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Again, it very much comes down to local circumstances, but I will be happy to come back to you on that point.

Yes, thank you, convener.

I thank the committee for the further opportunity to provide assurance on the Housing (Scotland) Bill. I understand that you have agreed with the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee that you will provide the committee with your stage 1 report shortly, and I am grateful for your time today.

In my evidence to this committee on 27 June, I highlighted key measures in part 5 of the bill on homelessness prevention duties. These are also an essential part of addressing the housing emergency, as preventing homelessness and supporting tenancies to be sustained both lead to less pressure on housing supply. I also emphasised the engagement with delivery partners that we continue to undertake to ensure that positive and sustained change is delivered.

With its renewed focus on prevention, the legislation as introduced builds on the strong housing rights that already exist for people who are homeless in Scotland. Those preventative measures have been shaped by significant stakeholder engagement since 2020, including the recommendations of the prevention review group, a public consultation and direct engagement with key organisations by both officials and ministers.

However, the introduction of the bill was never intended to signal the end of that journey. My officials and I continue to work collaboratively with stakeholders as we develop our approach to delivering those duties, in order to harness the opportunity to prevent and end homelessness, and to make a significant contribution to eradicating child poverty.

As I set out in my recent letter to the committee, the focus is now on plans for effective implementation of the new duties and driving forward cultural change towards shared public responsibility and earlier intervention. We hope that Parliament will support that approach.

Since we were last together, we have engaged with delivery partners on how the ask and act proposals in the bill could function in practice, and with social landlords on the domestic abuse measures. That engagement has made clear how much positive practice already exists, which we can build on, and that successful prevention is not always about doing more but about doing things differently. Getting early intervention right will avoid someone having to retell their story multiple times to service providers; it will mean that people get help faster; and it will make more effective use of public resources. It is vital investment.

In that way, shared public responsibility and early intervention also have the potential to deliver financial savings. Critically, that approach also benefits our future health, equality and prosperity. The new duties aim to strengthen consistency and transparency around prevention activity across Scotland through legislative change and to ensure that that happens at an earlier stage, while maintaining person-centred, flexible approaches to addressing the needs of individuals and families.

Clear messages are emerging from our recent engagement on our ambitious provisions to rebalance the whole-systems approach holistically around homelessness prevention, and I am keen that the next stage of engagement has a particular focus on how to foster partnerships and co-operation between relevant bodies, as outlined in the bill, in order to build on the strong rights that already exist in Scotland and to move us closer to our prevention aim. We will continue to work collaboratively with stakeholders on strong guidance that is tailored to different settings and builds on existing good practice; on clear expectations and a joint case for the benefits of cultural change to support prevention; on the resourcing, which I am clear is necessary to make the duties a success; and on the appropriate timescales for implementation.

As part of that next phase, I will be hosting an online event in October to bring together a wide range of stakeholders, including relevant bodies and local authorities. The aim of that event is to identify how we can support the co-operation required to implement each of the homelessness prevention duties and provisions in the bill. The committee is, of course, welcome to attend the event to hear the thoughts of stakeholders at first hand.

Overall, our homelessness prevention duties will help to avoid the trauma and disruption to people’s lives that homelessness causes. They are critical to our vision to end homelessness in the longer term.

I and my officials look forward to answering any questions that members might have on the bill.

I will ask Laura McMahon whether that is practical from a legislative or legal point of view. I appreciate the point that you are making, and I would be comfortable with that.

I have met Scottish Women’s Aid regularly, and that has been discussed. It is incredibly important. You gave a couple of examples. One involved the Scottish Prison Service, which is a key stakeholder. We have discussed the issue with it and will develop it further together. Again, we are trying to build on best practice. We heard a couple of examples in which some prisons are probably further ahead than others. A key thing that was talked about was consistency. That is an important point.

More broadly, when it comes to how we deal with domestic abuse, in my time as a councillor—which you were, too, Ms McNair—I saw how that was handled. It is partly about making sure that we are properly resourced—and a part of that is about training. Having dealt with it and seen it at first hand through people with lived experience, I can say that sometimes it depended on who they ended up with in the local authority. If somebody had the necessary training, they knew how to deal with the situation and had the necessary ability, which comes back to how to deal with somebody who is in trauma. Alternatively, if somebody had not been trained, that could actually make the situation worse.

One thing to talk about is how to make sure that victims are aware through the Scottish Prison Service, local authorities, the NHS or women’s aid organisations, for example. Again, it is about trying to strengthen what is already there. I have seen examples in which the council has dealt with the situation very well, and that helps the person quite quickly. However, if the situation is not dealt with, as you will have seen, it can result in more trauma.

Again, it is about having a more focused and more holistic approach. Why does it happen that nobody passes on the information from the SPS, the NHS, Scottish Women’s Aid or the local authority? If it is not handled well, it makes the situation worse.

Discussions with local authorities are on-going. The issue was also raised in the discussions that we had with the 140 practitioners that I mentioned. If you can attend our event in October, that point can be raised. However, it has been discussed within local authorities, within the Scottish Prison Service and with Scottish Women’s Aid.

Again, it is about building on what is already there. The legislation will give a duty to ensure that we pick up on that. We cannot have the inconsistency that we have at the moment.

Good. Thank you.

Do you mean in terms of—

There are a number of things in that. I will come on to the bill in a second. The policy that the legislation is wrapped around is important. We met COSLA last week and talked about funding for additional acquisitions. At that stage, for the ability to look at acquisitions and voids, it was agreed to focus on the local authorities that are under more pressure than others at the moment.

The housing to 2040 strategy group also met a couple of weeks ago, and key things that we said were, first, that we should try to make more properties available and, secondly, that there should be a real focus on how we get children, specifically, out of temporary accommodation as soon as possible. That is the supply side of how we deal with the issue.

Last week, I met Glasgow City Council. It probably has the biggest issue at the moment, so we talked about how to bring more supply. Again, there are voids, acquisitions, allocation policies and so on.

A key thing in the legislation is the holistic approach. It comes back to being aware between the two-month period and the six-month period. Having been a councillor, you will know that two months is not enough for someone who presents as potentially homeless. We need that longer period. That part of the legislation on its own—just trying to identify what the risk could be—is really important.

As we know, the Crisis homelessness monitor talked about the local housing allowance as one of the two biggest drivers of the rise in homelessness, particularly in families with children. I will pick that up with my United Kingdom Government equivalent, as I tried to do previously. It is also about the level of universal credit and dealing with poverty. Many people who arrive in that situation are in poverty, so that six-monthly approach is incredibly important. If there is necessary financial help that they can get, that is really important.

Again, we need a holistic approach from local authorities and from, for example, the NHS or link workers. One of the key things at the NHS level is the experience of link workers. I met link workers in Edinburgh six or seven months ago. One of the biggest drivers for people getting into that situation in Edinburgh is poverty, so it is about trying to identify the link workers and their role in the broader NHS to pass people on to get financial advice and so on that picks up on the key issues.

The six-monthly approach is incredibly important. It is about engaging with the NHS on its approach to identifying problems at an early stage. A fifth to a quarter of women who end up in homelessness do so because of domestic abuse, so it is also about engaging with the likes of Women’s Aid. If people are in hospital, it is about identifying that. If somebody has suffered domestic abuse, they might end up in hospital. How do we pick up on that? There are a number of occasions when we can.

The real issue comes back to that holistic approach and dealing with it at a much earlier stage. That is the incredibly important part of the issue. It also comes back to Roz McCall’s point about making sure that we are dealing with homelessness not just in urban settings but in rural settings. Early engagement and the holistic approach that the bill is pushing is incredibly important.

The prisons inspectorate would look at the SHORE standards with regard to specific points around the prisons.

We are in discussions with the Scottish Housing Regulator about what that scrutiny looks like, and building on that is one of the key things. You are right that there is no point in just saying that we are trying to get improvement. How do we evaluate that? How do we monitor that? That is the important part. For example, we talked with the Prison Service about remand prisoners. What does it need to do when prisoners are released early? What do we do about that? Again, some of that is about what the prisons inspectorate does and how we work with the housing regulator. We are in discussion with them about what happens at that particular moment. I will maybe ask Catriona MacKean or Matt Howarth to comment on that particular point. We are engaging with the housing regulator to ask how we evaluate and monitor that.

Again, some of the key things will be about getting figures from the local authorities and engaging with them on a local basis about how important that is. We are in discussion with the housing regulator to make sure that the standards that we expect—and how we measure and evaluate them—will be part of the discussions going forward.

I do not know whether Catriona MacKean or Matt Howarth have anything to add on that.

You will know from dealing with people when they arrive at that point that nobody wants to be homeless. Some people arrive there very quickly for various reasons. One of the key aspects of the wider discussions that we have had with the likes of the Scottish Prison Service is how we deal with prisoners who are leaving prison. If we do not deal with that, particularly for remand prisoners, they will end up sleeping on a friend’s couch or sleeping rough. One of the key things is to avoid that situation.

It is also about trying to engage with the NHS at a local level. It is not so much about discussing stigma as it is about making sure that, in dealing with people who are at that point, we give them the respect that they deserve, which comes back to the crux of the matter. We cannot have people leaving prison and going to sleep on a friend’s couch or sleeping rough. That is why we are trying to deal with remand prisoners in a way that solves that issue by changing the period from two months to six months.

It is the same when it comes to domestic abuse. Women suffer stigma because of domestic abuse. If we identify potential homelessness in domestic abuse cases over six months rather than two months, that will allow us to deal with such situations more quickly and manage them in the best way possible. We talked about the fund to leave, which was brought in. We worked closely with Women’s Aid on giving women the ability to leave by providing them with funds. It is about building on that work and managing the situation rather than people getting into a position where they quickly become homeless. It is literally a crisis situation at that particular point. The stigma issue is dealt with as part of the whole thing. It is about trying to plan as much as possible, and moving from the two-month period to the six-month period, as well as the legal obligations, gives us the ability to do that.

We have had round-table meetings, so the subject has been discussed. We have had two or three of those, if I remember correctly. There has been direct involvement of landowners.