East Renfrewshire Council declares housing emergency amid rising homeless applications
A housing emergency has been declared in East Renfrewshire.
The local authority says a significant increase in homeless applications has had an impact on demand for housing in the area.
It points to a 53 per cent rise in applications since 2018.
As it stands, there are 350 households accepted as homeless and awaiting an offer of accommodation; almost 200 households are in temporary accommodation which includes those in bed and breakfast.
Despite the delivery of more than 470 new-build properties in six years, East Renfrewshire becomes the 12th local authority to declare a housing emergency while the Scottish Government did so in May.
Declaring the local emergency was unanimously agreed by councillors at a meeting of the full council on Wednesday.
Housing and environment convener, Councillor Danny Devlin, said: “Declaring a housing emergency isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly. The increase in homelessness over the past five years has continued and has grown at significantly higher rates than the national average.
“The situation is exacerbated here in East Renfrewshire as it remains an extremely popular place to live and the local housing market is not equipped to deal with this increase in demand. We’ve actions in place to work towards mitigating the pressures and will continue to work with partners to prioritise actions and develop plans to tackle the crisis over the coming months and years.”
Council officials insist they have doubled the number of temporary accommodation dwellings from around 60 in 2020 to 130 by redesignating some of its permanent general-needs stock.
It also says it has increased the percentage of lets to homeless households to 70 per cent for existing stock and 40 per cent for newbuild accommodation.
An additional £1 million has been made available from the capital reserves budget and it is proposed that this could now be used to purchase more housing units and/or newbuilds.
It comes before the proposed local housing strategy 2024-2029 will be presented to the council’s cabinet next month. It details actions the local authority will take over the next five years to address the problem.
However, the council says this will not mitigate the immediate emergency with leader Owen O’Donnell admitting: “Our declaration is now unavoidable.”
He added: “While we’ve made progress in increasing our housing stock through nearly 480 new-build properties, it’s clear we can’t build our way out of this problem and that to have a substantial and systemic impact and to clear the backlog of presenting cases, significant investment in grant funding and associated borrowing across all tenures will be required.
“I’d like to thank staff within our housing service for their ongoing efforts in these difficult circumstances.
“Everyone deserves a place to call home and I want to assure our local community that we’ll do everything within our powers to mitigate the impacts on our ability to provide affordable and safe homes.”
He’s written to First Minister John Swinney expressing his disappointment that, as part of the programme for government announced last week, there was no explicit reversal of the £200m previously removed from the affordable housing supply programme.
Barrhead Housing CEO Lorna Wilson added: “Homelessness and the lack of affordable housing across the country is one of the greatest challenges of our time.
“East Renfrewshire faces a unique set of pressures and Barrhead Housing is absolutely committed to working closely and effectively with the council, Scottish Government and other partners to provide high-quality, energy-efficient modern homes to everyone who needs them.”
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