There's more than 16,000 children homeless in Scotland - and we already know how to fix it

A 28 per cent rise in people applying for help after sleeping on the street the night before. More than 10,000 children trapped in temporary accommodation. More than 16,000 children in the homelessness system overall – forced to grow up without knowing what it’s like to have a safe, secure place to call home.

Each one of the numbers in these new statistics represents a human being. Each one is an example of someone robbed of their potential, and their future. It’s not a situation anyone should be willing to accept.

Yet the frustrating part is that Scotland actually has very strong rights in place for people experiencing homelessness. It’s just that, all too often, they are forced to reach a point of emergency before they can get the help they need. That means that support measures such as temporary accommodation – rather than being a safety net – becomes the default response to someone encountering problems with their housing.

Local authorities are doing their best, but as pressure grows it becomes harder for them to cope. These new figures are further proof of that – councils are closing cases, but not as quickly as new applications are coming in. They’re working to end homelessness, but they’re not able to keep up with growing demand.

The impact of that trend is profound. As demand grows, people end up trapped within the homelessness system for longer, while good quality temporary accommodation becomes harder to find. As more people are forced from their homes, the worst options – places riddled with damp or mould or invested with lice or rats – become the only option.

The system is creaking, and the examples that were once shocking increasingly become the norm. It’s clear the current approach cannot go on indefinitely. We must act urgently, to stop the flow of more human beings into the homelessness system.

Because services are firefighting – and make no mistake, they’re working hard to do so, often at a huge cost to staff themselves – but the blaze has been growing bigger.

We need to shift the system towards prevention. To shift away from constant firefighting and install a system of smoke detectors, to set off the alarm when someone first starts to encounter problems with their housing.

By stepping in earlier, we can stop more pain and misery. Because the homelessness system can have a way of trapping you. By leaving people unable to plan for the future, or restricting them from maintaining work, or impacting their mental health, the experience of homelessness can cause problems to escalate in someone’s life.

Those problems, in turn, echo across society. Not just for an individual and for their lives, and not just for their family and friends, but for whole communities. Because the wider impact of homelessness in Scotland is massive.

Last year, Scottish councils spent over £160m on temporary accommodation, and the effect goes well beyond housing. Homelessness ratchets up strain on the NHS, because of the damage it does to people’s mental and physical health. It piles pressure on the justice system – with research showing nearly half of Scottish prisoners report losing their home while in jail.

Across society – in every area of public life – the reverberations of our failure to end homelessness are being felt. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Scotland can build a truly world-leading system, and reverse these trends, by shifting the system towards prevention.

We can take pressure off public services, save money, and avoid more lives being put on hold, by working to stop people from losing their homes in the first place.

The Housing Bill, currently working its way through Parliament, provides a huge opportunity to do that, by changing the law so people can get help earlier. At present, the duty to prevent homelessness kicks in 56 days before someone is at risk of homelessness. That’s far too late. By extending the period to six months, as this Bill will do if it’s passed, services will get a fighting chance to help people keep their homes.

But the proposed legislation goes further than that. It recognises that public services can do far more to help people keep their homes, and that instead of homelessness causing problems for wider public services, wider public services can help end homelessness. That’s why the Housing Bill contains new legal duties, requiring those in health, justice and beyond to ask people at risk of homelessness about their housing situation, and take action to help prevent it if needed.

The changes, if they are fully resourced, could represent a turning point for homelessness in Scotland. It’s vital we push on and that future a reality, because as these statistics show, the alternative is staring us in the face.

All sorts of words have been used to describe these figures over the past few days. An injustice or a tragedy – campaigners have reached for whatever words they can find to represent the human toll these numbers represent. But whatever you call them, and whether the knowledge that there are more than 16,000 homeless children in Scotland moves you to anger or to sadness, it’s clear we must act.

We know what causes homelessness, and we know how to end it. None of the solutions are a mystery. We need to build more homes, particularly social homes. We need more support for local authorities, facing an increasingly difficult job. We need a social security system that allows people to live in dignity.

And we need to push on with plans to change the law, to prevent homelessness from happening in the first place. Because we know that we can end homelessness, and by working together, that’s exactly what we are going to do.

- Matt Downie is chief executive of Crisis