constituency, two bedrooms for children, very cramped conditions in properties that are hard to let areas, looking for larger houses, and they seem trapped in temporary accommodation for quite a significant amount of time. Now they do quite often eventually get out of it if there is a sensible use of housing allocations policy by social landlords who will partially meet their housing needs by offering a slightly larger property and returning in the future to give them the ideal property for them, but too many families in my experience are trapped in very, very small cramped accommodation for quite a long period of time. Now that is anecdotal, that is maybe specific to the type of constituencies that I represent in Mary Helen Springburn, but I suppose that the question that I am asking is across the country, what are the types of people as individuals as families in terms of those that are staying in temporary accommodation perhaps for too long? What are the barriers to permanent accommodation and what types of questions? If you were our committee, would you be asking me what would the call for evidence? Hopefully that contextualises the type of questions that we are wanting to ask in temporary accommodation. Adam Lang. In January of this year, Shelter Scotland published the third annual report that we have now done based on FOI requests to all local authorities trying to analyse and understand the time spent in temporary accommodation and to seek to answer exactly some of those questions. To share a couple of the key findings, the average time a household spent in temporary accommodation last year was 24 weeks. The average time that a household with children spent in temporary accommodation has increased for the last two years and now stands at 20.2 weeks. The number of people in temporary accommodation is just over 10,500, and the number of children in temporary accommodation in Scotland is over 5,700. That has gone up in the last three consecutive snapshot figures that are done on temporary accommodation in Scotland. The number of children in temporary accommodation has gone up last year in Scotland and the year before children spent over a million days in temporary accommodation in Scotland, cumulatively in total. That is some of the top-level numbers around temporary accommodation, as we understand it at this point in time. At the heart of that issue is the lack of supply of the chronic generational, if you like, lack of affordable housing supply and, crucially, housing supply that is made available for social rent so that local authorities are just echoing what has been said by all of us today. Local authorities have options in terms of what they can offer people, because you are absolutely right, convener. The assumptions that are made about what is needed do not always match. A lot of our case work is trying to get families who maybe have two children and three children. There is a general lack of supply of temp and social accommodation. There is a real huge lack of supply for family homes in some areas. What that sometimes leads to is the challenges that we have with the mixed implementation of some of this work, and some local authorities are doing slightly better than others in terms of supply and service delivery. Some of the Glasgow that we know is quite challenging in some areas, but it is not alone that there are other local authorities in Scotland for this to be the real challenge. Any other witnesses want to add in relation to—I mean, take this as the opportunity to put on record anything that you would like to say in relation to temporary accommodation, because we are going to have to close the evidence session as soon as I want to comment. I think that you should extend the laws about unsuitable temporary accommodation to cover everybody, because anybody saying that an unsuitable temporary accommodation for an extended period of time is not acceptable. Thank you. Any other witnesses want to comment? I would just like to say that in our experience, where people are in temporary accommodation unsuitable or otherwise, it is very disruptive particularly for families. It creates real disruption in people's lives. They cannot move on. They cannot get jobs. They cannot decide what schools their children are going to. There are all sorts of issues around that, but what we found is for a lot of people, the key to moving them into more permanent accommodation is there being support available to help them do that. The actual housing allocation system and housing options system in most cities in Scotland is quite Byzantine, and you actually need someone with a little bit of expertise of the system to help negotiate your way through that pathway and a key to minimising the amount of time people bend in temporary accommodation will be ensuring that they have help to get out of it. I will take you in just before you answer this, Tony Cain. I was just thinking—again, I am talking about MSP Mike and some of my constituency case work, where some of the social landlords now operate a choice-based letting system where they will accept their obligation to house, but what they will do is they will have a group of allocations that are for homeless in their advocate constituents, so they will just keep bidding in and bidding in and not actually getting secure accommodation, whereas the old traditional route, with all its faults of a section 5 referral, a housing association or local authorities would accept that obligation on the basis that they knew they had to house you suitably within a set amount of time. So, just in terms of—I apologise that I am bringing this in fairly late in the day, Mr Cain, it has popped into my head and I thought it would be remiss if we not to mention that when we are talking about those that are homeless and in temporary accommodation. Difficult to respond across the range of those things. In a world of shortage, we ration social housing. It is as simple as that. Allocations policies, whether they are choice-based or not, are rationing systems. One of the biggest difficulties with a rationing system is demonstrating that it is fair and transparent, and that is not easy. There are a whole range of people that have a claim on social housing, and they all want to be treated fairly. They want to be seen to be treated fairly, and this is a binary set of outcomes. It is one or zero. If you come second, you do not get a house. If you come second, it does not mean you come first next time. You might come second forever. This is a very contested area. It is driven by shortage, and part of the answer is ending that shortage. There is the advert for the final point of my evidence, which says that, rather than committing to a particular number of social rented houses over a period, we need to commit to grow the proportion of the stock in social renting, particularly in those areas under the highest pressure, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Edinburgh, bits of Fife, Midlothian, Eastlothian, Perth, Aberdeen. These are the areas that need most of that investment. Dealing with shortage is a critical issue. In terms of the rest of the issues around temporary accommodation, IE, length of stays have risen. The percentage of lets being made to homeless households has fallen over the last three years, and that is both by local authorities and by housing associations. However, there is a gulf between the two, so local authorities are doing 38 or 40% of their lets. Some are doing significantly more on average. Housing associations are doing around 22 or 24% of their lets. Some are doing significantly more. Some are doing none. So there are issues about the way in which the access system works. I think that issues are about integrating the homelessness route into mainstream access so that folk do not have to go into temporary accommodation at all. Many folk present to local authorities who could just be given a house and finding a better way of managing the access arrangements, so that is what happens, is one of the tasks that we need to take on. Any final comments from witnesses before we close this evidence session, Mr Lang? Thank you, convener. To put it on record, there is no Government guidance on standards and temporary accommodation across the board, and we have campaigned and argued for a very long time that there should be and there needs to be, and I would like that to go on record from ourselves. The other issue that is addressed both in shelter Scotland submission and a lateral submission is the looming crisis of funding for temporary accommodation, which I think is very important that it goes on record. There is a massive shortfall project in how we fund temporary accommodation in Scotland to the tune of somewhere between £40 million and £60 million annually. We need to start addressing that right now, otherwise that is just going to be an enormous problem. The temporary accommodation is the bedrock of our homelessness support system and our housing safety net in Scotland, and we know that there is a huge shortfall coming and we need to do something about it. Witnesses, will there be a chance for a final comment that Alexander Stewart wants to just sneak in a little comment first? Thank you, convener. We have talked a lot about temporary accommodation and rightly so, but in the rural aspect of Scotland it is a major crisis. We understand that in the cities the problems are continuing to rise, but in the rural locations across Scotland it is absolutely vital. What you end up having is that people leave that location and may end up moving towards the city because there is nothing in between. You are right to identify that we have the problem, but I really want to hear about what could we try and do in the rural aspect, because the funding and the whole process of trying to manage and keep people in that community is vitally important. If we do not do that, we will continually see a migration into the centre. It is my fault that we have not closed the evidence session yet, Mr Stewart, because I threw in an extra question as well. The time constraint means that you may have to write to us if you have anything specific that you want to see on that. If you want to see just now, that is great, but I did give the promise of a final comment from each of our witnesses before we closed the evidence session. Mr Keane, can we start with yourself? I would actually just echo that point. It is important to understand that homelessness is not the same in East Asia as it is in Glasgow, as it is in Moray, as it is in Angus, as it is in Highland. It requires a bespoken, locally designed response, but at the core of it, it is about access to housing. It is about choice, and our legislation is too narrowly cast to support a housing system that is delivering control over people's housing outcomes that would make a difference. Thank you, Lee Clark. Do you want to finish? You do not have to have any final comments, but opportunity. For me, a key point is making sure that there is consistency in the approaches that the local authorities take. Mark Kennedy. We have covered everything. We would welcome further investigation into rough sleeping and understanding the issues, the reasons behind that, and exploring services for people with multiple complex needs. It is really helpful. Before we close the session, I would echo our call. We need action and leadership on homelessness now, otherwise we are going to see the numbers that have been declining for a while, and we are going to go back up. We need to act now on taking a strategic approach, a whole-system approach, to support those people who are at risk of homelessness. I thank all of our witnesses for what I think has been an excellent evidence session. We will inform our inquiry. We are determined that when we do our inquiry fully and do our call for evidence that we are well cited in the questions that we have to ask, there is no point in starting an inquiry and asking the wrong questions. This has been incredibly helpful. I thank all of our witnesses and we now move into private session.