Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast with me, Kieran Findlay, the editor of Scottish Housing News and former Dundee housing convenor, Jimmy Black.

In today’s episode, we are returning to the subject of homelessness with two charities that between them have been operating in Scotland for almost 350 years and have both recently published reports which tell us about the current state of homelessness in Scotland and where efforts to tackle it can be improved.

Jimmy Black

Helen Murdoch is the Salvation Army’s assistant director for homelessness services in Scotland and Janet Haugh is the chief executive at Right There.

So, Janet, we’ll start with you. Welcome to the podcast. Can you provide a brief history of the Right There charity established, I believe, in another guise way back in 1824?

Janet Haugh

Yes, I can. Thank you. And thanks very much for having me on. So, yes, Right There was founded in 1824, some 200 years ago, so we’re celebrating our bicentenary this year, and it was founded by an evangelist here in Glasgow where I’m sitting just now, David Naismith, who founded the charity in response to inequalities he was witnessing in the city. And we were a lifeline for young men, it was founded to support young men in the city. And we later became part of the YMCA movement, we were YMCA Glasgow for over 160 years or thereabouts.

Over the last few years, we’ve been looking at the future and we rebranded and set a new strategy and we’re now called Right There. And we’re delighted to be celebrating our bicentenary. Over those 200 years, the principles have remained the same. It’s always been about supporting people who are suffering from inequality, largely people who are marginalised in communities.

So we’ve worked through two world wars, the Great Depression, social inequalities, and we’ve witnessed all of that. And throughout that whole time, the reason our charity is called Right There is we’ve been right there for people and we want to be supporting them to be the best versions of themselves and get the outcomes they’re seeking for themselves personally.

Jimmy Black

What was wrong with your other name, YPeople? Why didn’t that suit you?

Janet Haugh

So as I mentioned, we were part of the YMCA movement for 160 years and we were delighted to be part of that. We outgrew Glasgow, we were YMCA Glasgow and we outgrew that and at the time, it was before my time with the charity, but at the time the decision was made to keep the Y because there was association with the Y but rather than men to make it people because we were supporting so many people, male, female, children, families. So we kept it as YPeople.

But a few years ago when I come into the organisation and through Covid actually we took the opportunity to review the work we were doing and think about the strategy going forward. And it was through that that speaking to people we support, our staff, our colleagues, even partners that we worked with, no one knew why we were called YPeople. No one really understood what the name meant. And there was an association with young people that wasn’t necessarily reflective of who we were supporting.

So we actually did a piece of work with again, people we support, staff, and the thing that came out repeatedly was this feeling that we’re always there for people, that we’re right there with them. We walk alongside people. And that was the name that emerged. So we’re now called Right There, which we’re delighted about. For the next 200 years, hopefully, we hope to be right there.

Jimmy Black

So Covid actually gave you an opportunity to kind of stop and take stock and change things around a little bit.

Janet Haugh

It absolutely did, yeah.

Jimmy Black

I don’t know if you do, but how do you categorise the people that you work with? mean, some charities work with homeless people, some charities work with people who require care. How do you describe the people that you work with?

Janet Haugh

That’s a really interesting question and again, something that came out really strongly when we were doing that exercise. So it was a year long piece of work where we really engaged with, as I said, people we support, staff, a number of people, stakeholders and we were asking lots of questions about who we were working with. We had multiple programmes across the whole of Scotland and if you spoke to people in our teams and asked them what’s the purpose of the organisation, some people would say it’s to prevent homelessness, some people would say it’s to end homelessness, some people would not mention homelessness at all.

So it became quite apparent that there was different views of the people we were working with. Again, what came out really strongly from everybody is that we don’t judge anybody coming into the organisation and we try hard not to categorise anybody. And we would never put a label on a person. We would never talk about a homeless person. It’s a person who’s experiencing homelessness, if that’s what’s happening to them at that time. We really try hard to not put labels on anybody.

So in terms of the people we are supporting, it’s people that are going through really difficult times. That could be experiencing homelessness. It could be a young person who’s going through a difficult time in the family or at school. They would benefit from mentoring or coaching or some of the other programmes that we offer. But fundamentally, the thread that has emerged most strongly is we talk about preventing homelessness and preventing people becoming separated from the people they love. Because if we’re working with young people who are either in care or at risk of going into care, we’re trying to prevent that from happening in the future. We’ve got a real focus on prevention where we can.

And that’s also about preventing those people who are experiencing homelessness to try and prevent them having to come into homelessness services again, if we can.

Kieran Findlay

Thanks for that, Janet. Helen, welcome to the podcast also. We’ll get to the Salvation Army’s Breaking The Cycle report shortly. But when I was at the report launch at Holyrood, I was struck by the various services provided by the charity. Is that quite common that while people in Scotland and across the UK will recognise the name Salvation Army, they might not necessarily be aware of the breadth of support that it offers?

Helen Murdoch

Yes, I would say it is that people will have different associations with the Salvation Army and they’ll tend not to recognise the scope and the breadth of the work that goes on. And actually some of that work is really similar to the work that William Roof started back in 1865. Labour exchanges, he started a missing persons department back then, as well as homes for people who needed homes and houses, offering better conditions to live in, a modern slavery department, Salvation Army is first and foremost a church and most people will recognise that element of the work but may not be aware of the scope and breadth of the social work services.

Kieran Findlay

Breaking the Cycle, the report itself is recommending urgent collection of data on the number of people rough sleeping, along with the cause of death data for anyone who dies while living in temporary accommodation. In its research, the charity found that at least 600 people died in temporary accommodation since 2019, but just one third of Scottish councils record this data.

Why is that the case? Why don’t more local authorities record this information?

Helen Murdoch

We did send out questionnaires to local authorities asking the question. There was an array of responses that came back and obviously we got some information that helped us put the report together. And I think the ask for us is that everybody has a consistent approach to this in order that we can look at patterns and trends and that we can identify what services people really need in order to support them with the challenges that they are currently experiencing.

So the ask is around everybody collecting that information so that we can understand the scale and the scope of the challenges, which we currently don’t really have a big picture on.

Jimmy Black

Does the research that you did suggest that people are more likely to die in certain types of temporary accommodation?

Helen Murdoch

I don’t know that the research went that far and we didn’t compare in terms of comparison between types of services, general population. We looked at numbers and I suppose that would be an interesting follow-up to look at that. What we do know from our own services are that people, we experienced significantly high number of people losing their lives in outreach in Housing First services.

Kieran Findlay

On Housing First and its approach, the report suggested it can actually do more harm than good because giving vulnerable people tenancies without the correct level of support doesn’t work. Can you tell us more about that?

Helen Murdoch

The ethos behind Housing First is providing the person with that home. And first and foremost, it’s about giving someone the right home, so a home that they’ve chosen in an area that they’ve identified where they may have networks and links, a place that they can really identify with, feel safe and settle into. So that’s the first kind of key area in Housing First is an area where someone can really feel like they fit. That might be family connections, it might be because they lived there before, it might be because they like that area, it might be because it’s near services that they use or places they go.

That is first platform for an individual to feel that they are in a place where they can feel safe and secure, and where they can start to look at the challenges that they are currently experiencing and how and if they want to address them. The main focus of Housing First is ensuring that that individual is provided with the wraparound support that they require. That is about providers all working together to ensure that individual and all the challenges that they’re currently experiencing, that we work together to help that person work through those challenges at their pace, at their choice.

Kieran Findlay

Janet, Right There has published its own report. It was an impact report which measured the saving to the public purse as a result of the support that it provides to people facing or experiencing homelessness.

What were the report’s conclusions? What did you find out?

Janet Haugh

Again, for a long time, we’ve anecdotally spoken about the impact we have on people’s lives and we’ve spoken about the impact that has on the public purse. Unfortunately within the charity sector, we see a lot of competition for funding, it’s a really difficult time for public sector in terms of public sector finances and what we wanted to do was put some evidence around that and actually try to equate the level of funding, public funding that’s gone into us as a charity, but actually the outcomes we’re delivering.

And the report took a number, again it did a lot of research, a lot of speaking to the people we support to understand the real impact we’re having every single day from those small interactions, simple things that you don’t think about, but how as Helen’s describing there, it’s about the person, it’s about their journey and when they’re ready for things to happen and to make the difference for them.

The research looked at a number of people we support, created the story, their journey of support and the impact that was having on them. And the conclusion was that if you rolled that out to the almost 4,000 people we support every year, we were able to demonstrate that the outcome for the public purse is that we’re feeding back, we’re paying back into the public purse £308 million every single year. And that’s through savings in accommodation, savings in the criminal justice system, economic savings, if we are helping someone to find a job, go into education, those savings that are made that are not spent for not costing the public sector this amount of money because we’re preventing things happening in people’s lives and allowing them to forge forward their own way forward and make their own decisions. So, £308 million.

Jimmy Black

I was going to say that as a former councillor, people would come to us and say, we’re saving you lots of money. And the immediate reaction was, well, where is it then? Where’s that money gone? And the health service, for example, will eat everything that you save in terms of care. So if housing saves people getting ill, then somehow or other the health service, you’ll never get that money back out of them because their demands are just so huge. How can you turn that mitigation, that amount of money that you save a local authority or the government, how can you actually get that back into more services for homeless people, more care, more support, rather than see it disappear into the big government pot?

Janet Haugh

Again, unfortunately, I don’t think I can influence that, but we are trying to influence it because it is a really robust piece of work that’s been done. It was conducted by an organisation called Sonnet Advisory & Impact, based in London, and again spoke to lots of people. It’s well researched, it’s a lengthy document, it’s over 100 pages, with a lot of analysis behind it and research behind it.

And the reason for doing that is because we’ve done this for Right There, but at our launch, again, delighted Helen was there along with other third sector providers, if you’d extrapolate this out across the third sector, if you imagine the impact that we’re having on the public purse, and I don’t think one charity is going to lead to the change that’s needed. But I think if they collectively raise the voice of the third sector and the impact we’re having, my hope is that we can start to direct funds and help the public sector consider where to direct funds. We all know, as you’re describing, Jimmy, that the funding is used, the demand for services is so high. But if we don’t start looking at prevention, then it’s just going to be a cycle forever.

So the prevention of homelessness is trying to demonstrate that if we could invest, I don’t know, £500,000 in a supported accommodation service that changes the lives of 20 people. That’s going to save in the long run a lot of money, but we also know that it’s really difficult for local authorities, NHS and others to think beyond a short-term funding cycle. But we absolutely want to raise that dialogue and the debate around we need to change to happen. We can’t just keep putting money into services to deal with the outcomes that people are experiencing. And we can prevent them if they can help prevent them, that’s what we’re seeking to do.

Helen Murdoch

Likewise, could I add in about the cost effectiveness of Housing First in terms of similar picture that there’s lots of research being done in terms of savings to the criminal justice system, health systems, or people entering Housing First, something we do in our own services as well. We look at how often some these may be presented at A&E prior to accessing the service, how often they’ve spent the night in a prison cell. And actually, after three, six months in their accommodation with wraparound support, that individual is attending scheduled appointments. So every appointment missed is a charge to NHS, every day spent in A&E, every unscheduled visit, every night in a prison cell. And it’s shown that Housing First has got significant impact across various budgets.

And there’s a big push and one of the Breaking the Cycle recommendations is around and the Salvation Army has been working with their addiction services to get the push towards looking at different challenges as a public health issue and not a criminal justice issue. And actually all of these are people issues. And how can we pull all these people budgets together in order to help people transform their lives.

Janet Haugh

Absolutely and again, if I could come in to build on that. Very, very similar. The findings also, and it wasn’t from us, it was from the person who conducted the research. That was his takeaway, similar to what Helen’s describing. It was the holistic approach. It wasn’t looking at, you’ve got supported accommodation here and you’ve got counselling here and you’ve got, it was looking at the wraparound support that’s been offered to someone for where they are in their journey. It’s up to, it’s what’s best for them at a given point in time.

I know you’ve spoken about Housing First already. Within Right There, we talk a lot about, we’ve got a programme called, it’s the People First approach. That’s our approach to delivery. Everything’s about people first. It’s about relationship building. It’s about understanding the needs of an individual. And that’s what’s come out, similar to the analysis for Housing First. If you address the individual’s needs, you’re going to get the best possible outcomes.

Jimmy Black

What I was going to say is that people don’t look beyond their own budgets in terms of councils don’t look beyond their budget. They’re not going to give any other money to the NHS and the NHS aren’t going to give any of their money to the IJB, the integrated joint board and so on. It all goes around in a circle. And it’s up to politicians to sort that out, isn’t it? It’s something that they need to do anyway.

Kieran Findlay

Janet, Helen in her report, The Breaking the Cycle, is calling for data to be collected and to be used to kind of generate a plan going forward. But I noticed in your foreword to the Right There impact report that the charity is going to be developing a plan that will lead to, you said, a cultural shift away from gathering data to measuring the things that matter.

What did you mean by that?

Janet Haugh

So clearly we need data, we all need data and it’s really, really important. We need evidence to justify and lead the right decision making. But what I meant by that comment was we want to talk about outcomes. So it’s not about outputs. So it’s not to say, we supported 20 people today. Did we support them well? Did they deliver what they were requiring today? So it’s about outcomes and trying to focus on that, which ultimately leads to the impact.

So it’s about doing the right thing. It’s about knowing that the things we are doing every day when we’re supporting people are actually leading to the outcomes that they’re seeking. And we have a theory of change which demonstrates the changes we are hoping to see in people’s lives that will ultimately help us achieve our vision of a world where everyone has an equal chance to create a safe and supportive place to call home.

And that’s things like it’s about how they feel. It’s has our work helped someone feel loved? Has our work helped someone feel supported and secure and safe and respected? That’s the journey we hope people go on and that’s what we want to be able to measure more. That’s the outcomes we’re seeking to measure. So this report, we were delighted to do it and it’s a snapshot to help us celebrate our 200 years. But we actually want to conduct a five year, potentially longer, impact assessment that truly looks underneath the stats. We need the data first, but then looking underneath that to see what actually the outcomes were delivering for people.

Jimmy Black

Helen, getting back to the Breaking the Cycle report, there’s a number of recommendations. Is it seven recommendations that you’re putting forward to government? Tell us about those.

Helen Murdoch

So the recommendations are asking local authorities to analyse the cause of death for anyone who dies in temp accommodation and including Housing First tenancies. And this is about us, as I said previously, about being able to review the patterns and trends, being able to understand some of the challenges and experiences and local contexts so that we can help identify how a locality needs to be resourced to support the people who are in that locality.

We’re looking at the recording of rough sleeping and a kind of similar recording system that happens in London, the CHAIN system, so that we can really understand that rough sleeping population. And this is back to what Janet was talking about around prevention. We need to understand, we’re looking at both ends of the spectrum here, analysing the cause of death, analysing the population who are rough sleeping, so that we can really understand the people that are on the periphery and people who have sadly passed away, we can understand the challenges and the context that they are both living in and experiencing.

We are asking and calling for local authorities, the Scottish Government, and health and social care partnerships to work together to ensure that there is alcohol and mental health support available evenings and weekends in all the local authority areas. And perhaps one of the options that we’ve suggested in the recommendations is to look at a one-stop hub for drug and alcohol support, but just something that provides that out-of-hours provision, which the report identified was something that people who use services and people who work in services found to be significantly lacking.

Again, as we were talking about this kind of where people see drug and alcohol challenges sit, we are calling for drug and alcohol policy to be treated predominantly as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice issue.

We’re also asking the people who in temporary accommodation to be prioritised in receiving specialist support or substance use and mental health. The people who are using services that we know are furthest away from provision, we find some way of prioritising their challenges and their needs to help them progress.

Again, Housing First tenants, we know that is a proven model. The research shows it’s evidence-based, the outcomes it can achieve if we resource it. So we’re asking that Housing First tenants be prioritised into receiving specialist support for substance use and mental health. And so we’re calling for Housing First tenants to be passported into specialist services when they need it so that we can see and people in Housing First can realise the real benefit of that model of provision.

The last policy call is that no individual, especially if their experience in homelessness should be denied mental health support on a basis that they’re using drugs or consuming alcohol.

Jimmy Black

Mark Griffin is going to take a couple of the recommendations forward apparently to the housing service.

Kieran Findlay

Yeah it was specifically the recording of data regarding rough sleepers and then the cause of death of anyone who dies in temporary accommodation or Housing First.

Helen Murdoch

Yeah so we had a great conversation at the launch of the report and Mark Griffin I think was quite surprised by some of the findings around an understanding of who was recording the data and who wasn’t recording the data. So really interested in kind of getting behind that. I think looking at some of the policy currently exists and actually what does that policy say and what scope is there within current policy to work with local authorities to help them gather this data and actually looking at what kind of data do we really need to help us ensure that we’ve got the correct service provision in place for people who are experiencing the most significant challenges.

We’ve had great support. So we’ve had, even like all our partners, so we went along to Right There’s launch and it was, there was a mention there from at the time, Housing Minister Paul McLennan mentioned Salvation Army’s report. There’s been a real recognition, which has been really encouraging from different partners and stakeholders who were in attendance on the day and really getting behind the calls.

I think collectively, as a group of providers in this area, we’ve all got the same asks. And I think what Janet was saying is that we recognise that we all want to do this in collaboration with the Scottish Parliament with government, so we all want to work together to achieve these, to make these changes. And I think we’re all, we’ve all got a different part of the jigsaw, we’re all bringing that to the table. And I truly believe that, you know, everybody’s coming together, we’re all highlighting concerns and challenges and some of these concerns and challenges appear new to people and some of it’s a misunderstanding, some of it’s like, actually we’ve got legislation there that could really make some of those changes and help us realise some of those changes.

So I think as a group of providers and stakeholders and alongside Scottish Parliament, I really think that we can get some traction in some of this because it certainly feels like we are all on the same page.

Kieran Findlay

So Janet, do you believe that there is this collective movement of homelessness organisations in Scotland?

Janet Haugh

So you mentioned Homeless Network Scotland there and particularly through Covid. And again, Covid was a great experience. It was a traumatic experience for many and obviously lots of lives lost, but in terms of as a sector and as a third sector provider responding to that and the goodwill we found in people and the will to collaborate more effectively to actually make decisions more quickly.

So there was a real drive and momentum created then and Homeless Network Scotland did step in at that point and really helped coordinate a response across the homeless sector and that’s continuing to a certain extent but I think we’ve all witnessed that having come out of momentum perhaps has slowed ever so slightly and perhaps a kind of movement back to the way things were done previously so the decision making maybe going back to a bit slower decision making or again due process having to be done which we all understand through Covid there was a real kind of charge to say we need to get things done, we need to think about doing things differently and that’s perhaps slowed it ever so slightly.

But I do feel we have a voice, I do feel that we’ve got a lot of like-minded partners, again ourselves and the Salvation Army have worked together and we’ll hopefully continue to look for opportunities to work together in the future. And more than that how we can reinforce each other’s message because they’re not different messages.

We completely endorse all the recommendations from the Salvation Army report and our report is different, it’s a different take on it, it’s more about that prevention message about if you could redirect funds into this, this is how much you could save. But they’re both telling the same story and both seeking a better outcome for the people we’re supporting. So I think there’s a place for it but I think there’s more to be done and how do we bring in, as Helen was mentioning, the government and the local authorities because it shouldn’t be disjointed, it should be a collective voice working together.

Kieran Findlay

Helen, would you like to comment on that?

Helen Murdoch

Yeah, I agree with Janet on that one. I feel that there definitely is a movement of providers and I think Homeless Network Scotland has done a great job in facilitating that and actually like bringing us all together around the one table. I think through some of the interactions and events from Homeless Network Scotland and just through some of the context that we currently work in and have worked in, we as providers have found a strength in each other and actually have really found a way of identifying what it is that we all bring, what value we bring and actually really understanding the magnitude of that value when we all work together as one and the strength of that movement and the change that could bring.

I think Homeless Network Scotland are actually integral in kind of like really driving that and bringing us together. I acknowledge them for their part in this. But it certainly I feel as a provider that I’m part of something bigger. And as the Salvation Army, we are part of something bigger. We are part of a collection of providers. And it’s like there’s a provider’s voice coming to the table and there’s a staff member’s voice coming to the table. And there’s people who use our services voices coming to the table and really to influence some change.

Jimmy Black

On the 16th of July, we incorporated the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child into Scots law. And that emphasises children’s rights to adequate housing. Now, we’ve got homelessness laws as well, which say that local authorities have to provide accommodation, good temporary accommodation of a high standard. But that’s not happening as much as it should be at the moment. Will this new legislation, having the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Scots law, will that actually make any difference? How can we harness the power of all these laws that we have, great laws, to do something practical about homelessness on the ground?

Janet Haugh

Again, I’ll come in at that point. So, we’re delighted at the introduction of the UNCRC yesterday and it’s something that we’ve been working on for a number of months now, behind the scenes in preparation and preparing it, particularly through our children and family services, how we can implement that and really embed it across all of our programmes in terms of risk assessments and making sure that we’re considering that. When we bring it to the homelessness services, then as you’re highlighting, I think the current estimate is about 16,000 children in temporary accommodation across Scotland, or in homeless households across Scotland in temporary accommodation.

Clearly that’s not good for them, it’s not good for their families. I would hope that this legislation helps raise the voice of the young people and talks more about that impact. When we spoke previously about those 16,000 children, we equated that to, across a year, an average primary school class size is about 23 pupils. So that’s about two classrooms full of children every single day becoming homeless.

That’s awful in society, that’s awful to hear that that’s happening in Scotland. It’s also then thinking about the types of accommodation that they have been put into, so we talk a lot about temporary accommodation. So we offer temporary accommodation in Glasgow and we’re pleased to be able to do so because sometimes that’s the right thing for someone who needs somewhere to go to and we work hard to make sure it’s a quality and it’s something that is livable. It’s in private rented sector accommodation. So it’s a flat somewhere in the city and people can live in those on a temporary basis.

But what we’re obviously seeing is families and children being asked to live in hotels or bed and breakfasts or unsuitable accommodation. And we clearly need to do something about that. In terms of the legislation, as you’ve said already, we’ve got a lot of legislation, how is it implemented and how is it joined up? We don’t want lots of new legislation. We need the legislation that we have to be effective in delivering the outcomes that we’re seeking. Because there’s also the Housing Bill that’s currently out as well. Hopefully we’ll start to address some of this.

Jimmy Black

Helen.

Helen Murdoch

It does feel like there is a piece of work to be undertaken in terms of the legislation that is in existence and actually understanding the expectations around some of that legislation. What is being implemented? are the challenges around implementing at a local level and supporting locals to implement that? Because there’s a lot of good legislation there. So I think it feels like a good place to start to look at what we’ve got, see how we’re using what we’ve got and actually what does that look like in reality and what does that mean for an individual who is using the service? And if we’re not implementing it, why are we not and how can we support people to implement it?

Kieran Findlay

Yeah, thanks. I think we’ll round it up there for this episode. My thanks to Helen Murdoch from the Salvation Army. Thanks to Janet Haugh from right there. Thanks also to my co-host, Jimmy Black. I’m Kieran Findlay and we’ll be back with another episode in a couple of weeks.