Edinburgh council extends limited housing allocations until December after rejecting 2027 plan
A decision by Edinburgh Council to suspend council housing allocations for everyone except the most vulnerable will be extended to December of this year, after councillors rejected a call to keep it in place until 2027.
At Tuesday’s meeting of the Housing, Homelessness and Fair Work committee, councillors voted against a recommendation by officers that the policy be suspended until March 2027.
That date was branded ‘a shock’ and ‘stark’ by councillors who said some of the proposals put forward to tackle the problem were ‘vague’ – and admitted not enough progress was being made and it wasn’t being made fast enough.
Under the agreement, voted for by nine of 11 councillors, the committee will receive monthly updates on the progress made during the suspension.
Councillors will also still have the option of extending the suspension further at December’s meeting of the committee.
Before the decision, committee convener and Labour councillor Lezley Marion Cameron said: “I’m acutely aware of the impact recommending such a decision has.
“I think we need to do more. We’re doing as much as we reasonably can, and we’re making progress, but it’s not enough to match the scale and the complexity of the issue.”
The city’s housing crisis has been worsened in recent months by a need to move homeless households out of unlicensed HMOs, a policy started during Covid.
The report for councillors said that 517 families would still be in unsuitable accommodation at the end of the suspension, if it had carried through to March 2027.
Officials had warned that only suspending allocations to March 2026 would leave over 800 families in unsuitable accommodation every night – and they said the shorter the extension is, the higher the number of families in unsuitable accommodation would be.
But they added that works underway to acquire more properties could drive this number down.
They said the city was exploring many avenues for tackling the lack of accommodation, including the construction of council-owned temporary accommodation from scratch.
So far ten families had been housed or moved despite the suspension due to emergency circumstances.
The council is facing competing legal difficulties, with pressure to get people out of unlicensed HMOs and a legal requirement to house people presenting as homeless.
SNP councillor Danny Aston said: “I certainly wouldn’t disagree with anything that’s been said so far. I suppose I’ll add something else, the shock I got when I opened the papers and saw the date of March 2027.
“I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that having put forward such an extreme recommendation, there wasn’t a briefing for councillors around that.
“At the moment, what we’ve got are proposals that are still quite vague, that still don’t have price tags.
“For the reasons we’ve outlined, we can’t support the March 2027 extension.”
Liberal Democrat councillor Pauline Flannery added in: “I too feel that 2027 is a stark figure.
“It’s very difficult to reconcile that against the fact that we are in a housing emergency, and we talk a lot about that. Two years down the line does not fit that.”
And Green councillor Ben Parker said: “This report does represent progress. The modelling clearly does show that this approach could bring the number of people in unsuitable accommodation down.
“But the fact of the matter is that the numbers are too high, the progress is too slow, and the disbenefits for council tenants are too difficult to bear.”
Conservative councillor Marie-Clair Munro said that the current housing crisis was partially a consequence of the current government in Holyrood not making available enough funding to councils.
Earlier in the meeting, Cllr Marion Cameron expressed that much of the responsibility rested with the Scottish and UK governments due to a lack of funds being made available to address Edinburgh’s housing issues.
She added that she was in the process of setting up a meeting with Mairi McAllan MSP, the current Cabinet Secretary for Housing at Holyrood, and noted that she would be willing to have councillors from the committee attend with her.
SNP councillor Danny Aston said he endorsed the suggestion to have other councillors attend the meeting.
The meeting also saw concerns raised that the homelessness crisis in the capital was being blamed by some on immigrants. Several councillors, including Green councillor Susan Rae, made calls for ‘racist dog-whistles’ to stop.
The asks came after remarks on social media, as well as ones made by Conservative group leader Iain Whyte in a newspaper opinion piece on August 8.
In the piece, discussing council finances, he wrote: “I don’t have space to explain more than the basics that immigrants make up a large part of our homeless crisis.”
The next meeting of the Housing, Homelessness and Fair Work committee will be held on Tuesday, September 23.