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Scotland has some of the strongest rights in the world for people who are experiencing homelessness. However, because local connection powers are discretionary at the moment, there is a risk of inconsistent practice across the country, which can result in households in one area receiving a different service from that which households in another would receive. Ending the referral powers will result in a more consistent service for homeless households across Scotland.

When people make a homelessness application to another local authority, they have good reasons for doing that. As I said in my opening statement, they might want to be closer to family or to a job opportunity, or they might want to use services that are not available in their current area. They might want to make a fresh start because they do not feel safe in their present home. We have listened to people’s experiences and have built on what we have heard.

Changing the rules on local connection has been a long-standing commitment—it is not something that has come to light recently—and the change has been informed by experts in the homelessness sector. As I said in my opening statement, the bones of this go back as far as 2002, when the issue was first raised. We have delayed, but we feel that now is the right time to move forward.

It applies within the 32 local authorities.

Yes. We monitor breaches very closely. I am obviously concerned about any breaches, so we monitor unsuitable accommodation order breaches. That will be part of the package of information that we will look at.

Going back to one of my previous answers, we need to address the housing system as a whole. We can address some of the issues around temporary accommodation and we can tackle the unsuitable accommodation orders.

Some local authorities are doing imaginative things. For example, at a recent housing event that I attended, one local authority representative spoke about how they are getting far more upstream in identifying households that could potentially end up homeless and in temporary accommodation by looking at, for example, people getting into council tax arrears as well as rent arrears. By getting further upstream and helping families with their debts and arrears earlier, the local authority’s homelessness figures and the number of people in temporary accommodation came down. It is about tackling the issue of those presenting as homeless and continuing to expand housing provision and look at innovative ways of tackling temporary accommodation, but it is also about prevention.

I am keen to consider further how we might help families before they end up in the homelessness system. That is about drilling down into the experiences of folk who have ended up in temporary accommodation. What is their story? How did they get there? What happened and what were the opportunities for intervention?

The prevention duties that we are bringing forward will be important in that respect as well. It is about looking at all the opportunities to intervene and seeing it as everybody’s business to ask the questions about whether folk are getting into debt or arrears, whether homelessness is a potential consequence of that and how we can prevent it far earlier.

It has been a constructive discussion, and a lot of important points have been made. I will come back to the committee at some point with an update on how the order is working in practice, if that would be helpful.

Thank you for the invitation to today’s meeting.

The proposed change to local connection referrals between local authorities in Scotland was recommended in 2002 by the homelessness task force and was picked up again in 2018 by the homelessness and rough sleeping action group.

In brief, local connection has been recognised for two decades as a barrier to accessing homelessness services in Scotland, and we are now removing it. We made changes in late 2019 so that investigating local connection became a discretionary power, rather than a legal duty, for local authorities. That means that, at the moment, households can still be asked to demonstrate their local connection to the area when they present as homeless to a local authority.

Most homeless households want to live in an area where they are already settled within a community. However, for some households, application of the local connection test is a barrier to securing a settled home. Choice is important, and homeless households should be as freely able to move to a new area as anyone else is. They might do so in order to access support, take advantage of employment opportunities or simply make a fresh start.

The number of households presenting as homeless with no local connection to the local authority is low—it is currently around 5 per cent of all households assessed as being homeless or threatened with homelessness. When no local connection is established, local authorities have the power to refer the homeless household back to an area where they do have a local connection. However, local authorities seldom use that referral power, which suggests that they are already operating in a person-centred way, following the legislative change in 2019.

Our 2019 consultation showed that there is broad support for the change in local connection among homelessness stakeholders, local authorities and our lived experience group, the change team. However, we know that some local authorities have raised concerns about the timing of this legislation, as they are already under pressure to deliver their homelessness duties. Big cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh are seen as being attractive places to live, with a wide range of support services and employment opportunities. Our island communities are also concerned that even a small increase in homeless households could have a significant impact on support services such as health and social care services.

A robust monitoring and evaluation framework has been developed with stakeholders, and, through regular engagement with local authorities and services, we can capture trends as they emerge. That will provide the evidence base for mitigations, should any disproportionate adverse effect on local authorities be identified.

As members know from my previous correspondence with the committee, we have delayed this Scottish statutory instrument a number of times in order to support local authorities. However, we are determined to improve access to housing and support for homeless households, so we are moving forward with the changes now.

Finally, safety, stability and support are all affected by where people live, and I see the ending of local connection referrals in Scotland as an important step in removing the barriers experienced by homeless households, ensuring that those households receive a consistent service and offering them opportunities that are available to other Scottish households.

Again, I will bring in officials on the detail. Some of the data is already being collected, and the monitoring and evaluation framework is about adding information to what is already there.

I welcome the supporting statement that Shelter has shared with the committee, which recognises that the change is an important step towards improving outcomes for homeless households and giving them the same ability to move as any other household would have. Shelter advocates on behalf of people who are experiencing homelessness. I know that it sees the change as a strong step in the right direction towards supporting a person’s right to choose where they live. It has held that position for quite some time and is content that the Scottish Government has now introduced such a change, having previously delayed—although that was for good reasons, because of Covid and then the situation in Ukraine. We feel that now is the right time to move forward and that to delay any further would not be right.

I am happy to do so. In my opening statement, I said that about 5 per cent of households do not have a connection to the local authority that they present to. There were fewer than 200 referrals last year, and 11 councils made no referrals and 13 councils made five or fewer, so we are not talking about huge numbers of people or huge increases.

However, we recognise that we must monitor, observe and keep an eye on any trends. We completed an island communities impact assessment with engagement from each of the six island and rural local authorities to ensure that we were hearing about the issues that Emma Roddick has articulated. The monitoring and reporting framework has been developed in collaboration with them and with front-line services and people with lived experience, to capture relevant information to support the data that had already been gathered through the HL1 homelessness statistics. Monitoring those statistics will be an important way of understanding the impact of the legislation. We have said that, if there should be any indications of difficulty, we will engage directly with the relevant local authority to consider how we can support it.

The backstop would be if an emergency situation were to be created in an area. There would then be the potential to come forward with an exemption, which would require me to come back to Parliament, though I would want to do so only in extremis. I do not anticipate that that will need to be done, because I think that local authorities will manage the situation and that, with our support, they will be able to address any additional applications that come in.

I will be happy to come back to the committee with an update report after a period of implementation, if it would be helpful to give you further information at that point.

Yes, and we monitor that carefully. As you will be aware, the housing system for Ukrainian displaced persons is a bit separate. They have the welcome accommodation and then we try to get them into host accommodation. There are also opportunities for accommodation in the private rented sector and the social rented sector.

A lot of work is going on, and £50 million has been made available to local authorities to provide new accommodation in refurbished and repurposed properties. We have had a good response from a number of local authorities. The latest is 500 units in Aberdeen that needed refurbishment and had been seen as surplus to requirement. We are trying to keep that housing stream a bit separate to create additional capacity, but we need to keep a close eye on it.

It is really important that the opportunity for host accommodation is continued beyond six months. There have been a number of changes in who is in charge of the programme in the United Kingdom Government. My colleague Neil Gray has sought urgent discussions about the importance of ensuring that we are able to keep hosts beyond the six-month point. English local authorities are really concerned about the matter as well. We do not want people to end up coming out of host accommodation and presenting as homeless. It is really important that that does not happen, so it is crucial that hosts can continue to host while people are supported into more settled accommodation.

All of those things are linked.

The action plan has to address all those issues. The key stakeholders have been clear and have been informing the development of the plan by raising the issues that you have just articulated and others and setting out what needs to be done. It is about trying to reduce as much as possible the timelines that I talked about earlier when it comes to getting projects from inception through to having spades in the ground, and it is about the capacity to provide support for local communities—and the myriad other issues that we know the plan needs to resolve.

Having said that, it is reassuring that we are seeing more affordable homes coming through in rural and island communities. The 25 per cent increase that was delivered in 2021-22 compared to 2020-21 is cause for optimism that things are improving, although that comes with all the caveats about peaks and troughs. The plan will absolutely help to keep the momentum going. It is important that we listen to organisations such as Community Land Scotland and make sure that the plan addresses the issues that they raise.