SOMETHING deeply troubling is happening in the provision of homelessness services in Glasgow.

At a time when there’s an ever-increasing demand for emergency accommodation, we appear to be introducing and planning for more cuts to homeless accommodation. How can that be conscionable?

The Glasgow City Integration Joint Board (IJB) published a report on June 28 this year which explained it forecast an overspend on homelessness services in 2023/24 by £16.59 million, so it was introducing further immediate cuts of around £5m.

The IJB took this action knowing that it could stymie its ability to perform statutory duties to homeless persons under the 1987 Housing (Scotland) Act 1987.

The report said: “Proposals in addressing homelessness pressures are likely to increase risk of non-compliance with statutory duties.

"This paper sets out proposals which will ensure the HSCP statutory responsibilities remain protected wherever possible whilst delivering the necessary financial savings.

“It should also be noted that whilst Glasgow Homelessness Services have fully complied with our statutory duty to provide emergency accommodation we equally recognise that by doing so we are in breach on the Unsuitable Accommodation Order by more than 600 households.”

That’s quite an extraordinary admission.

A clear recognition that further financial cuts means acting in breach of statutory duties as a local authority, which results in having to act unlawfully on more occasions.

Yet it gets worse than this. How are the cuts of £5m to be achieved?

On page 11 of the IJB’s report we’re told that “two recovery plans” have been identified to reduce the provision of emergency hotel and B&B accommodation available for homeless persons in the city.

The “solution” selected is removing the availability of 78 beds from the Charles Rennie Mackintosh homeless hotel as well as “slow down admission to emergency accommodation”.

This will save almost £5m in 2023/24 we are told. The IJB expressly concedes this will result in a reputational risk to itself, together with the risk of more judicial review challenges in the Court of Session from non-compliance with legal duties.

From my reading of the IJB report, in essence what has been introduced is a reduction in the provision of emergency temporary homeless accommodation, managed by the creation of bottlenecks to prevent access to statutory services.

It’s the equivalent of turning off a lifesaving tap for a significant percentage of vulnerable homeless persons.

In 2022/23 the IJB claimed almost £12m in Covid-19 monies for homeless services in Glasgow (paragraph 2.12 of its June report). That funding has now evaporated and in truth this must be the primary source of the projected overspend.

The £5m cuts introduced are relatively small in the scale of Glasgow City Council’s overall budget, however, they will have a profoundly detrimental impact on the lives of many vulnerable human beings who simply seek emergency homeless accommodation.

Admittedly there are also demand-led drivers here. The decision of Mears and the Home Office to accelerate the number of people being moved out of accommodation following successful asylum claims results in an additional pressure of 600 homeless households per annum.

During the first weeks of May this year, the IJB confirmed this demand translated into 50 presentations per week seeking homelessness emergency accommodation and resulted in hotel and B&B accommodation numbers increasing to almost 800 with spot purchasing of higher cost hotels now becoming the norm in order to sustain statutory duties.

Changes to the “local connection” duty from last November meant that Glasgow accommodated an additional 75 households who had no connection with the city between November and May this year.

Clearly the use of B&B accommodation can be very expensive.

Why do we rely on it so much?

The short answer is Glasgow is a stock transfer city with no meaningful number of council houses so it relies upon local housing associations.

Glasgow’s local letting plan for 2023/24 revealed that Glasgow had a shortfall in securing permanent lets of around 1600 homes. The goal was to secure 4500 lets annually, however in 2022/23 homelessness services were provided with 2900.

All of these problems come back to the ongoing shortage in affordable housing in Scotland generally – another crisis that seems to be accepted and tolerated with no sense of urgency to address.

In my opinion, we’ve got our priorities all wrong. Every other week we hear of the waste of large sums of public money whether through incompetence, misfortune or simply poor public service policy development or delivery.

One example of this is the failed Deposit Return Scheme – £86m wasted, but the total bill could reach much higher if compensation has to be paid out.

The Scottish Government’s improvements in homelessness law have been excellent but they need funded as a matter of urgency.