In 2023, Edinburgh declared a housing emergency in response to rising homelessness, a growing reliance on temporary accommodation and a chronic shortage of affordable homes.
Like councils across the UK, our priority was to meet our statutory duties and support people with nowhere else to go.
But we also recognised we could not keep expanding crisis services indefinitely. If we wanted to reduce homelessness, we had to prevent more people from reaching crisis in the first place. Three principles have underpinned our approach.
First, make prevention everyone’s responsibility. Homelessness doesn’t begin when someone presents to a homelessness service. It is often the result of problems with housing, health, employment or poverty building over time.
That is why prevention must be embedded across the council and delivered with partners, rather than sitting within one service alone.
Second, use evidence to intervene earlier. We’ve invested in our data capability, trained more than 80 staff in data fundamentals and are working with the University of Edinburgh and NHS Lothian to better understand the pathways into homelessness.
Better evidence helps us identify where earlier intervention can make the greatest difference.
Third, reduce pressure on the crisis system while building for the future. Alongside our prevention work, we’ve brought hundreds of long-term empty council homes back into use, expanded access to permanent housing and worked to reduce reliance on temporary accommodation.
Edinburgh is making real progress, but there is still a long way to go.
There will always be pressures we cannot predict, but by embedding prevention across the council, we are better placed to respond to those challenges.
- This article draws on Derek McGowan’s chapter in ‘How to use evidence to end homelessness’, a collection of essays written by leading thinkers across different sectors about the need to shift from crisis response to prevention in homelessness. Commissioned by the Centre for Homelessness Impact, the book is available at bit.ly/3UIHpxs