City’s ​£24m homeless bill - John McLellan

​Last month’s Competitions and Markets Authority report into the Scottish housing market spreads the blame for under delivery between government and private industry.

Homeless person outside The Salvation Army Hostel at The Pleasance, Edinburgh (Photo: Ian Georgeson)

​But the failure is illustrated by the report to tomorrow’s special meeting of Edinburgh Council’s finance committee about temporary accommodation.

The council is legally obliged to house homeless people and last month there were 4957 households in emergency accommodation, up 39 per cent on pre-pandemic levels.

The council might, just might, be able to reduce this by 500 in the next year if it can bring some currently empty council houses back into use.

It means the pandemic will have been over for three years, but the number of households in emergency housing will be 900 greater than when it started. At best.

Therefore, councillors are being asked to approve the extension of 41 contracts with temporary accommodation providers, including bed & breakfast operations, at a cost of £24,219,973.

But the report says there is a risk some of the accommodation might be unsuitable, and so illegal, and also warns about both UK and Scottish Government asylum and refugee policy. In other words, the city can’t cope with more.

And this for an authority whose leadership has repeatedly criticised the UK government’s attitude to immigration. So, the next time you hear councillors arguing for more immigration to meet a labour shortage when a fifth of working age Scottish people are economically inactive, remember Edinburgh can’t find a decent home for thousands of people already here.

And it’s not xenophobic or racist to say so.