The leader of West Dunbartonshire Council has hit out at the lack of funding from the Scottish Government despite the area having “the highest level of homelessness in Scotland.”
Councillor Martin Rooney claims that the local authority is not seeing “a fair share” of the funding allocation to address homelessness when a report presented to the area's housing and communities committee highlighted that more than 1100 new homeless assessments were expected to be made during 2024/25.
The report highlighted that there were over 5000 households on the council’s waiting list, 274 in temporary accommodation and of those households, 89 had children.
In 2022, the Scottish Government published a document that showed 1404 people per 100,000 in West Dunbartonshire were homeless – more than double the Scottish average of 632 at the time.
Councillor Rooney said: “It is really good to see that we have continued to prevent households from becoming homeless in the first place.
“The report tells us that we have managed to deal with 262 households. It doesn’t take away from the fact that we have 5000 plus on a waiting list. We also know from the Scottish Government’s own statistics that we have the highest level of homelessness in Scotland.
“Unfortunately, the money is not going to where the highest homelessness is, it is going to where the Scottish Government has chosen to send it. We are not seeing a fair share of the allocation of resources to address that.
“Is it a consequence of the pressure that we have got in housing? We are seeing that the report shows that we have 68 breaches of unsuitable accommodation. We are failing to meet our statutory duties and yet I don’t think that we are being seen as a priority as we should be by the Scottish Government.
“How are we going to address homelessness overall because it seems to up year on year and we are going to end up still on the top of the list and there is no additional money coming to address it.”
West Dunbartonshire Council was the fifth local authority in Scotland to declare a housing emergency in May 2024 as a result of extreme pressures facing housing and homelessness services.
On May 15 last year the Scottish Government declared a National Housing Emergency in parliament.
Peter Barry, chief officer of housing and employability for the council, said: “Our view is that the funding formula for distributing homelessness funding should be based on a proportion of people per head of the population.
“We have the highest per capita of homeless presentations in Scotland so we believe that we should see a funding formula that reflects that.
“I understand the challenges for the Scottish Government because you have Glasgow, Edinburgh and some other areas too where the overall numbers are really extraordinary and the level of pressure.
“It is a complicated issue and a decision was taken to focus on bias funding towards those larger councils. While I understand that, it doesn’t sit with us and we would prefer that to be reviewed.
“We will continue to lobby and press for a formula that helps to reflect this specific challenges we have got.”
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