Theme 3: Warm and affordable homes
A warm and affordable home is important for dignity, safety, health and wellbeing, and a priority theme emerging from the consultation and engagement process.
The focus of the theme spans increasing the availability of affordable homes, making sure that they meet people’s needs, making heating more affordable and making the process of applying for a home easier.
There are a range of wider actions being taken as part of the mainstream work of the Council with the aim of meeting the longer-term outcome of a warm and affordable home for all.
The Council is committed to addressing homelessness in the city and has agreed the Rapid Rehousing Transition Plan to address this challenge. However, the Covid pandemic has further highlighted the scale of rough sleeping in the city and has added to pressures on affordable housing through job losses and reduced income.
The priority outcome for the first year is therefore that stakeholders at risk of homelessness are enabled to access suitable accommodation on leaving hospitals or prisons through the development of pathways with established support.
The groups which will benefit from these actions are people with disabilities, including mental health issues, age (older people), gender (people leaving prison are more likely to be male); age (e.g. young people who have committed offences), ethnic group, religion and sexual orientation.
The actions described below will progress the general duty of eliminating discrimination, advancing equality and fostering good relations.
Mainstream actions
- Progress work on the Council commitment to develop a programme to deliver 10,000 affordable homes by 2022, and 20,000 by 2027.
- Further develop people-centred income maximisation, family and household support services, aiming to extend into all city communities, holistic support to improve financial resilience, health and wellbeing for people who are already in or are at risk of being in poverty.
- Ensure that new affordable homes planned for the city will support health and social care priorities through, for example, provision of accessible homes for wheelchair users. The City of Edinburgh Council was one of the first local authorities to have a Wheelchair Accessible Homes target; with 10% of all social rented homes being wheelchair accessible.
- Continue to provide advice and support for people whose health needs mean that their current home is no longer suitable.
- Invest in existing homes to make them more energy efficient, cheaper and easier to heat and transition to net zero carbon by 2030.
- Take forward improvements to the North Cairntow Gypsy/ Traveller site. Council officers worked with residents of the site to co-design site improvements, addressing fuel poverty, mainstreaming equalities and harnessing lived experience of tenants. In March 2021 the Council’s Finance and Resources Committee approved a contract for the redevelopment works.
- Carry out research to improve understanding of accessible housing requirements in the city and set a cross tenure target for wheelchair housing.
- Making applications for social rented housing in Edinburgh easier by introducing an online process through Key to Choice.
- Updating the policy on the volume of student housing as part of ‘Choices for City Plan 2030’, a topic of concern raised during the consultation on outcomes.
Actions to support the priority outcome
To achieve the priority outcome for the first year, stakeholders at risk of homelessness are enabled to access suitable accommodation on leaving hospitals or prisons, pathways will be established to support transition at the point of leaving prisons and hospitals into accommodation including housing options for young people in the justice system.
This supports the delivery of the Scottish Government Ending Homelessness Together Action Plan to develop prevention pathways for people leaving prison and hospital. The existing national standards - Sustainable Housing on Release for Everyone (SHORE) standards - published in November 2017, set out good practice for prison and housing organisations to deliver better housing outcomes for prison leavers. These standards are being reviewed and will form part of the development of the pathway for people leaving prison. Both are actions agreed in the Councils’ Rapid Rehousing Transition Plan.
Performance
Measures of success will be developed as part of the work to develop pathways on leaving prison and hospital.
Measures to support the monitoring of the wider activities include:
- affordable housing approvals/completions and
- delivery of the Housing Revenue Capital Programme which includes investment in new homes, existing homes and funding for adaptations to Council homes.