Report: Current policies fail to ensure human right to an adequate home
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Housing is a human right and ensuring that every household has an adequate house is one of the key obligations on the Scottish Government and local councils but a new report published by the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers (ALACHO) has shown that not every household enjoys this right and current housing policies may not be doing enough to improve things.
The central estimate in the report, produced by Gillian Young of Newhaven Research Ltd, suggests that some 547,000 households fall short of being adequately housed for two or more reasons. This equates to 22% of all households. But without a clearer definition of what we mean by “adequate”, and much better statistics, the Scottish Government can’t be sure that it’s focusing on the right things or that its policies are having the right effect.
John Mills, ALACHO’s co-chair, said: “Our report, we are consciously calling it a ‘can opener’, is intended to move the debate on the human right to housing firmly into the field of policy, programmes and resource allocations. To explore what we mean by ‘adequate’; how it could be defined and the extent to which we can measure how well it is being met.
“What we found is that answering these questions is difficult because we simply lack the information we need to understand the situation. But based on what we do have, there are many families, owners as well as tenants, who may be living in homes that fall short of meeting their rights, including those with disabilities, those facing domestic abuse, and many families struggling to pay for their home each month or to keep themselves warm in winter.”
Professor Ken Gibb, director of the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, added: “This excellent and timely report reminds that it is not enough to mandate a human right to adequate housing; we need to define it, operationalise it and resource the capacity to address it.”
The impact of the pandemic on those already facing disadvantage has been widely noted. The recent report by the Social Renewal Board recommended that the Scottish Government should itself carry out an audit of the achievement of the human right to adequate housing. This report shows how urgent that task now is.
The full report and executive summary are available on the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) website here.
ALACHO will launch the report jointly with CaCHE today at 10.30am at an online session chaired by Professor Gibb.
Places can be booked through Eventbrite.
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