Council to shut down more than 200 places for homeless people each year
Glasgow city council will stop using hostel accommodation to house homeless people within the next three years.

Plans finalised within the last month will complete one of the largest hostel closure programmes ever seen in a British city.

Roughly 800 hostel places – mainly in four major hostels – will be shut down over the next three years, with the council having set itself a target of closing at least 200 places a year.

The plans represent a concerted move by the council to phase out hostel accommodation – supported by a £55m grant from the Scottish Executive.

The move is in line with the aims of the Homelessness (Scotland) Act 2003, which intends to ensure that all intentionally homeless people are entitled to permanent accommodation by 2012.

Catherine Jamieson, the newly appointed head of Glasgow's homelessness partnership, said: "The target of getting people out of hostels has been set. Large-scale hostel living is no longer seen as acceptable – it's not appropriate for meeting people's needs and the facilities associated with it are not brilliant.

"In the long term we are looking to settle people in accommodation that is appropriate for their needs."

She added that Glasgow had been too reliant on large hostels in dealing with its homelessness problem – some homeless applicants have been living in the same hostel for as long as 20 years.

To complete the decommissioning programme, Glasgow council will have to rely on Glasgow Housing Association to rehouse hostel tenants.

Stock transfer of the council's 80,000 homes was completed in March this year, with one of the conditions that GHA would house the majority of the city's homeless applicants.

Protocols that allow for council nomination rights with respect to homeless applicants are being reviewed ahead of the next round of hostel closures.

However, the transfer agreement gives the council access rights to 1500 flats for this financial year, and that figure can rise to 2500 if the council deems necessary.

Currently Glasgow gets about 1150 homeless applications per month.

Jackson Greenhorn, policy development officer at GHA, said the association had the capacity to cope with the closure programme.

Source

Housing Today