I will probably not do this justice but, in its simplest form, housing options is about preventing people from becoming homeless, engaging earlier and—as its name suggests—informing people of their housing options at an earlier and more preventative stage before they reach that crisis point. Inherent in that is the challenge of looking at things solely from a statistical point of view. The fact is that, if you are doing good prevention work, you should not be recording the same types of outcomes that you would be recording in the absence of good prevention work—if that makes sense.
The difference is that someone making a traditional homelessness application will go to their local authority, apply as homeless and be assessed as either unintentionally homeless or not, and, in theory, they will follow the traditional route of going into temporary accommodation before they move into permanent settled accommodation. The housing options approach is about engaging with people at an earlier stage, where possible, to prevent them from ever getting to that point. Crudely, that is the principle behind the approach.
We are fully supportive of the housing options approach—we think that it is a very positive thing—but the challenge is that, when it was rolled out, there was no formal guidance on how to implement it; that came a couple of years later. The guidance has been rolled out only relatively recently, and it is not statutory guidance. As the Scottish Housing Regulator has highlighted, that allows for different interpretations of how to implement the approach. As has been mentioned, different local authorities have different resources, structures and local priorities, and they have implemented it in different ways.
I believe that we now have two years of returns of housing options data. Looking at that data in a purely statistical way tells us something, but it does not give us the full picture on the implementation of housing options. That is why I welcome the fact that the committee has been hearing from front-line service providers about the reality on the ground, because statistics and reporting can tell us only so much.
Shelter Scotland would like to see what impact the roll-out of the guidance has on the official statistics—the PREVENT1 statistics—on housing options. There are concerns about whether, for example, housing options recording goes far enough in telling us about the outcomes that people achieve. I believe that, in the current set-up, homelessness is recorded as an outcome, but we need to know more than that; we need to know what happened next. Did the person get the support that they needed to move into permanent settled accommodation? Did they get temporary accommodation? How long did they spend in it? We need to know more. We have only a couple of years of housing options data.