Charities: no room for the homeless

By law, all local authorities have a duty to provide emergency temporary accommodation to anyone who suddenly becomes homeless, before adding them to the waiting list for a permanent place to live.

However, in the three months from April to the end of June this year, 99 of the 191 homeless people who presented themselves to the council for help were turned away - a direct breach of the council's legal responsibility. This occurred on 165 separate occasions, meaning many of those who sought assistance were turned away on more than one occasion. Seven in every ten failed applicants resorted to sleeping rough.

A similar picture emerged for July to September, which revealed that of the 200 people who approached Glasgow City Council's statutory homelessness service, 136 were told there was simply no accommodation for them. Again, many faced this rejection more than once and six in every ten failed applicants ended up sleeping on the streets.

The figures have brought into focus the shortage of emergency accommodation for the city's most vulnerable people, a problem about which housing charity Shelter says it has been pressing the council for more than two years - only to be stonewalled with "bureaucracy and managerial speak".

A spokesman for the charity told the Sunday Herald it confronted the council over the issue in September 2011 after being forced to threaten it with six judicial reviews - effectively taking the council to court - in a short space of time when it failed in it statutory duty of providing emergency accommodation to six homeless people. On each occasion when a judicial review was threatened, accommodation was found and the cases never came to court - a pattern also recognised by staff at the city's Govan Law Centre.

The closure of homeless units and the loss of specialist staff through cuts and redundancies have compounded the issue, but Shelter is understood to have been blindsided on discovering the full scale of the crisis uncovered by GHN, having been under the impression the ­situation was improving.

Shelter Scotland director Graeme Brown said: "It is a national scandal that Glasgow City Council's social work department has placed hundreds of vulnerable homeless people at risk by forcing them to sleep on the streets of Glasgow. Their refusal to fulfil their legal duty to place vulnerable people in temporary accommodation is shameful.

"It is simply no longer credible for senior staff in the council to hide behind bureaucracy and managerial-speak rather than face up to the problem that, through their inaction, they themselves have created."

Brown added that Shelter is also frustrated by the failure of the Scottish Housing Regulator to step in and protect the rights of homeless people in the city.

"Our worry is that a culture of complacency has been allowed to take hold unchallenged, where earlier action could have stopped the rot before more people were put at risk," he said.

Concerns about potential shortfalls in temporary accommodation were raised as far back as 2008 when the last of three all-male hostels, the 250-bed James Duncan House in Calton, closed after 30 years. Two other council-run, male-only hostels had closed earlier in the decade as part of the Scottish Government-funded hostel decommissioning programme, with city-centre hostel Robertson House shutting its doors in 2005, followed by Pete McCann House a year later.

In 2000, the Scottish Government announced £12 million of funding to scrap the city's "old, out-of-date" and larger hostels by March 2013 and relocate residents into the community or into smaller, supported accommodation. The move was welcomed by locals who felt the hostels - which typically housed vulnerable men with mental health issues and drug or alcohol problems - had become a hotbed for crime and anti-social behaviour. The Salvation Army-run Hope House in Bridgeton, a 96-bed mixed unit, has also closed in the last year.

However, for those at the sharp end trying to help the homeless, the closures have left a void that is pushing more people - particularly single men - on to the streets.

Garry Burns, a prevention-of-homelessness case worker at Govan Law Centre, said he was personally dealing with an average of four people a week who come to the centre for help after being turned away by the council.

He said: "It's been getting worse. Every single week we have to send letters to Glasgow City Council telling them that if they don't accommodate our client they will then be taken to a judicial review.

"Support workers who work with homeless people in the town are bringing them by the truckload to organisations like myself, and what's happening is that people with the letters are getting accommodation, while those who can't afford the bus fare to come to me or who didn't know about me aren't.

"It's basic maths: if you've got 100 people presenting for homeless accommodation that need it that night, and you've got 20 beds, then 80 of those people are going to have nowhere to go; a percentage of them won't have any family to go to so they are going to have to sleep on the streets.

"I don't think presentations to the city council have increased substantially over the last 10 years, it's the resources which have been cut back. They shut some of the larger-scale hostels in Glasgow. We've lost a lot of the emergency accommodation for drug users, alcoholics or people with mental health problems, but they didn't open up other capacity.

"The council generally say that they closed them down because they weren't 'fit for purpose' and in that they are absolutely correct, because the larger-scale hostels brought in a lot of drugs, crime, and exploitation. However, if you shut something and you don't increase capacity elsewhere … you end up with a shortfall."

Burns said 400 people had approached the City Mission's night shelters last winter after being turned away by the council.

He said: "I find it quite ­offensive that the housing minister has actually come out at a couple of conferences and said that nobody sleeps rough in Scotland. If I had been there I'd have been very bold and vocal in challenging that."

Maggie Brunjes, director of the GHN, said she felt presenting the numbers in black and white had been a watershed moment for the council and that there was now a "willingness to face up to" the situation. She added: "Thousands of people every year seek help from Glasgow City Council and are quickly and successfully accommodated."

Rough sleeping is the most visible symptom of Glasgow's "housing crunch". As well as the excess demand for emergency accommodation, there is not enough social housing to provide permanent accommodation to those who need it - it is estimated about 1300 new tenancies are required simply to clear existing waiting lists.

A shortage of social housing is by no means unique to Glasgow, but the city accounts for more than one in every five people presenting themselves as homeless in Scotland.

Brunjes said: "The bottom line is that the demand for social housing doesn't match what it holds available. And with this pressure comes a number of urgent tasks to ensure that everyone can exercise their right to a home.

"We need to open up other housing options, including in the private rented sector. We need investment in new homes and initiatives to bring empty homes back into use. And we need to better prevent homelessness and housing crises, the damage it causes individuals and families and the stress it puts on an already stressed housing market."

A spokeswoman for the Scottish Housing Regulator said: "The Regulator is aware of reported difficulties that service users are experiencing. We are engaging with the council on this matter to scrutinise further this aspect of its performance."

A Scottish Government spokesman said: "The Scottish Government, along with partners, promotes supporting people to remain in their own home as the best way to prevent homelessness. Importantly, the homelessness legislation provides a critical safety net for those who do become homeless. Since December 2012, all unintentionally homeless households have been legally entitled to settled accommodation."

A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said: "We fully acknowledge there are significant pressures currently impacting on our homelessness service. However, changes to housing benefit have stripped millions of pounds worth of funding out of the service and, for a number of reasons, there is an overall shortage of available, suitable accommodation in the city.

"The council is also completely dependent on registered social landlords to provide permanent accommodation for people affected by homelessness, but insufficient numbers of homes are being made available. A lack of permanent homes means homeless people get stuck in temporary accommodation and this then reduces the availability of places to stay in an emergency.

"We are currently in talks with housing providers to secure access to a substantial number of additional flats for the homelessness service and we continue to work with voluntary organisations to address homelessness issues."