OPINION POLLS continue to show that immigration is a top three issue for the public. Yet you wouldn’t believe it if you listen to our Scottish political class who consistently make claims about Scotland being more welcoming than elsewhere in the UK.
One of the biggest examples of a problem area is in housing. Here in Edinburgh the left-wing politicians who espouse increased immigration, and welcome it even if that’s migration by illegal means, also shout about a “Housing Emergency”.
Let me put this in context. We have over six thousand households in temporary homeless accommodation. About 1,100 of those originated from outside the city. People are pulled in following a Scottish Government decision not to require a “local connection” when declaring yourself homeless.
This drags people to bigger cities from across Scotland and it also brings single young men who are not eligible for emergency housing in the rest of the UK.
You might take a view that it is wrong that they are not eligible for that support elsewhere. However, having a far more generous system creates a pull factor. And as these people to come to our city without any safeguards and the additional funding to support them, there are unintended consequences.
The number of homeless cases from outside Edinburgh has grown by 287 per cent since April 2024. Almost three quarters of those are asylum/refugee cases who were given leave to remain while elsewhere in the UK.
I don’t blame the migrants. If you came to the UK and had no money but were told you could stay in the country, you’d look for housing. If you were then told you wouldn’t be housed where you were staying in England it’s a perfectly natural reaction to come to Scotland where the authorities must accommodate you.
In February 2025 the City of Edinburgh Council published a paper explaining some of the changes in homelessness demographics in the last decade, including the early months of that 287 per cent surge since April 2024. This hasn’t been updated since but contains telling information.
Comparing presentations with 2014/15 it shows a significant increase in presentations from males and single person households. British households made up 79 per cent of presentations in 2014/15 but now only make up 55 per cent. European households have remained steady at around 15 per cent. Other nationals have, however, surged from 6.5 per cent to 29.7 per cent.
The paper goes on to say that between July 2023, when the UK government introduced an accelerated asylum scheme, at the end of December 2024, Edinburgh received 546 homelessness applications from recent refugee households. Of those, only 45 had been granted leave to remain in Edinburgh. The other 501 came from outwith the city, with 103 from elsewhere in Scotland, 325 from England, 58 from Northern Ireland and even 15 from Wales – a self-proclaimed “nation of sanctuary”.
This matters because a chunk of our emergency accommodation is in unsuitable B&Bs which currently hold about 1,000 households where people can languish for years. It is also estimated that on 12 January we had 89 individuals sleeping rough. Combined, this is almost exactly the number of homelessness cases from outside Edinburgh.
Overall, I must conclude that the Council is doing a reasonable job of preventing homelessness with advice and assistance to households at risk to help them maintain tenancies or find new accommodation.
Even with a growing population and a surge of migrant applications the number of new presentations for homelessness has dropped slightly in the last decade. The 3,783 who presented in 2024/25 is down 200 on the previous year and is below the 4,020 of ten years ago. It is also well below the peak of 5,512 in 2006/07 when we last had two Labour governments in Edinburgh and London.
The Scottish Government is imposing two very generous policies on the Council under the guise of “human rights” but not helping with the financial burden. This imposes a tragic burden on some homeless individuals, both local and from further afield. They end up in unsuitable accommodation or worse sleeping rough. Something that the figures show needn’t be happening if the Council was only addressing local homelessness cases. Indeed, the numbers in suitable temporary accommodation would likely be falling too.
Building housing takes time and it is fundamentally true that we are not building enough for a growing population – regardless of tenure. But ignoring public concerns about housing, community safety and welfare largesse at the same time only breeds resentment.
If the Scottish Government is so insistent on being generous it must fund the Council to meet the aspirations it sets and prevent the tragic unintended consequences it creates.
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