Scottish homelessness in 3 charts

This week the Scottish Government released its annual batch of statistics on homelessness, not that you’d know. Everyone was pre-occupied with #brexit.

So was it a good week to bury bad news? Here’s what you need to know.

First off, the total number of people applying to local authorities as homeless across Scotland has gone down, which is hardly bad news.

In the last year there were 34,662 homelessness applications, down from a peak of 60,568 ten years ago.

When it comes to rough sleeping, the latest figures maintain a similar downwards trend. The national statistics show that last year the number of people who slept rough the night prior to applying as homeless was down 6% on the last year to 1352.

But not all the trend lines are downwards.

The statistics show that some more people from ethnic minority groups are applying as homeless. This may simply reflect the growing diversity of modern Scotland.

There has been a 19% rise in African people applying as homeless. A 3% rise in people applications from white Polish people and a 5% rise from other ethnic groups — albeit often from a low bases.

Homeless charities have however tended to highlight another detail in this year’s figures. That is the increase in the number of families with children placed in temporary accommodation.

As our last chart shows, this figure is going in the wrong direction. There were 2884 families with children in temporary accommodation at 31st March 2016, many more than there were on the equivalent date in 2002, 14 years ago.

Here’s what Shelter Scotland had to say about these figures.

Jon Sparkes, Chief Executive of Crisis, said that homeless people were ‘increasingly visible’ on the streets, despite the top-line improvements in the statistics.

He said: “Scotland has made considerable progress in the fight against homelessness, and these figures continue to show improvement, both in the number of people formally seeking help and the proportion who slept rough the night before.”

“Despite the extension of rights, homelessness is increasingly visible on the streets of Scotland’s cities.

“There is no room for complacency, which is why we’re calling for a more robust, proactive approach to prevention and for Scottish Government to develop a strategic approach to homelessness across government that mitigates recent cuts to local authority budgets and social security”

Scottish housing minister Kevin Stewart told Third Force News in response to the criticism: “It is our aim to stop people becoming homeless in the first place which is much better for our people and our communities, and of course our homelessness services.

“While there are many reasons for families staying in temporary accommodation, I am disappointed in the increase in the number of children in temporary accommodation.”