Homelessness Applications

Operation of the Homelessness Persons Legislation in Scotland is available on the Scottish Government website.
Tables included in the bulletin are also available to download from website in Excel. The publication is available as a web page and in PDF formats.

Not assessed

Because of the differences in collection methods and in the legislative duties to homeless households in Scotland following the 2001 homelessness legislation care needs to be taken in comparing homelessness statistics to England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Operation of the Homelessness Persons Legislation in Scotland is published around five months after the end of the relevant period. Data gathering and error correction errors from all local authorities usually takes around 3 months to complete. The report production timetable takes a further month. There is one month extra in the timetable as a contingency against staff illness and unforeseen circumstances:

\u2022 Annual data for 1 April to 31 March are published in August.

Operation of the Homelessness Persons Legislation in Scotland is used to monitor trends in homelessness and to provide information on the implementation and effectiveness of Scottish homelessness legislation. Crucially, this statistical output is used to monitor the implementation of the Scottish Government's 2012 homelessness target. That is, by 31st December 2012, the priority need test should be abolished.

The Homelessness Statistics User Group meets twice yearly and is consulted on to ensure that Operation of the Homelessness Persons Legislation in Scotland remain relevant to users and make best use of the available data.

Given the continuous nature of the recording system, figures are updated on an ongoing
basis and may differ from those previously published. There may be delays in
some cases being reported to the Scottish Government due to IT issues, quality
assurance processes and delayed entry of data - particularly at the end of the
financial year. As a result, we estimate that the headline number of applications
may change by as much as 2% between first and subsequent publications.

The quality of these figures rely on on the quality and consistency of
the information supplied to us by Local Authorities on the HL1 and HL2 returns.
The quality statement on the Scottish homelessness statistics website sets out the ways in
which we do this. The main focus of our systems is to ensure consistency
between the HL1 and HL2 returns and consistency of the case level information
within each HL1 return.

Our approach to revisions and corrections is set out in detail on the Scottish homelessness statistics website. In summary,
published statistics and supporting reference tables are generally revised when the
figures next appear in any publication. However, if a revision is significant resulting
in a major change to the published figures a note showing the revisions will be
published as soon as possible on the homelessness statistics website.

All disclosive figures are rounded to 5.