Community Planning Aberdeen board has agreed that the city’s participation in The Royal Foundation of The Prince and Princess of Wales Homewards Programme will provide significant opportunities to help address homelessness in the city.

Homewards sets out to deliver a five-year locally-led programme which will demonstrate that by working together it is possible to end homelessness: making it rare, brief, and unrepeated.

The board approved the development of a key objective (referred to as Stretch Outcome) to tackle the issues around homelessness and improvement aims for inclusion within the refreshed Local Outcome Improvement Plan.

Aberdeen City Council co-leader Councillor Christian Allard, chair of the Community Planning Aberdeen board, said: “Homelessness is something that can happen to any one of us. We know that over the past 15 years, 75% of people presenting as homeless have no prior homelessness experience.

“Prevention and Early Intervention are key to reducing the likelihood of homelessness and the associated issues, which is why I attended the Homewards Aberdeen event, held in the city this month.

“Community Planning Partnership’s vision is for Aberdeen to be a place where all people can prosper regardless of their background or circumstance.”

Aberdeen, the only Scottish city to be selected to be part of Homewards, was determined by the programme’s National Expert Panel to have strong relationships and trust across both statutory agencies and the voluntary sector, from senior leaders down to frontline staff, where data sharing processes and co-location are already in place.

Homewards will build upon these excellent foundations, and support Aberdeen to form a new local coalition of committed people, organisations and businesses, who will work together to create and deliver an action plan to end homelessness in their areas.

Over the next five years, Aberdeen will have access to expertise from across the UK and beyond, up to £500,000 of flexible seed funding, and will be supported to bring in new partners, new ideas and deliver an initial innovative housing project, targeting a specific cohort, that will test new ways to unlock homes at scale.

In Aberdeen, the reasons for homelessness given by the applicant over the last four years were:

• 55% of homeless presentations have been from Parental/Family Home/Relatives or Friends/Partners home and 45% from a tenancy.
• 8% of presentations have been due to actions by landlords in the private sector, 6% due to terminations and 3% due to terminations for arrears.
• 45% of presentations are because people have been asked to leave or a non-violent dispute within the home.

Community Planning Aberdeen is the local partnership of public, private and third-sector organisations and communities working together to improve people’s lives across the city through the Local Outcome Improvement Plan.

Since its launch in 2016, the 10-year plan has seen significant improvements through short, medium and long-term initiatives across the key themes of economy, people, place and community.

Community Planning Aberdeen consists of Aberdeen City Council, ACVO (Aberdeen Council for Voluntary Organisations), Aberdeen Civic Forum, Active Aberdeen Partnership, Aberdeen City Health and Social Care Partnership, NHS Grampian, North East Scotland College, Police Scotland, Skills Development Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, NESTRANS, Scottish Fire & Rescue Service, Robert Gordon University Aberdeen and the University of Aberdeen.

A refreshed Plan and Locality Plans will be presented to the Community Planning Aberdeen board in April 2024.