Cabinet Secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville MSP, visits our Edinburgh centre and talks prevention

Maeve McGoldrick, Head of Policy and Communications Scotland

26.11.2024

In a debate at the Scottish Parliament on the Housing (Scotland) Bill recently, the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Shirley-Anne Somerville MSP, stated at the beginning of her speech that:

“The Government declared a housing emergency to move past the debating of definitions and move on to focused actions.”

We know that there is a housing emergency in Scotland but what is important to us, and what our work centres on, is how to bring it to an end and ensure it does not happen again. Focused actions, not rhetoric, are therefore what’s needed to end homelessness in Scotland.

The Cabinet Secretary visits our Edinburgh Skylight 

We welcomed the Cabinet Secretary to our Edinburgh Skylight prior to that debate taking place, where we discussed our frontline work and our hopes for the prevention measures in the Housing (Scotland) Bill – and, crucially, its successful implementation - if Parliament passes the Bill in 2025.

As this was the Cabinet Secretary’s first official visit to our Skylight, we were delighted to show her the transformative work that our staff do. This prefaced a helpful, informative conversation about the future of the Housing (Scotland) Bill and how we can make the best of the prevention measures contained therein. 

Addressing Scottish Parliament on 13 November 2024 

“Our homelessness prevention measures will shift the focus away from crisis intervention and towards prevention.”

In addressing the Scottish Parliament on 13 November, the Cabinet Secretary made this declaration. This is a vision that we wholeheartedly support and want to see actioned, and it formed the basis of a detailed policy discussion that took place during her visit.

We were very grateful to Crisis members for joining us so that they could speak to their personal experience in conversation with the Cabinet Secretary. Their insightful and impactful contributions evidenced the need for the Scottish Government to prioritise prevention and we were pleased to see this reference made by the Cabinet Secretary so soon after visiting us.

Preventing homelessness will be the key to solving it

The scale of the challenge we face in Scotland is considerable but not insurmountable. The number of people experiencing homelessness is rising but so are the numbers of people being helped out of homelessness. The latter is evidence of exceptional work being done at the frontline level across the public and third sectors but also that they are being let down by a system that still enables people to become homeless in the first place. If we can get prevention right, it will drastically reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness which must be our collective shared aim. 

We have therefore left the Cabinet Secretary with ideas regarding how the prevention measures contained within the Housing (Scotland) Bill can be successfully implemented. It is incumbent upon the Scottish Government – and subsequent Scottish Governments – to implement these measures effectively and actually deliver the change that they can bring about. It will not be enough to simply pass the Bill, it must also be enacted well.

Three areas of action that will deliver change

To do this, we have asked the Cabinet secretary to reflect on three areas of action that could help deliver the change we want to see happen:

1. Fund and deliver a Test and Learn pilot programme to find answers to aspects of the legislation that are unknowns. 
2. Fund and deliver a programme of Scaling Up Prevention best practice across Scotland in response to the National Housing Emergency, and in preparation for implementation of the new duties.
3. Establish a Prevention Delivery Unit at the heart of Scottish Government, tasked with transforming public services to create a new holistic support model for households in need of help early on. 

All three of these proposals can be actioned in the very near future and doing so will give us the opportunity to actively address the housing emergency by prioritising prevention, thereby stopping people becoming homeless in the first place. 

We will continue to press the case for more than rhetoric, for these actions to be taken as swiftly as possible and for them to be adequately funded in the forthcoming budget in December.