There is “real misery and despair” behind West Lothian Council housing department performance figures, a senior SNP councillor said this week.
Depute SNP group leader Councillor Robert De Bold's criticism of performance came as housing officers revealed a surge in spending on homeless service costs to more than £688,000, in the last financial quarter of 2021/22.
Councillor De Bold pointed to a fall in the percentage of homeless applications being assessed in 28 days from 90% to “less than 50%”.
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The percentage in assessments completed with a 28 day time frame fell from 80.23% in the first quarter of last year (April to June ) to 48.29% in the first quarter of this year.
Councillor De Bold told the meeting of the Housing Services Policy Development and Scrutiny Panel (PDSP): “This matches with my own experience of constituency work, and my colleagues. Of all indicators here this one has the most direct human impact.
“There is real misery and despair caused by our current inability to assess applications as quickly as we could. We have numerous individuals, numerous families, who are passed from hotel to bed and breakfast on an alternately daily basis, very often where these places are located are not even within West Lothian.
“I would ask the Administration to treat this as a priority to try to rectify this situation as quickly as possible.”
Chairing the PDSP Labour’s Councillor George Paul said: “The Administration does treat it as a priority. To say otherwise would not be conducive to helping homeless people.”
Accompanying notes in the reports said: “A review of processes is being considered across the services to increase efficiencies and make better use of our current systems.”
And for the final quarter of the last financial year- January to April 2022- the notes painted a picture of staff shortages: “This has been a result of a number of long term sickness within the team coupled with other staff either leaving the council or moving onto other posts within the council. This has resulted in officers having to take on additional duties which has impacted on their case management.”
The report added: “Recruitment has been ongoing and staffing levels are slowly beginning to increase and it is hoped that the team will reach full capacity by the start of the next quarter. Refresher training has been provided to the team as part of the improvement plan. As capacity increases within the team it will allow officers to refocus on their case management and performance moving forward.”
On tackling homeless service costs, the Performance Report said: “The increased costs in property is a result of a higher number of applicants who require goods storage, and who are then staying longer in temporary accommodation.
“The spending on homeless service costs has dropped back below £200,000 in the first quarter of 2022/23.
“The service is considering the option of providing unfurnished temporary accommodation to reduce property and furniture costs along with charging or removing school transport; however this will require a change in policy and is not likely to be seen if approved until 2022/23.”
In October last year the Local Democracy Reporting Service reported West Lothian had the second highest number of homeless presentations in Scotland.
The council has developed a Rapid Rehousing Transition programme (RRTP) that was starting to stabilise the numbers and speed up the transition into stable tenancies when the Covid pandemic began.
The pandemic and lockdown led to a surge in homeless applications, by mainly young people.
In October 2021 the numbers in B&B were up 128 per cent between the end of June 2020 year and this, from 61 to 139. The length of time spent in B&B is up 227 per cent from 14 days to almost 49 days from June 2020 to June 2021.
Councillor De Bold said after this week's meeting: “West Lothian Council Housing is increasingly unable to deal with homeless applications and all councillors are experiencing a significant increase in constituents contacting them about being stuck in the emergency accommodation system for extended periods of time prior to being placed in temporary accommodation.
“Emergency accommodation is generally hotels or B&Bs and the homeless individuals or families can be located for limited periods of time in one place before being required to move to another. Emergency accommodation invariably does not have cooking facilities, which places significant additional costs on families who are already in difficult circumstances. This situation generally goes on for as long as they are not assessed by the Council (and very often for some time after).
“The Administration is not meeting their target 28 days to assess more than 50% of the time. Many of the human stories behind these statistics are genuinely upsetting and harrowing."
Councillor De Bold added: “George Paul’s response is not reflected in the facts – four quarters of continually falling performance.”
The report comes just a week after the Housing department revealed new plans for young people’s accommodation in a housing block for the centre of Livingston and changes to the buy-back scheme to boost housing stock for temporary accommodation.
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