Rough sleeper numbers soar by 1000 per cent forcing u-turn on homeless hotel

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Scotland’s largest council has u-turned on plans to stop using a homeless hotel amid concerns about a huge rise in rough sleepers.Officials in Glasgow earmarked saving £3.6million a year by ripping up their deal with the Rennie Mackintosh Hotel, which has been used by the city council to house homeless people for years.Councillors agreed in June that use of the facility on Glasgow’s Union Street should be stopped but the move has now been halted.It comes amid concerns raised by charities about the number of rough sleepers in the city rising by 1000 per cent in the past two months.According to the Simon Community, the average number of rough sleepers in Glasgow is now 30 while Edinburgh has about 40 people sleeping rough – compared to just four two months ago.Elyse MacKinnon, who manages the Glasgow City Mission’s overnight welcome centre, said the situation with rough sleeping is changing as more people gravitate towards big cities.Elyse said: “The numbers are rising.

Edinburgh does have a big housing crisis as well as people coming to the big cities and the money is not being redistributed."As local connection is no longer really a thing, Glasgow and Edinburgh city councils have been picking up a lot of those cases where traditionally they would have sent them back to their local authority.”She said that while B&Bs had been used before the pandemic, their use rapidly expanded during covid as the Government had a policy of getting everyone off the streets.Elyse added: “The law in Scotland is very progressive and people do have a legal right to be in accommodation.

That’s one of the challenges we’ll start to see over the next few months. As [councils] don’t have accommodation, how do we make sure that a person’s legal