 Everything needs to be. Good morning everyone and welcome to the ninth meeting of the local government community's committee in 2017. Can I remind everyone present to turn off mobile phones and his meeting papers are provided in a digital format. Tablets may be used by members during the meeting. I would like for the apologies that our vice convener Elaine Smith received this morning but she cannot make the meeting this morning, unfortunately. Now we move to agenda item 1. The committee will take evidence from Margaret Ann, Brunjo, Edyn Elsin ac Beth read. I would normally give you your full titles and organisations, but I thought it would be very helpful for people watching if you said a little bit about the organisation you represent this morning and put that on the record before we move to our first question, so thank you everyone for coming along. Margaret Ann, could you perhaps start with yourself? Sure. I work for an organisation called Glasgow Homeless Network. Our home is Glasgow, but we have a number of programmes at work more broadly across Scotland. We focus on ond, dwi'n gweld nhw'r ddysgu ac ychydig, ac bod ddydd yn gennym gwybodaeth yn cael dechrau bod rydych chi'n mynd i weld ti'n clywed ag y bydd. Felly, rydyn ni'n cael cael fydd pob yn ddechrau candidates o ffrif wneud, a ddych chi'n prif. Yr Ystod yma, edrych chi'n argyrchu i ddim yn ffogolol ac rydyn ni wedi lleibu ar gyfer y cerddur o'r sicr oedd ymgyrchauon syrryd. Rydyn gallwn ni'n dda peirloedd o'r orynggiad We have a floating support team, an outreach team and currently a day centre. We have been working in a resettlement field over the last 12 months and we have covered the whole Perth and Cymor area. We look within the Perth area of the Perth city to carry out work within the people with other agencies, both start area and voluntary. We have also covered wider areas, the rural areas within Perth. Thank you very much. I'm Beth Leed. I'm Beth Leed and Policy Manager at Crisis. We are the national charity for homelessness. We work across the UK. Our aim is to end homelessness. We're ambitious in organisation. We do a lot of research and campaigning. We have skylight centres across the UK, including the Skylight Centre in Edinburgh, which works with about 600 people in Edinburgh and the Lothians. We primarily work with single people. That's a historical thing because of some of the legislation. We also support rent deposit guarantee schemes across the whole of Scotland. We've done that for about 10 years. Thank you very much and thank you to all of you for being here this morning, for taking the time to say a little bit about your organisations. We'll move to questions now and we'll open up the question from Andy Wightman, MSP. Thank you, convener, and thank you for coming along this morning. The committee is in its early stages looking at the question of homelessness and considering what it might do in this session. I thought that it might be worth starting with a broad question to ask you what progress in your view has been made in tackling homelessness over the past five, ten years. If I can start, we obviously had the introduction of the end of priority need, which came into force in 2012. That was a really major step forward in Scotland and internationally in terms of moving legislation on and giving people who are homeless really significant rights to settled accommodation. That has been a major step forward. At the same time, we introduced housing options and that has helped to reduce the number of people who are making applications for homelessness by giving them advice and support and so on. We need to keep up that momentum. We need to make sure that we don't rest on our laurels on that. We need to keep going. There are lots of changes going on in the wider environment, particularly around welfare reforms that are making it more difficult for people to sustain their housing and keep their housing costs going. We are seeing some of our cities. We do seem to see more people on the streets for all sorts of reasons, whether that is EU nationals or people with very complex needs. We have made some really good progress, but we need to keep up that momentum to make sure that it doesn't go backwards. Our aim as an organisation is to see homelessness ended, so we want to make sure that momentum gets going now and step up that level of ambition. We are most definitely exploring all those challenges that Bethraedd was mentioning, but what progress tree feels been made in the past five, ten years? I think progress. I have worked now with the CATH organisation for 20 years to take it down to a basic level when I first started 20 years ago within the Perth area. You had 35 to 40 rough sleepers when I was born, the two or three, and Bethraedd was saying a couple of them are EU nationals and one individual, that is his life change style choice. So there has been progress made in that side of things. In the last 12 months, again, we are going back to the housing options in the Perth and Cymru area, looking at housing first, homes first model. It has its positives and it has its negatives. What we have is people that are being offered houses and homes, but to a certain degree cannot maintain those homes because to a certain extent you could say that they have been institutionalised by going through hostels, temporary accommodation, failing that, but it is also over 85 per cent of the people that we work to support as chaotic lives, live chaotic lives and have multiple issues, which lead into them having chaotic lives. What we have is the difficulty engagements, and that is the biggest difficulty that we face with a lot of these individuals that we work to support. They have sometimes a fear of statutory services and they work with the third sector, but we need to look at trying to co-ordinate better the third sector within the statutory services, so there is a more concentrated, more co-ordinated effort to work with individuals that slip through the net. We have examples, we do case studies and we have examples of people that have had, on one occasion, with one guy that is in his 60s that has had six tenancies over the last 10 years, but he cannot maintain a tenancy. It then goes back into a hostel situation, he has alcohol issues, he goes back to his own peer group, and then it is a case that he comes through the recovery period, he goes back into, he has offered a house, goes back into the house, and then it is a case that the loan that is isolation is a way for his peer group that used to support him, so therefore he is attracting back to his peer group, which leads him back into the alcohol situation. Sorry, I get accused of rambling at times and it is my first time that I have been here, so you will have to, you know... Can I reassure you, as you are saying all of that, when we did a discussion about the questions, we are very keen to ask to explore in further detail, and both that you have said is already eddy and indeed Beth are all questions, we are going to explore in much more detail, so you are really helping to set the scene for committee members, so you are not rambling at all, you are actually... Yeah, I do more at that. But you are reassuring us that we have a grasp of the questions we have to explore further, Margaret, and do you want to add anything? So, I mean, it is actually not often we get the opportunity to ask and reflect on that type of question, because I think when you work in the sector, when you work in the homes in the sector, you are just so incredibly working with it that you don't often have a look back and reflect on all the kind of changes and improvements that have been made, and I think each of us here have kind of worked in this kind of sector for the period that you have described. So there has been significant progress actually, and the biggest changes we probably all know in terms of the briefing or your own knowledge is the legislative advancements that have been made in Scotland. We simply have the best homelessness legislation in the world. Now, what that gives is rights to people, but what that clearly doesn't do is ensure that everybody is able to claim those rights or exercise them, and that's the area within which we're each all operating. I mean, in terms of progress, there was a report published yesterday by Fianca, who is simply a kind of umbrella organisation working out in a European context. What they were able to demonstrate is that every single country across the European context with the UK being counted as one, that every single country's homelessness has got worse over the last period, and that the only country whose homelessness hasn't worsened is Finland, and the key difference in terms of what Finland is doing is the housing first model, but instead of housing first being considered a model, they've created it as a national strategy and made it a central plank of their whole approach to homelessness, particularly for people with complex needs. I know that this is me now, but we're making a windering into not a reflection, but more what's next, but if we can definitely have the opportunity to have a chat more about housing first, I'd welcome that. Absolutely, everything that you've said, you've set the scene for what we're going to explore further. Andy, do you want to take some of that forward? Yes, thanks. Just to echo the convener's comments, we will be following up on all of this detail. Is it fair to say therefore that there's been an improvement in broad terms, but that what we're looking at now is greater focus on the complex needs of people, the greater complexity that accompanies preventive work, and possibly some of the complexities that arise when people are in, as Eddie said, accommodation and not being able to make it. We've made quite a big stride in tackling the black and white homelessness issue, though more work to do, but more focus on those more complex. Would that be a fair summation of what you're saying? I think that's fair. I would also add in some of the funding challenges that are coming up, particularly around temporary accommodation and the welfare system. The welfare system, which funds part of homelessness teams in local authorities, but it also has the pressures on local authorities more generally. I think that that will be something that needs to be looked at in the wider mix as well. A proportion of people with multiple disadvantages is increasing. If homelessness overall in Scotland is reducing in terms of people who make a statutory application to the local authority, we know that the proportion of people who need it is increasing. That's why the focus is there, both nationally and locally, because that's the bit that we're not doing right, although a number of us have a number of solutions. I hope that we get a chance to chat more about that. I'll leave it there, but we're interested in your views on the priorities that we should focus on and the work that we do. We're actively considering that, so you have a chance towards the end to reflect on that, through the session, to help us, because it's a big topic. Whatever we want to do, we want to do the most productive work that we can. Andy, I'm conscious that one of the things that we're looking to explore is housing options, and that came through quite strongly. I want to make T's that out a little bit more, so that we can be thematic and approach to questions. My understanding, I would like to make sure that we understand what housing options are, because from our understanding, it's an alternative to traditional homelessness route where you pitch up and you say to a local authority, I'm homeless, help me. You indicate housing, you're needing issues and problems in advance, and the local authority or the housing association, the register of social lad will come around and they'll have a meeting with you to discuss what your options are before you get to the stage of homelessness. It's almost like a semi-preventative measure, if you like. We think that that's what it does, but what we're not sure about is when we look at the statistics of those presenting as homeless and those presenting within housing options, is when you compare the outcomes and you compare the numbers, is homelessness actually improving, or are we moving a section of people that otherwise would have presented as homeless, or are we moving them to another category? That's fine if that's what we're doing, as long as we're measuring the outcomes for that other category to make sure that the outcomes are better than the traditional homeless route, because if they're the same as the homeless route, they should really be together as the one in housing statistics. I'd appreciate your thoughts a little bit more on how housing options work, and are the outcomes through housing options better than the traditional homeless route? Through my experience, the housing options has benefits, and it's what you are touching on there about the preventative work. Our organisation has worked on pay for 20 years, and the housing options make a difference, but I think that there is grey areas of presenting yourself as homeless. Most of the individuals that we work with, unfortunately, do live chaotic lives over a high percentage of people suffering from drug and alcohol issues. It's difficult for them to build up confidence to take the step forward, stating to, for example, going to housing options teams and saying, I'm having difficulty with my accommodation and then support being provided to maintain that accommodation. There does seem a sense of a lot of our service users, a sense of hopelessness. It's right, I've got a house, but where am I going? What do I do? What support am I being provided within that house? It feels to me personally that it's not really a co-ordinated support service, and we need more co-ordination between both the third sector and the statutory sectors to provide support. Again, sorry, I might be going a wee bit off track here, but previously it was like a priority, a non-priority, and there were certain issues taking into account. That was done over a 15-minute talk with the individual face-to-face of when they were approaching the local housing advice centre. Sometimes we have individuals that are very angry because of their circumstances going in and seeking advice, and sometimes their behaviour isn't exactly positive. At times, I think, it's down to the training in front-line staff. There needs to be more training provided in front-line staff and how to deal with these situations and how to try to provide the best service to that individual, the best advice and the best options. Am I going off track? Sorry, because I'm saying this in the process. No, no, no. It's helpful. Perhaps the issue is one of mine where I roll two or three questions together and I should have narrowed it down to the one question. In your experience, Mr Nelson, but also the other witnesses, I'm very curious to know who decides whether someone who is maybe in a private tenant says three or four weeks left to run, they're deeply overcrowded, they've not got a nice landlord, they can't afford the rent, they know they're going to be homeless. Who decides whether that person goes through a housing options route or whether they go through a traditional homelessness route where you're told, right, okay, we'll deal with you that way. You could be a section 5 referral to a housing association or whatever. In your experience, who decides whether someone is diverted towards housing options or towards the traditional route? What actually happens in practice? Any witness that could give us a steer and that would be quite helpful? I think there's quite a challenge, quite a tension in the legislative approach and the housing options approach and I think this is quite well known. If you go through the housing options route, are you preventing people from getting their statutory rights through the homelessness system? I think that is something that's been looked at, the housing regulator looked at that a couple of years ago. There was some non-statutory guidance published last year which was aimed to look at those issues but I think that is a tension for local authorities. In terms of what happens, I would imagine in that situation that you described, it depends whether somebody's got a notice to quit and then at what point they intervene. I think what we're seeing certainly in the areas that we work in in our Skylight Centre is that there are a lot of pressures on the local authority and people go to the council quite often, they're being told, well actually you've got three hour wait, you can hang around, we might be able to see you at the end of the day but we might not or you can come back a bit later and actually people are quite often being discouraged whether deliberately or not from presenting at an early stage and it's not until they actually are homeless and they have been kicked out by the landlord that they actually have to go to the help and at that point they're in crisis and they need something in an emergency and that's where it becomes much more difficult to help somebody. That's very helpful. Does anyone, does any local authorities count the statistics in relation to that because what I became to know for example in Glasgow would be for every person that turns up to say I'm homeless now as I'm on the street but they could also be their sofa surfing or they're about to be chucked out their private let for whatever reason. Does anyone collect the data to say well in any given day we have 20 presentations of which Tenor told to come back once they're homeless or Tenor told to go to for a housing option? Is anyone collecting the data so that we can analyse what's actually happening across Scotland? There is a lawful lot of data collected. We have the HL1 statistics which is whenever somebody makes a homelessness application, we also have the prevent one statistics which is when anybody comes to housing options. I think again looking at the experience of our skylight you know we have worked with clients who have said well I went to the council and I told them that we're homeless and I'm not just talking about Edinburgh council, I'm talking about you know we're working in the wide area. We've been to the council, we said we were homeless and they didn't get any help and then we go back and say well has this person made a homelessness application because they think they have and it turns out that that hasn't been accepted as that. So I think you know there's lots of data collected but how that's collected the variations in that between different areas I think is questionable. The Glasgow context is that the experience you describe is more likely to happen if somebody goes through the housing options route and if somebody goes through a direct homelessness route so that would mean you know can be shown up at a local case work team. Although if somebody does show up at a local case work team that type of data is more likely to be collected and this is the Glasgow context I'm talking about and it's more likely to be collected as a result of voluntary intervention of the Scottish housing regulator and I need to better understand the full extent of homelessness, people who are making homeless applications, people who are attempting to as well as people who are getting a decent service. I wouldn't dwell on housing options too much, it might be that the witnesses we have in front of us today that your three organisations are dealing with vulnerable people when a lot of this system breaks down so maybe you're the step beyond housing options or beyond the statutory homeless route where things have broken down and you're providing other voluntary forms of support. Sorry, Bethraed. I just wanted to make a more general point about housing options and I think looking at the data that we've got, what seems to be going on is that housing options tends to be primarily advice and information. If you look at the data that's collected about two thirds of it at least it's just telling people about their homelessness rights or just giving them general housing advice and I think that the approach to housing options that you described at the beginning sets out something that should be more than that so it should be more, it should be looking at, you know, can we negotiate with the landlord and get them to rethink this notice to quit, can we look at getting some repairs to their house, can we do some mediation with the family if a young person's been kicked out so, you know, it can be much more in depth than we're doing at the moment. I think also looking at other housing options so, you know, in some parts of the country we have a long way to get into social accommodation. Are we looking at the private rented sector? We know for example in Fife and Dundee we get 300 people a year into private tenancies and in other parts of the country there's very very few people going to private tenancies and that can be for some people that can be a really good option. It's not always right for everybody but we need to look at housing options much more widely and not just give advice and then pass them on, I mean half of people who go through housing options end up making homes applications so can we look a bit more in-depth and find different options and we also know that there's huge variations around Scotland so some local authorities are doing it really well and some are much lighter touch. Yeah and I'd like to support that point and also maybe just make the kind of comment that we were talking earlier about Scotland's leading reputation and some aspects of homelessness and actually one of them has been the housing options approach and actually the public sector's leadership role within that and it's opinion I make everywhere it's not always popular and but it's true in terms of Scottish and national government and local government there was a leadership role that completely changed how we prevent and tackle homelessness at a local level and that's to be absolutely applauded you know but what we would say next to the public sector and within each of the particularly the housing options hubs is it's time now to bring the third sector in because I think exactly as Bethesyn if we're looking at the need to achieve a greater range of prevention activity to go deeper into communities and reach more complex people then that's going to need the kind of skills and the experience that the third sector has and I think I think I think there's a lot of fun at line services that are just desperate to be invited in. Okay that's very interesting and I have to say we're unclear particularly on how housing options work which is why we're asking these questions and that final comment there Margaret and it seems to be as if there could be a lot of successes with it but unless you're consistently monitoring and assessing what the outcomes look like it's hard to evidence base that and it's also hard to evidence base when things are not working as they should be and it could be working differently across local authorities. I mean I don't want to ask any more questions on housing options but I do know Alexander Stewart wanted to add one or two things on that. Thank you, convener. Good morning. I think you've given us a very good overview of where we are and I think that the visits we had gave us a flavour of what you're dealing with but one area that you talked about was a co-ordinated approach, having that co-ordinated approach. Now when we went to Perth to church snacks from the homeless you talked about at times that there was a discord sometimes between the local authority and yourself depending on how that was managed with the client or the service user and that sometimes what you were providing or suggesting was something that the local authority didn't provide or they gave them a house when your advice was maybe they should be looking at other options. I found that quite complex that you know that we were all trying to work to achieve one goal but it wasn't being achieved for the actual service user and the advice from yourself as a third sector organisation was sometimes being challenged or not taken on board by a local authority. I'd like to expand on that because we do know that there's a variation across Scotland in local authorities as to how they tackle that. I think that communicating with the service user who maybe has literacy or numeracy issues is also an area that needs to be looked at when you're talking about training and skills so that's something that I'd like to expand with you. I agree. We have individuals that we've supported for over the 20 years. Those individuals have been provided with tenancies and not been able to maintain those tenancies for whatever issues that they have and it's trying to work with issues. For example, if an individual arrives and they've got four presenting issues, one could be mental health, one could be drug addiction and two other issues. What do you focus on? What the focus has been on and what has developed as a focus is a house. Housing first, if you get the stability within the housing then they could start addressing the other issues that would hopefully maintain and sustain that tenancy and get them back into recovery and move forward. What we're finding is that the tenancy of being allocated to the tenancy and the process of going through that allocation of the tenancy causes more stress for that individual. Therefore, that could be a trigger for them not completing the recovery and taking two or three steps back and forth. So it's back to the tenancies, the choices. If you look at choices for someone presenting and we have individuals that are now staying in Alyth, Blair, Gowry, Kinloch, Rannach, which is a widespread area, Perth and Curran, as you know. Their idea was that all those individuals that are now living in those areas were going through recovery processes and they thought, right, that's a rural area, I'll get peace, nobody will have a perception of me having this habit or that habit, I'll go there, I'll be anonymous, I'll be able to be part of the community and try to develop my relationships with the community. But they find once they're there, they're not then associated with their peer group, their peer group that used to be supportive. Even if it was a negative manner, they were still supporting that individual. Therefore, they're drawn back into Perth, they don't maintain their tenancy, they're not provided with the level of support that they need. That's their choice. They're thinking that that's a good choice and it's not really a good choice because it's explaining through the housing, it's right, you're wanting to move to Eilidh, it's a rural area, do you know the transport costs, do you know that maybe the Perth will be a bit dearer, do you know maybe the milk and bread will be a bit dearer, do you know you need a new doctor, that's my way of sitting down with someone and trying to explore where they would like to move to and sometimes that's a counter measure. We do have the difficulties at times with the local council because they have targets to me and it's like what you were talking about earlier is what's an outcome, is it a number, is it an individual, is it the amount of houses that's been allocated and that's where I feel that the grey area and there's still difficulties is that I think that the agencies are now looking and the Government is now looking at outcomes as true outcomes, how do you move someone on, it's not just all we've worked with 40 people, all we've housed 30 people, it's what happens when they're housed and I think there needs to be more investigation, more support and more research carried out on the journey offered individual, like I was explaining earlier, we had one individual in his 60s that's went through five tenancies in a shock period of time that cannot maintain those tenancies, in my opinion it would be good to sit down with that individual and we do have you know support workers that have a good positive relationship with individual and find out the history is back to where, what is the triggers for the housing failing and then trying to work on new models of accommodation, what we have at the moment is you know, you appear homelessness, you could be allocated a place in a hostel, temporary accommodation, maybe move on to temporary accommodation which was zone model and then into secure accommodation and there's difficulties in that process too, there was positives and there was negatives, the positives was presented as homeless, you were allocated a place in a hostel, you paid a service charge of a certain amount and you were provided with your meals, you were provided with accommodation, the TV licence was paid, the gas and electricity was paid, you had a room, your next stage would be possibly temporary accommodation, that was basically furnished but it was habitable and you were provided support with that and then moved on to secure accommodation, as soon as you hit the secure accommodation that's it, you're possibly 70 pound benefits and these people are living chaotic lives, they then had to start dealing with their utility bills, it's hard to start dealing with TV licence, they had to start looking at what they're getting furnished into the bed and that's a process and the process then goes back to the individual and us as support workers applying for community care grants so a person's allocated a house and this at this moment in time we could have individuals that's got to make a decision on where to accept that tendency or not accept that tendency and ours rather than days or weeks but in ours so there's a certain pressure and stress level in having to take that tendency on even though they maybe feel oh this isn't really the place I want to stay but I need to take it because I'm not going to have another option to take another choice and it's all a combination of factors and that's what I go back to looking at, there needs to be a coordinated effort, a discussion to take place and the question sorry I'm rambling, the question you were saying Mr Stewart is that what happens I feel is that it's right, there's a house, that's a tick box, that's the way you've got there, we'll try to provide support but there's not enough resources to provide the support in the statutory sector and the public sector and it comes back to the third sector and it's not about you know the third sector, I'm finding it difficult to explain, the statutory sector is there and they make the decisions and to a certain extent they hold most of the power and they hold a lot of the power strings too for its general government and local government, for example the church's action for the homeless we are funded through service level agreements on a 12 month basis so every year comes Christmas we've got workers that are becoming demotivated and I'm sorry going on for this but this is the impact on the housing models, become demotivated I'm going to look for an iron job, we go back to the Christie report in 2011 I think it was over 50% it did research over 50% of people working in the first sector were looking at other employment moving out because of the stress levels anxiety not knowing where they're going to be in 12 month 18 month so it comes back to the longer terms of funding to be able to provide the support for the individuals that we work with which unfortunately the most chaotic to provide a level they support over a longer period of time with a continuity that you've got time to develop a relationship with those individuals to build up the trust to build up the honesty to take that stage forward again back to your point is that what they have is they maybe see these individuals that's presenting for homelessness once or twice and then they're saying right we're offering you this house and we go back to them and say well that's not going to work this guy or this person will most likely fail this tenancy in a short period of time because of the the environment because of the issues that they're having and we're based in that judgment on working with that person over a long period of time sometimes five seven days a week so we're developing a relationship we're seeing their habits we're seeing the issues we see how they react in certain circumstances and that's what we're trying to put forward that's our opinion that this will happen but I think because of the targets and it's not just Bert and Cronos it's all over that that's it and that's coming back to again the figures what is working and what's not working there needs to be more researched how to look at things how do we come up with outcomes what outcomes are we actually achieving you know an outcome for our organisation our worker is going in and monitoring someday and seeing that they're still alive and that is basic and it's not harsh that is what the situation is because that's the difficulty that we have sorry no no i want to bring in a second but i want to reassure you because within that i think you made a very valid point about secure longer-term funding for non-statutory services that are affected and providers who are effectively bolstering the statutory system in the way that you outlined pretty eloquently I have to say so the committee's heard that and that's an official report the other thing you've written down is ongoing support and advocacy for individuals with complex support needs irrespective of whether it's a housing first model or a housing options model it's about building trust and relationships with those individuals over the longer term and I think that's pretty much what you were saying Mr Nelson in relation to that and none of that was rambling I think it put pretty eloquently the support that your organisation others provide so thank you for that Margaret and did you want to add there is there is just something so specific and all of that actually something so specific also in addition to what you just paraphrased in terms of how we approach the systems change that we need to undertake over the next phase now if we put to one side people suffering as a given and focus on us who work in the sector in all our different roles across all the different you know sectors and our seeming often obvious inability to properly work together in a truly trusting and respectful way now there are examples of that happening and when it happens they see the goods they see what happens you know what what outcomes happens but it doesn't it doesn't happen often enough just come in on that I think we have an incredibly complex environment of services so we have in our homeless service we have a social work service we have the NHS as a different body we have all of these services and then we commission out so that homelessness service might be divided between 10 homelessness voluntary organisations as well so we've got an incredibly complex environment and then we've got one individual in the middle of that with a whole range of needs which may be complex or may just be ordinary needs but they do need you know a bit of confidence they do need a bit of support was you know been feeling low because they're in a bad housing situation that they're struggling with their employment not necessarily complex needs just a variety of needs although some people will have extremely complex needs on top of that and it's how do we look at the individual across all of these different services and and make that the focus I think in terms of some of your points about partnership working at you know I think there is some really good stuff out there and you know Glasgow homelessness network has a coordination role and Glasgow there's a shape organisation in Edinburgh which coordinates all the third sector homelessness organisations but it is challenging and you know the points about funding that's really really important crisis is a non-commission service we're very very lucky in that in that respect but you know when we've moved into new areas setting up a service you know there is a sense of well who's this who are these people are they going to threaten our funding all these kinds of questions and then they realise that we are there genuinely to work in partnership and and to contribute and add value to what's already there but there is that constant threat and I think charities who are funded by local councils are in a difficult position sometimes also to challenge you know it can be difficult saying to a council actually that have this number of people and you're not helping them when you're dependent on them for their funding next year. Traditionally the roles across the different sectors have been adversarial you know but the truth is if your starting point is that nobody's doing this deliberately if you work in homelessness nobody's doing this deliberately therefore everyone the matter what role they're in and we're doing the best with what they have and then my opinion what you need to look at is what we have what it is that we're working with and what it is going to let us to put the pieces together to find the right solutions. Okay, thank you. Thank you Alex Andrews, thank you very much. Thanks, I think it follows on from everything you've said but I'd also like to go back to something that you said earlier Margaret Ann. You mentioned Finland I was very interested in that you said that was the only country in the world where homelessness hasn't increased but they have a national strategy. I guess my question to all of you is do you think Scotland should have a national homelessness strategy? I think in your in crisis written evidence you suggested that it should be the case. You also mentioned things that are going on in Wales I wonder if you could expand on that. So a couple of questions national strategy and what is going on in Wales. Thank you. You hear me? To make my point clearer that the Finnish experience is that their national strategy is housing first not that they have a national strategy per se so that their approach has been where other countries and including Scotland have looked for example housing first as a project localised but instead they've taken a strategic country-wide approach to housing first and that's their strategy although they may need to have other strategies. In terms of the need for a national strategy in Scotland my sense is that we would have to be absolutely clear what the purpose of it is if some of the spirit of housing options has been about enabling and empowering local partners to come together to find local solutions to local problems and if it said that homelessness is something that originates always locally it doesn't come from anywhere else then sometimes national strategies can concern to not underpin but overrule sometimes local approaches that are working well not always it would bend what's in them. If the point is about consistency I think I would always kind of note too that clearly consistency doesn't always mean better consistency is only better if it's better you know and often the need to have a national strategy serves the purposes of organisations I guess who want an easier job of monitoring and evaluating outcomes and not that that's a bad thing of course so for me I haven't I haven't been entirely convinced yet that a national strategy would properly direct resources and energies to something better and more if it was an overall strategy and more what I would like to see is the next movement being similar to what the 2012 movement was being is a housing first movement so something that just has an absolute focus and not something that on a national aspect encourages you to look at all the different elements of homelessness which we know are significant and when instead they can be better addressed at local level. I can say just make a few points about various of those things I think Finland's really interesting as Maggie says it's got a strategy around housing first but I think so what they've tried to do is tackle very complex homelessness so people who've been living on the streets and so on for me one of the key things about that is that everybody bought into that and I think that's one of the lessons of the 2012 agreement as well you know everybody bought into this idea that we are going to end priority need in Finland everybody bought into this idea local authorities, national government, people, other agencies at local level that we're going to tackle this and that's what I think is really important and there's a number of other areas countries where they've developed plans around ending homelessness of Canada is another one the USA has done some really interesting work on that. So in terms of a national I think I'm not sure whether the word strategy is always helpful but I think there's something about a national ambition to end homelessness and that's something that crisis is looking at developing over this coming year. We've got a conference that I mentioned in our evidence on the 15th of May in Glasgow and what we want to do there is begin to kickstart that process what do we need what would it look like to end homelessness first of all what does that mean does that mean no rough sleeping does that mean no sofa surfing does that mean nobody ever moves on from somewhere with nowhere to go what does that look like and then thinking about well what do we need to do that and what does that mean at national level what does that mean in terms of services working together but I think absolutely critically what Maggie says what does that mean at local level because it will look different in Perth from how it looks in Edinburgh from how it looks in Wick from how it looks in Inverness it will look different so so what does that mean and what does that look like how do we engage the public in that you know there's a whole range of questions in there and I think from our perspective as crisis you know that that is something that everybody has to buy into it's not something that just has to be done by Scottish Government or by local authorities but it's something that we all need to buy into and I think critically also it's not just something for housing and homelessness it's you know a lot of the issues that we're talking about social care issues or health issues employment issues so it's a much broader thing but in order to tackle what is the outcome of some of those failure I don't mean failures in terms of services doing a bad job but somebody losing their job or a relationship breakdown the end outcome is homelessness but actually the starting point is a lot further down a lot earlier upstream so how do we yeah so I think when we're talking about a national approach that is that kind of ambition in particular that we want to focus on just to come in on Wales so Wales introduced the housing Wales act 2014 so what they've done there is I think they looked at the Scottish model and and felt the ending priority was was perhaps almost too ambitious for them but what they have done is they've created this dual duty which is a prevention and a relief duty so there is now a duty on local authorities to take action to prevent homelessness from happening in the first place if somebody is 56 days away from homelessness and then if they are if they do become homeless even as a result of that then there's duties around relieving homelessness which is kind of like some of the duties that we've got I think one of the differences is is that kind of statutory duty to prevent homelessness which is kind of there in the Scottish legislation in that if you're threatened with homelessness within 56 days then you should be able to make a statutory homelessness application but I think it creates quite a clear journey through the system and I think one of the really interesting things that they're using is personal housing plans and that gives people a really clear route through the system so that they know that if they these are the steps that they need to take these are the steps that the local authority need to take if that doesn't work these are the next steps and these are the next steps and that can be reviewed and and looked at and I think that helps create a really clear journey through the system and crisis convened an expert independent group in England recently which was chaired by Suzanne Fitzpatrick from here at Watt University and they developed a model for England which they felt would work drawing largely on the on the Welsh model and that is actually reading that that was presented as a private member's bill and that's actually reading it's receiving its final reading in the house of lords tomorrow and that will we hope that will get royal assent in the next few weeks and that draws on that so that has the prevention aspect the the relief aspect and also critically I think a duty for other public bodies to refer on so if they identify that there's somebody at risk of homelessness or facing homelessness they have a duty to refer to the homelessness service within the local authority so that means that you capture people at that much earlier stage and that's something we've actually seen in in Edinburgh in our work so we've been doing some really in good work with a couple of the job centres and one of the things we've got them to do is just to say to people are you facing homelessness and they've been really surprised at the number of people saying well actually I'm really worried about this I think I might be facing homelessness in the next few weeks and then we can act we can begin to act early and we can begin to get people at that early stage prevent homelessness negotiate with the landlord whatever that is and it also helps everything else it helps the job centre to to get them into employment because they're no longer worried about that housing situation they can actually focus on on that so I think there's some really interesting models that we lessons that we can learn from from the Welsh system about having a consistent approach through the system and also making sure that people approach services early enough. If we look at the kind of technical legal aspect solely then we already have the Welsh prevention duty within the Scottish legislation if that makes sense to all intents and purposes it's the same the 56 days and we have that the duties at local authority always somebody that's homeless start 56 days before that person becomes homeless which is the same as the Welsh duty to all intents and purposes now the truth is again how that's implemented is quite different so that being the focus of the Welsh duty means that probably arguably they'll achieve more in the 56 days than we will because it's a different approach so I suspect if Scotland was wanting to look to legislate round about prevention it would be looking to something I would suspect that would be longer than 56 days or more than what's within the Welsh duty. To follow on from that I think there is a complexity in the Scottish legislation which means that you get the right to relief when you're almost preventing the homelessness and that's that's where some of the tensions come in I think so yeah I think that is where the challenges come in for housing options teams. Eddie, you don't feel obliged to answer but we'd love to hear from you if you want to add something to that. I think speaking to the colleagues I'm listening to the colleagues here it's it's it's back to the co-ordination it's like you know we make suggestions that there's quite a lot of elderly population now in personal cameras, council, high percentage and they suffer from loneliness and isolation so we're always looking at building up groups but they have home carers, they might have McMillan nurses going on and it's something that you touched on Beth. If we could get information now that we receive information in or the services receive information it's more co-ordinated but there's better communication and that can be difficult because of the number of services that's involved but I think the important factor is the communication. Down in England like in the rough sleeping counts they have a computer system data that's collected so a member of the public could say I saw this guy aged 40, he's standing on this corner in this town, looked like he was having difficulties and then some would support services pick up on that and that's what we're trying to encourage within communities and that's what the Scottish Government's doing putting forward the policies they're looking about inclusiveness you know integration and until we properly integrate the services where it's a third sector coming and playing a part with the statutory services and vice versa it's not about somebody taking the lead or somebody you know saying right we'll follow that it's about all the services the mental health services NHS and I know they're trying to achieve that at the moment and it's sort of partway there through the integration of healthcare and social care but it's getting the communication the important thing is the communication and I don't think the communication is there at this moment in time because there's too many services and to a certain extent in my experience that people are under pressure to carry out those services with individuals like you've got to support that a number of people in this period of time and therefore there's not enough time spent with the individuals for example they're talking about Wales and Finland there's projects starting down in England now and sorry I'm not harper of it it's like they've got they're called fulfilling lives and it's a partnership work between the statutory sectors and the third sector they've set up teams to work with people that's living chaotic lives that has the highest you know percentage of re-offenders drug issues alcohol issues and they're not engaging and they're sleeping rough and it's mainly funded through the lottery funding but it's a partnership from the local government and the councils with the third sector and they've applied to lottery funding I think there's eight places in England that was received between I think about six and 10 million but they looked at it over the longer term so it's for a five-year period so they're giving them a substantial amount of time to develop the relationships look at the issues and try to to work as a team to develop that at the moment in time you know just with housing it's a situation if we have someone that presents with mental health issues first stage is the GP the doctor some won't attend the GP then it's maybe a referral on or it's maybe going through the drug and alcohol team so it's it's maybe our staff our staff the cath staff that are going with them to support them and advocate on the behalf but if it's possible I would like to submit some case studies that are collaborative routes to recovery have done over the last 12 months it was funded through the integrated health and social care and it's it's maybe small barriers to us at how we deal with like personally if I'm phoning up for about my eon bill I get very frustrated that I've got to press button one button two button three button four without speaking to a person you know can we magnify that with someone that has literacy and numeracy issues that is difficult to get very very angry possibly say the wrong word over the line and that gives a person on the line an excuse to put the phone down and it's about you know what we call in the cath if we are advocating on behalf of someone on the phone they are dealing with our benefits sanction and we non-verbal communication we're usually sitting at the other end of the day is going no cut it don't see those words you're going to get and it's small things like that but these have huge impacts on these individuals and it's it's we talk about integration and trying to integrate you know we've got people that's in communities and if we have an individual that's allocated a house a home in a community that already has these issues that's trying to recover from those issues goes into that community and nine times out of ten and it's just human nature at this moment in time that a lot of that community will pick up on that person's issue and that person's going to be stigmatised and persecuted from the start so we have to look at the whole model if we're ever doing what we're going like this you know what's happening in person in Ross there's success there's areas that were deprived there's areas that were stigmatised that you know the people's perception of the public's perception was no go areas and what you see now is homes being built they're beautiful homes that our communities are starting to come together you've got the new school and that's what we need to do I think personally and it's sorry I'm going to interject only because actually I really don't want to interject I'd rather just let you continue to speak because you've actually answered a whole set of questions that we haven't asked yet you've put it very well on the record no but in relation to how health services have to engage with the voluntary sector and the statutory sector and get things right I won't interjecting because I know members have great questions to raise no no please don't apologise because it's worth its weight and gold some of the evidence you've put on the public record here today so my apologies to yourself that I have to kind of cut you off there and I'm sorry about that Graham before I move on do you want to follow up on any of that and then I'll wait at Ruth Maguire in afterwards it's really quick convener because I know there's a lot more we want to ask so there's a thanks for your answers there because there's an awful lot for us to look at out of that just a very quick question to Beth you mentioned there's a bill going getting its final reading in the Lord's what bill is that that's the homelessness reduction bill so that is a bill that will introduce prevention and relief duties in England and also yeah as I said this this duty around services cooperating um yeah so that yeah I can provide you with more information about that if you want could I just make a very quick point about culture of services and I think that there is something really important about the culture of services I mean I think we're seeing it at the moment with health and social care integration you know there's a real challenge there I think we see it between the third sector and the statutory sector but I also think it's something that we see between um and I think this goes back to some of the points that Maggie's been making between home statutory homelessness provision and housing options and I think housing options brought in a very different culture and I think that has been a challenge for local authority to take up so instead of you know going through this very set route and um you know is this person eligible is this person not eligible to looking at well what can we do to help this person it's a very different culture and I think there's something really important in that that we need to look at and address and I think perhaps that's why housing options has been so variable and I think perhaps where some of the things you're raising about you know the legislative route versus the wider kind of system of support come in it's moving from that housing options instead of being a binary it is about options and appraise of those options and that's been challenging I think for um for a number of organisations everything in our sector I think in the third sector as well and but it's whether what we want is to prevent homelessness or prevent a homeless application and what housing options can do is prevent homelessness that's really helpful Ruth Maguire thank you computer good morning panel I'd like to move on to rough sleeping committee was interested in the topic there was a question around whether it was increasing or it was just more visible we heard from Shelter that there has been a rise in rough sleeping and Tony Cain from Alachol agreed he expressed two concerns the first one being that some of that was people just simply walking away from statutory services and that the the second one was about economic migrants perhaps not having access to public funds and ending up on the streets of a couple of questions do we know enough about why it occurs you know why why does it occur and is it increasing so I'd be interested to hear your your reflections on those points in short to do we know enough is now I think from our experience in Edinburgh a lot of the people that we see rough sleeping do have complex needs some of them have not engaged with statutory services for whatever reason that might be because they've had bad experiences in the past either in the local area or elsewhere it might be because the kind of needs that they've got if they've got mental health problems and so on they may not feel that they want to engage and some may have been turned down turned away by the local authority and we certainly know that there are real challenges of providing temporary accommodation in Edinburgh in particular and you know if you go to the council you might if you go by 10 o'clock in the morning they might well have run out for that day so that there is a challenge there but I think there is a lot of complex needs I think there's also a lot of EEA nationals who may not be entitled to to benefit support and that composer challenge in terms of what we know I mean that the data that we collect is about where the people present to the local authority so that only gives you a kind of relatively narrow picture and we don't know about the people who don't present it is definitely becoming more visible I think certainly in I was thinking Edinburgh Glasgow in particular that I think there probably has been a rise but I think it's very difficult to say because we don't have any other figures apart from whether people turn up to the local authority we do know the shelters have been full the last couple of years probably with a bit of confidence just to Glasgow in kind of context but but not any wider than that for all the reasons that Beth says that there isn't a common monitoring approach so it says based on kind of different opinions and perspectives and different counts really but within the Glasgow context GCN operates a common monitoring system which is a shared online case management system that a number of the key high volume most threshold services in Glasgow use so the last annual data we had was obviously 15-16 because we'll be doing our next annual report over the coming weeks and it was able to demonstrate an 18% increase in rough sleeping in Glasgow on the previous year so we're able to say with confidence that the numbers have gone up but on top of that of what we're seeing in Glasgow is visibility increasing and there's a number of anecdotes and discussions around about why that might be because what we're seeing on the streets in Glasgow is a proportionate to the figure increase but there is definitely a cultural change in people's willingness, courage to sleep more publicly. There was always the that kind of taking in Glasgow that people would hide away because it was safer particularly over the kind of weekend evenings that you were safer to be under a bridge or down a lane than you would be in a shop up doorway contrary to other cities where people felt would be safer in more public areas so there has been a more of a coming out in a sense and people more willing. Some of the discussions around about that in the Glasgow context has been that some of the other expressions of street activity for example begging which is often but not always as we know associated with homelessness and some begging activity that takes place in the city of Glasgow is undertaken by the particularly Roma community, I think, by the Romanian, by the Latvian and because that is a much more public expression there's almost a sense that there's a kind of following of suits you know that if there's a willingness to be more public with begging and sleeping then people are coming out in the corners. So an increase in visibility as well as an increase in numbers is what the take in Glasgow is. Excuse me, Perth and Ross numbers are low. There's a, I think I mentioned before at this moment in time, there's three or four a couple of them were European nationals and a couple of individuals that prefer that as their choice. We still advise them and you know advocate on behalf of them access in food banks or benefits and things like that. But it has from about 12 months ago, 20 years ago when I first started with cath, it was between 30 and 40, it was different in nature and things. Now like up Chris I would say about 12 months ago there was maybe about eight of those individuals and they didn't want to access accommodation but what's happened is because the person cannot stand on the home's first model that people are being offered accommodation, what you're finding instead is sleeping raft or sleeping on their friend's sofa and they're sleeping in the spare room. So that's what I was saying that way. There's still not got accommodation but they're just going around about their friends or their peer group who, excuse me, was allocated a tenancy. Some of the difficulties of people that's allocated tenancies is what we call the sofa suffering is that the intimidation is high of an individual that's maybe, for example, has a drug issue invites his friends and people get to hear about that and then some of the others of the local community go in and use it as a shooting up gallery basically and that puts that person's tenancy at risk. We then get concerns raised by the local housing officers, we try to go in and support that individual and then it could be a case A, we can't move things forward, we'll support you to maintain that tenancy but when we that supports left the peer group move back in so it's a continuous and that's what we find is some people are then presenting as homeless saying that we can't maintain the tenancy, it's then well you're intentionally homeless so we can't offer you anything so then we try to step in and that's what you were speaking about earlier Mr Stewart, we tried to advocate the bathroom saying well they can't maintain the tenancy can we look at different models of accommodation you know and if that means accepting that you'll be in a hostel for a period of time but you've got an individual room, you've got support, you've got your heating line etc it's a step forward but it's also what I'm trying to put forward is the models of accommodation, we need different models of accommodation, a house isn't suitable for everybody where it's because of their issues because of the peer group that ran about it and it's also about what I've talked about earlier about the integration within a community you know and to integrate in a community to a certain extent you need to be accepted in that community and contribute something to it but it's a two-way two-way story, Perth and Ken Ross we do have individuals that's begging, every individual that is begging on the streets has accommodation, we have got issues with non-engagement with those individuals they put it down to their previous experiences with services but again it's down to their issues and what they're trying to do is they can make more money from begging than off their benefits and again that's party, again I'm going back on about things sorry and I'm maybe going a way off again on tangent. I wonder because I'm not really interested in you know the kind of scale of rust sleeping across Scotland and why we don't have that kind of common one drink approaching can do the benefit of one what we've been able to count in Glasgow is that 1134 individual people and so that's over a thousand individual people slept off in Glasgow at least once and now they won't all still be home, still be rough sleeping but that was the count over the course of a single year and now the HL1 count within Glasgow was about 300 or 400 people so there's a significant difference between how many rough sleepers are caught through HL1 monitoring because the question is so limited the question is about how many people slept off last did you sleep off last night that's what the question is and if you did you captured and if you didn't you know you don't and it doesn't capture people that go on to sleep off that night or people that might be slept off in the previous week and in our common monitoring which reduce steps out all the duplicates so we are talking about individual people and doesn't put that kind of category round about it what it doesn't do is deduplicate with what the local authority is counting so what it means that we're also able to say that 1100 number is an absolute minimum and it could be plus what the council counts or at least a proportion of what the council counts so I suspect if we were to extrapolate that across the other cities in some way a formula somewhere within that if you looked at kind of Edinburgh Dundee, Fife, Aberdeen being the key areas for rough sleeping after Glasgow would occur and other areas too but we might get closer to what the national scale might be. There's a different picture it does seem to be the larger towns in the cities and elsewhere at Mr Nelson quite a little painting that it's not the same across the country it depends on the geography of the country and that's quite helpful. Ruth, do you want to follow up on some of that? Thank you for those answers I suppose you know today we're trying to decide what we'll look at as a committee and it's hard to sort of compartmentalise each aspect of it because it is all tied in so I suppose it's just to ask whether you think there'd be merit in us looking specifically at rough sleeping and potentially solutions to that or whether we spoke about the additional services that people need the types of accommodation whether when we look at all those things it's going to be caught up in that. Rough sleeping is the most extreme form of homelessness and we know that homelessness happens more in areas of the highest economic disadvantage the single biggest cause of homelessness even though we look at it in terms of what happens immediately before a person becomes homeless structural reasons why people come homeless is of course poverty that's the single biggest reason so if we look at rough sleeping in those terms if we're looking at rough sleeping as a strategy or a focus absolutely but within the context of housing first I would plead because housing first is the only and it's the most evaluated evidence solution to the group that we're talking about here there simply isn't another solution that's ever been researched or evaluated that produces better outcomes for people sleeping enough than the housing first approach if the housing first approach is implemented using all the criteria to ensure fidelity to the model because you'll get greater outcomes then if you don't get the right sort of support then it doesn't work but if you do it does. We've begun to look more within Scotland at multiple or complex needs rather than rough sleeping because you do have this kind of potentially this kind of revolving door of people you know some of the people you're potentially talking about who go into tendencies it fails for whatever reason and then they're on the streets or whatever we work with a lot of people in Edinburgh who are in and out of B&Bs and that kind of thing there's something about understanding who we're talking about with rough sleeping which goes back to your original point and then there's something about who those people are and tackling those things and I think that probably a lot of that is complex needs there may be something specifically around immigrants and that kind of thing the support that they get and what happens if you are here I mean one of the the situations I've heard a few a couple of people mention is where you've got couples from an Eastern Europe or somewhere like that and there's domestic violence and then the couple splits up and the woman has no history of working here she has very little English potentially and she's in a very vulnerable situation and she's not entitled to any housing benefit and so on so what happens in those sorts of situations so there's something I think about the support that there is available for immigrants and I recognise that that's not necessarily within purview of this in this Parliament but then there's also the complex needs there's unpicking what rough sleeping is and then I think there's the complex needs issue I would agree with Maggie about housing first you know it is a very well evidenced approach we have to make sure it we stick to the model I think something called housing first which are just a house and no support and that doesn't work you know we're talking about really you know people with very complex needs and I think if you look at Turning Point Scotland who they piloted a housing first within the UK in Glasgow and they've done some really interesting work and talking to some of the people talking to some of the people and to the staff working with them you know they've helped some really people who are very challenging leads and who've been sleeping rough for very long periods and stuck with them as they go into housing and then they've you know they've gone back to living on the streets for a bit and then they've gone back to housing and then they've gone back to living on the streets and then finally they've begun to maintain that that tendency and keep going with it okay thanks Ruth I know that you're going to explore temporary accommodation if you want to run with that now or could it leads in quite nicely I think just in terms of we're talking about housing first but there has to be supply and whether that's a permanent tense initially a temporary accommodation and other issues around that I don't know Ruth who's going to explore some of some of those around that I suppose it's I mean it's really the whole the whole thing in the terms of temporary accommodation and the challenges around the suitability and these are things that we have heard a bit about from some of you and how we can improve homeless persons experience of that we had a visit to streetworks in Edinburgh and heard about people's experience in bnbs which wasn't particularly positive and I think you know even without complex needs or vulnerabilities would be actually quite hard to live that way and I think Beth you spoke about impact of welfare reform and funding on temporary accommodation so just your reflections on that on the whole thing really I guess in terms of the broader picture you know we've got about 10 000 people in bed in temporary accommodation at any one time in in Scotland and that number's got pretty static over the last few years but what we do know is that the length of time in that in that accommodation is is increasing now there's a whole range of types of accommodation that people might be in we as a crisis we're particularly concerned about people who are in unsuitable accommodation we've said that families can be in unsuitable accommodation which often means been breakfast although it can mean other kind of accommodation which doesn't necessarily have the right facilities for long term living you know we see in Edinburgh we see people there for kind of 18 months at a time in some cases and there are a number of parts of Scotland where that that is the case you know we've said that's not suitable for families we think that should be really if accommodation is unsuitable it's unsuitable for anybody it's right that we prioritise families but actually we need to be looking really at everybody who's at his homeless and you know there are some local authorities have been made well a lot of local authorities have made some really good progress towards ending the use of bnb five have done a lot of work recently Renfrewshire as well have done a lot of work to end the use of bed and breakfast so I guess that there's a point about the suitability of temporary accommodation and particularly bed and breakfast type accommodation and I think from a Glasgow perspective some of the traditional hostel approaches and obviously there's talk about the bell grove hotel on a on a regular basis which is utterly unsuitable there's the length of stay and I think in terms of the length of stay in temporary accommodation it's about can we get people into permanent accommodation much faster you know the affordable housing programme you know will will contribute to that we should be looking at the private rented sector you know can we use prevention approaches to help people stay in accommodation where that's appropriate so where that's young people facing family relationship difficulties it might be that you can facilitate that and with some mediation it's not always going to be appropriate and we need to be aware of forcing young people back into accommodation which isn't appropriate for them but in some cases that can be sustained especially if you get there early enough yeah and then then there's a wider question which is the funding of temporary accommodation and I think that is a that's a really big challenge I've heard various estimates of the shortfall each year that's going to be in temporary accommodation but I do think that also provides an opportunity to rethink what we're doing you know we are going to have to look at this and we're going to have to say well actually how can we do this differently so can we use you know some of the options I've set out to do that differently or you know can we can we go and convert some of the private sector leasing to to short short tendencies or you know can we can we think differently and do something more imaginative around it I agree with that it's it almost kind of feels like we're at a crossroads now and it is either you know whether we make better the wrong system or create the right system and I think that's what a number of people's discussions have arrived at and clearly at least in my opinion what we want to do is start creating the right system the temporary accommodation and it's such a it's such a central plank of our current homelessness system and it continues to grow you know that we start then needing to want to improve it and because that's that's what we do and that's what we're here for we look at people's homelessness and particularly complex forms of it and in all its complexity and start applying more and more responses to that because it feels like the right thing to do they're not necessarily coordinated responses and ultimately what we're doing is recreating additional layers and layers and layers on top of an already very complicated system and if instead what we can do is start unpeeling those layers and taking it back to I get it quote I heard the other day which is when we stop looking at homelessness as a homelessness system and instead look at it as a rehousing system then everything changes and I think I absolutely fundamentally believe in that that in attempting to alleviate people's suffering we've instead unintentionally prolonged their experience and if we can bring it right back to the simple fact that homelessness is not only a housing issue but it's always a housing issue and if we can start from that place and apply all the supports that people need then it'll progress us further. Can I give a really obvious example of that I think is people leaving prison you know when people go into prison we know when they're going to leave so why are they ending up going through the homelessness system and why are they in temporary accommodation for however long and you know and then while they're waiting to get somewhere else you know we should be able to get that journey right and I think that's a really obvious example of something that's kind of buried deeper in the system you know we could be looking at housing first for you know somebody's coming out prison relatively complex needs they need stability you put them in housing first you get the right support in place for them they won't have to move after six months or 12 months or whatever and you know but but again that goes back to having some sort of coordinated approach as strategy crisis is doing some work in Liverpool which is looking at a regional approach for housing first in in in that city region and you know it's about like monkey says you know having a really coordinated approach to that you're doing some working Glasgow as well looking at in the private rented sector as well you know how can we how can we think a bit differently and make sure that that we sort out the housing first rather than saying what do you have to go through this this homelessness route that we've created the solutions that we know are cheaper and more effective and yet we're not doing them to scale and it's that we have this amazing opportunity in front of us and you know there are other aspects of resolving homelessness that there are lots of different approaches and what we also need to do is kind of really frame in narrowing on what works and do that in quite a systematic way and we're working with crisis on that type of approach as well but we do need to simplify and de-duplicate the system and we'll get further ahead. We know that the costs are huge but the costs aren't necessary to the homeless services the costs are to the A&E services the cost of the criminal justice service the police you know to the mental health services and and that is one of the problems and we we did some costing you know to to prevent somebody's homelessness we we looked at four different scenarios typically cost about 1500 pounds for a person now if that person doesn't get support they go on to you know worst-case scenario go on to rough sleep you know mental health problems involvement criminal justice that can be 10 000 pounds in a year easily you know so if we can get this right there's huge savings to public public the public purse but it does it does potentially require some up for an investment. Ruth, do you want to add anything? In a moment we're going to bring in Andy Wightman for another line of questioning but can I just there's a question wrapped up in here but I want to make sure that my observation is valid because I want to have captured the strikes I'm talking as a constituency MSP now in some of my experiences in the past is when various vulnerable people get put in temporary accommodation it's temporary furnished they may sustain that they may not sustain that now the nature of vulnerable people is quite often they don't sustain it and with all the antisocial manifestations that can bring where I will have other constituents complained to myself about antisocial or problem tenants which stigmatises the homelessness case. Now the irony for myself is when a tenant does get put in that temporary furnished accommodation and they make a success of that tenancy they still get moved on and actually it's not just unfair on the tenant who's made a success of that tenancy it's unfair in the neighbours that are sharing a land in or are close with that tenant because another vulnerable tenant gets moved in who might not sustain the tenancy and I've got constituents who in the longer term have a kind of yo-yo effect of vulnerable tenants getting moved in and moved out and abling they make a success of it they're not they don't get allowed to stay so I'm just wondering if housing first options may not just be best financially in terms of how we use budgets best for the homeless person but also best for the neighbours in the community as well I just want any comments on that would be quite helpful have I captured that correctly yeah I think you've captured it perfectly I think that's my experience you know someone as Beth was saying someone could be in a temporary accommodation that's partly furnished but they feel it is a home because it's partly furnished and it's more comfortable than moving into somewhere new where they've not got any funds to actually make it a home and it is about developed relationships and it's back to what I think I mentioned earlier that if we really really want to aim in which we all are to end homelessness we really need to integrate people that have been homeless for a long period of time that are suffering from a lot of issues back in the community and the community needs to play a part in that and what you're just saying there is exactly that that a lot of individuals or one individual could stigmatise or change the perceptions of the public to the next 20, 30, 40 people that are in that community and and to change that it's about a coordination it's actually a bit sitting thing I think what you've put something about Magnatine was saying and in my experience there seems to be a fear factor in making decisions it's like you know right this structure has been in place for the social work department for 10 years it's outcomes is this and we look at that and but there's you know maybe constructive criticism of it's not working effectively or it's not working properly we can maybe tweak it here but there's a fear factor where it's amongst the seniors or the managers of that to say well if we state that it needs changed now we maybe might be criticised for it being that way for the last five years. I'm trying to say that there's a fear factor there's a fear factor within the third sector of losing your job losing your funding so so so there's anxiety levels round about that and stress there's there's there's fear factor of criticising the person that is giving you the funding and and I also think within the statutory sector there's a fear factor because the structures have been in place and we need to start changing the structures we need to actually have a coordinate effect coordinate effort we're looking at integration of healthcare we're looking at integration of social care but there's still this protective arm from certain agencies around certain parts of those organisations that's natural I understand that sorry I feel so bad for cutting you off Mr no no you do I just I mean perhaps I'm rambling with my question so I'm just as bad but I just want to make sure that the picture that I'm painting is not just unique to a couple of constituents cases I've had over the last couple of years but it's perhaps it's something Margaret Ann Beth that you think you've experienced when you've supported help try to help and support vulnerable individual sustained tenancies I think there's sorry I think there's something really important about valuing social relationships and social networks and I think for a lot of people that we work with that that is critical and you know the end of homelessness is you get a social tenancy that's that's kind of ideal but actually for a lot of the people we work with they get the social tenancy there's no furniture it's right on the edge of Edinburgh they don't know anybody there that you know they have to get a bus a long way to meet and their friends and then they have to build all these links with these neighbours who you know they may or may not get to know and I think that's really critical I think it plays all the way through the homelessness system actually if we're talking about people with complex needs we know that for a lot of those people there's increasing evidence to show that trauma early in childhood and all the way through life can can make a big difference so building relationships and having consistent relationships and I know this is going slightly away from your point but it's really important and you know I think some of the things that Eddie was saying around the length of time you can work with people actually for some people it will take two to three to four to five years to build up a relationship where they feel that they can trust so I think if you're moving people from temporary accommodation into somewhere you know moving them on constantly in that journey then they have no opportunity to really put some routes down and and actually those you know there's the issue of around stigma with neighbours but there's also the issue of they'll keep an eye out for you and check that you're okay and that you know your mental health hasn't gone down and that you know you've actually left your house in the last two weeks you know all those kind of things as well those social networks are really important and I think we need to find a way of valuing valuing them more in the services that we provide and that was my experience where neighbours actually wanted the individual to stay within the stairwell in the closest because they were a good neighbour and they couldn't work out why that would be temporary accommodation because that accommodation was suitable for that person and they'd put down routes and the system just seemed crazy that then they would move that person on but I think you're particularly a lot better than I do what you are is that mark? I mean just exactly what you're saying and I'll make it very quick that there is definitely more that we can do in that period when people are temporarily accommodated particularly when that temporary accommodation is provided as a flat through RSLs or a local authority depending on your kind of local context we're missing opportunities there people are there often prolonged periods of time instead of giving the opportunity to lay down routes and for the life to stop being on hold it's always considered as a temporary stay even though that temporary is often quite long term instead if one of the more creative solutions we can be looking at is whether those flats where it fits the aspirations of the household whether those flats can be converted to permanent accommodation and if you're there temporarily you know can can can ask secure tenancy just be applied to the same tenancy so that people can get on with their lives you know. That might only be a small amount of cases but that's been my experience thank you very much Andy Wightman. Thank you computer just a couple of questions one quite short one here Beth you talked earlier about a degree of confusion as to whether someone in fact has actually presented as homeless with with local authorities there was quite a well publicised case here in Parliament of a gentleman who was campaigning on a point similar to that asking that there should be a statutory right to declare as homeless is that something that you recognise as not being there and if it if it's not should be there and would that help or how alternatively can we get a better framework so that people who have a right to declare as homeless are actually getting the response that they deserve. I wonder if it's a question about transparency within the system what's happening at the moment is I think that people go to the council they don't necessarily know the full range of their rights but they know that if they go to the council they can get help hopefully not everybody does that but do they get informed that you have made a homelessness application and this is the outcome of it you know do they get told that very clearly or not and if if somebody goes to the council says I'm homeless and they say well okay you can make it these are housing options and you can make a statutory housing a homelessness application and then they say well I want to do that and then they get told okay you've done that this you will hear within so many days or whatever then you know that that's about having a transparent system I think so anybody can make a homelessness application you know that that's and then if you do that you go through that kind of statutory process but they need to know that they've done that and they need to know what the outcome of that is you know it shouldn't be that we we working with a member for four months and at the end of that we call the shelter legal advice line and then they say well actually the council's saying you haven't made a homelessness application it shouldn't be that that opaque okay that's that's very helpful thanks very much again this is actually a quick question but we've heard evidence from a latch show suggesting that the 1987 legislation is is outdated beth you've talked about Welsh legislation and English legislation is going through at the moment. Do you think in broad terms and I'm not inviting you to get into the detail of it but do you think in broad terms there's a need to update or amend our homelessness legislation in this session of Parliament? You start best not arguing I'm not going to argue with Tony Keane however the 77 legislation was significantly amended by the 2001 and 2003 acts I mean they weren't small amendments they were significant rewritings of the central tenants of the legislation they resulted in a number of additional rights on people I can't see that there's any specific new legislation we need I think we need to be better for all the reasons that we just talked about better working together and exploring the common ground that we have across all the different sectors to implement what we have and I believe that we have the resources and the legislation that we require to go on with it and we just need to better go on with it and I'm not sure legislation is what we need next. Beth, do you want to add anything to that? I think we have some of the most progressive rights on homelessness in the world so I would be nervous about anything that might put that at risk having said that I do think there is something that we need to sort out whether it's legislatively or otherwise about how we do prevention and how we make sure that people aren't the yeah that we we prevent it as early as possible and I think that there is as I've said I think there is a little bit of attention between housing options and the statutory route at the moment now I'm not saying that necessarily needs a legislative intervention but I think it does need to be to be looked at in a bit more detail and I do think potentially there is something around engaging other services again whether that's a legislative route or not but I think that you know we should be looking at the Wales and now the England legislation that's going through and and and seeing what lessons should we be learning from that and looking at that in quite some detail okay thank you okay thank you alexander stewart can I move on to the role that the health sector plays within homelessness now we're aware and we've already discussed that some of these individuals have complex health issues they may have mental health issues but it's how we work together and there have been some very good partnership processes and partnership working that's that's taken place so it would be good to get your views on sort of evidence of partnership working and is there any focus that we can do more as there are opportunities for further partnership working to happen within health or do we feel that that we've taken it to a level and we need to do something radically different if we're going to try and change the whole health agenda because as I say these individuals do have complex problems and they repeat the problem it doesn't necessarily go away it may it may diminish for a time and it's only through the partnership working that that maybe has happened but it's how we sustain that and look at what we can do more within that sector because we got the feeling that there was maybe some gaps still within that sector and I think that we unfortunately don't have today as Dr Neil Hamlet who would have answered your question with precision and I think what's clear what Neil has said over the last period is in absolutely putting the NHS housing social work components back together again and in a sense some of that probably its strategic level had been lost a while probably since the end of the monitoring required around bit health and homelessness standards that we had under previous approaches. Some interesting work that we know is kicking off I think all local authorities have signed up to this is data linkage so actually linking health data with local authority HL1 homelessness data which will allow a much more sophisticated analysis and understanding of the complexity and depth of need including health need of people that are coming into the homelessness system and what we would want to try and ensure within that programme is a programme that recognises that what that will do is continue to describe the problem better which is incredibly important but similarly probably a proportionate same amount of effort on what do we do now that we can better describe the problem you know so about real pragmatic responses solutions finding out what works and making them work. I am constantly in my mind of a tweet somebody the experiences homelessness who on the launch of a new homelessness report they were saying how many times do you need to research this and it's not it's not hard for any of us to you know to want to take that close and to what it is we're doing and say okay we describe the problem what now to be put in place to make people's lives easier you know. Anyone else want to comment on relation to the the link with health and better working that Alexander Stewart was mentioning? I think that there has been positives in the integrity of health and social care there is moves forward with that I think it's a slow process because of the nature of the resources that they both have to deal with and the issues that they have. What we feel as a third sector organisation is sometimes our voice isn't heard in relation to who you're taking an individual or supporting an individual to a mental health service or the jp it sometimes depends on the individual the professional that we're dealing with it depends on the history of the individual that's been presenting with that issue and it's trying to get to an overall picture and it's back to what I said earlier that I feel that if an organisation Beth is if we're working with an individual over a period of time we've got more opportunities to observe the behaviour and the reactions to certain processes they support with that individual and sometimes that's not taking account in my personal experience when we're supporting an individual and trying to explain to the professional that this is the the the behaviour that's being displaced with us it displayed when he's with us or whenever with us and it's not taking any account of the decisions made there's also because I think that the lack of resources within those fields there is a huge weight in time and that time is very very difficult for us as an organisation to support someone through that because we don't have the experience and the knowledge to take that forward and that's why we try to signpost and refer individuals on and again it's back to I think it's what we are saying hopefully collectively that it's more co-ordination of effort it's more a co-ordination of services and it's really about communication that's what I feel is as we need to communicate better we need to communicate more and as we start listening a little bit more too I'd agree with those points I think in terms of service delivery and in particular thinking about people with complex needs and I think this came up in your in your previous evidence session but you know when we're talking about people with quite chaotic lives and so on there's something about recognising how those people are going to engage with your service because they are not going to be able to adapt to your service structure and you know remember that you've got an appointment in a month's time on a nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning and you know so that there is something also about making sure that services meet the needs and there's a place on Hunter Street in Glasgow and there's the access practice in Edinburgh and you know there's places that do do that and I think perhaps there's challenges in in more rural areas and so on about that but there is something about thinking about how how can we support this person to engage particularly I think with mental health services not not for any criticism mental health services but people with mental health problems will have difficulties engaging and that's their problem there's a guy psychiatrist from the access practice who speaks very very eloquently on the and I can't remember his name just off the top of my head but you know he talks about their way of engaging is not to engage because that is their experience of life people haven't engaged with them whether that's parents whether that's people at school and so on so I think that I think there is something about awareness in in some of those services and perhaps capacity and ability to engage in a different way with with some of these clients you hit the nail on the head the capacity is to the might vital issue and a problem that we face and funding comes with that that package and for some individuals who've been institutionalised are coming back into the community they need that step up or that step down to manage their chaotic lifestyle and you and your agencies are all trying to provide that but if we're still having a barrier with the health professional and that could be the community mental nurse or it could be the the gp or it could be individuals within the sector then the the chain gets broken and it's very difficult to then put that link back in because they end up not going to the practice or not going to the appointment and then going back into another cycle and that then creates even more problems for the individual back to the strategic approach and the work that Neil Hamlet is doing about saying well actually these people are still coming to the health services they are costing us a lot of money let's get that in an early stage and actually if we intervene at that stage and allow them some flexibility okay they haven't turned up to this appointment again but it's a lot cheaper than a psychiatric admission or whatever it might be thank you and of course I'll let you in we're almost at the end of our evidence session but yes please continue to absolutely agree with your point in terms of accessing mainstream services particularly when people have experience of specialist homelessness services with again a great service and an immediate service and then the difference then when you move into the community and the mainstream services that they're not getting that Glasgow just at just as a point of interest Glasgow took the decision to include homelessness within its health and social care integration as a priority group which means there is a specific integrated strategic planning group that looks at homelessness and that's early days but an interesting approach in terms of making sure that the different aspects are looked at together okay now I'm looking at my MSP colleagues if there's any additional questions at this point I should say in relation to how health connects with homelessness and service provision a few of you mentioned Dr Neil Hamlet and Dr Neil Hamlet had hoped to make it today but he was unable to do so he's put in his apologies he's consultant in public health medicine NHS 5 and we're still keen to get information from Dr Hamlet we think some of his information will be vital and we'll make sure as a committee that we that we still do that but it's all the reason for him on watching to put on record that Dr Hamlet did want to be here today but he was unable to make it can I thank all of you for coming along this morning I feel at certain stages and this was to the strength of the evidence session it was a discussion between the three of you and what had to happen to improve the situation which is kind of what we were looking for that's a strong evidence session so we've got a lot of I hope you certainly all have as well normally at this stage I would say to you and I want to say to you we're going to actually email me a right to me the answers to this if you were sitting in our position what questions would you ask we do a call for evidence because we've now taken a lot of fact finding visits we've taken a lot of evidence on the record including today and we are going to do a formal and detailed call for evidence in relation to the inquiry and homelessness but we want to make sure it's like Eddie was saying about measuring outcomes and outputs you have to ask the right questions at the start and the outset of an inquiry to make sure the outcome we get as a committee is appropriate so any thoughts you've got if you were sitting in our position of what you would ask we'd be very keen to know but don't tell us just now because time is upon us all that remains to be done is to thank our three witnesses and do stay in contact we'll stay in contact with yourself and that is agenda item one thank you all and we now move to agenda item two in fact we'll suspend briefly just to give more witnesses the opportunity to leave thank you