THE CITY OF EDINBURGH COUNCIL recently claimed a Daily Telegraph article had “inaccurately reported details about how we prioritise and allocate Council housing” and went on to say it was “addressing misinformation”.
The Telegraph article was headlined “Asylum seekers bumped to top of Council housing list” and pictured a tented village of rough sleepers outside the Council HQ.
But the only “inaccuracy” was down to the semantics of how we describe people who might be arriving in the UK with no visa or job lined up, perhaps but not necessarily on a small boat.
On a beach this person might be an “illegal immigrant”. Once immediately processed they usually become an “asylum seeker”. If they are given “leave to remain” they become a “refugee”.
People and the media often use these terms interchangeably, but politicians and government bureaucracies give specific meanings because different terms give different legal rights and this obscures policy outcomes.
What remains true is everything at the core of the article was correct – not in itself surprising when the story came from a Council committee report.
It is true that immigration is placing a strain on our local homelessness services with applications from recent arrivals increasing from 1 per cent to 16 per cent of cases in two years.
It is also true that the SNP’s deliberately generous policies give single young men priority homeless status – meaning the Council must house them. This does not happen in England, Wales or Northern Ireland. The SNP also ended “local connection”, so you don’t have to become homelessness in Edinburgh to claim help here. This latter policy has seen a further influx of non-refugee homelessness cases to the Capital from elsewhere in Scotland and the UK.
Both policies make our city a magnet, but we aren’t given any extra funding to address it.
All of this led the Council to do exactly what the Telegraph reported. It stopped taking housing applications from anyone other than those considered homeless, disabled or at risk of violence.
It is true the Telegraph said, inaccurately, “asylum seekers” rather than “refugees”. But does it matter if the result is their homeless status prioritises them over most of the 31,000 locals seeking Council accommodation for reasons other than immediate homelessness?
Let’s also not forget that a skilled immigrant with a visa and a job will find their own housing.
How do I know these Scottish Government policies are having a direct impact? Firstly, the rough sleeping in the Telegraph picture has become a regular feature as, even with expensive and inappropriate use of B&B accommodation, the Council regularly finds itself unable to accommodate people. Albeit there are a small few who need help but don’t trust the Council to give it and would rather sleep rough.
Then there are those B&B places. Many small hotels and guest houses have transformed themselves to HMOs to give places the Council uses as temporary accommodation. These cost from about of £25k per room upwards per year and many of them are classed as “unsuitable temporary accommodation” because they don’t have the facilities of a full tenancy. The Council is paying over the odds to house people in substandard B&B rooms.
Coincidentally, the number of “households” (for this largely read single young men) in unsuitable temporary accommodation is directly equivalent to the number of recent immigrant arrivals and non-Edinburgh cases put together.
If we didn’t have the additional pressures created by Scottish Government policies seeking some kind of tartan empathetic exceptionalism and drawing homelessness case to Edinburgh, we could house everyone in appropriate accommodation. Albeit temporarily.
In contrast to the shouts of misinformation in Edinburgh, SNP run Glasgow City Council has woken up and is complaining to its own SNP Government that it can’t cope with the influx of cases without lots of extra support and funding. This makes the Edinburgh tactics of blaming the media even stranger to explain.
Real “misinformation” would have been a reason for a press complaint. So why would the Council do this when it was the SNP’s Scottish Government policies that were getting the blame? I smell gaslighting politics rather than corporate communications.
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Photo of rough sleeping reality by JW Studio via Adobe Stock
