Several of today’s Scottish newspapers report on a slight increase in the number of homeless people in Scotland, and in particular – for some reason – those who’ve slept rough for at least one night in the three months before declaring themselves homeless.
Things become a little clearer when you see that the reported stats are courtesy of “research by Scottish Labour”, who’ve cherry-picked the worst-sounding numbers in order to blame “Tory and SNP austerity”, etc etc – that weirdly specific stat has risen by 10%, although the actual number of homeless people is only up by 1%.
But all credit to Labour – it’s only taken them two months to find them.
Because the figures were actually released and reported in mid-June:
And the only sense in which they’re news again now is that Scottish Labour have spoon-fed the media a pre-chewed press release about them.
It is, of course, bad news that homelessness is up by 1%. But given the constant assault on welfare by the UK government, it’s also about as surprising as getting a sore face if you cover your head in honey and ram it into a wasp’s nest.
While the Scottish Government has spent hundreds of millions of pounds mitigating UK government policy – for example by effectively abolishing the bedroom tax – those elsewhere in the UK have been left to suffer the consequences of the brutal Tory war on the poor.
The number of households in temporary accomodation, for example, has almost doubled in England since 2011:
While the comparable stats for Scotland over the same period are flat:
(These are just about the only like-for-like figures we could get hold of. It’s very difficult to track down “headline” stats for homelessness in England and Wales to compare with Scotland as a whole, and probably intentionally so.)
Labour’s solution, of course, is a Labour government which will magically fix everything in ways never specified. But despite this tiny uptick, it’s perhaps worth comparing the situation now with the one the SNP inherited, after eight years of Labour rule at Holyrood during an economic boom when budgets were constantly rising.
Despite a decade of enforced austerity and cuts from Westminster, homelessness in Scotland has decreased by 41% since the SNP came to power in 2007, having increased by many thousands under Labour’s rule.
Scottish Labour have, of course, always relied (usually fruitlessly) on the electorate having a short memory. But as a Labour government at Holyrood becomes a more and more distant memory, it’s a tactic they’ll probably deploy more and more often. And that’s why sites like this one are here to remember things, even when the Scottish press has forgotten which stories they ran two months ago.
