Monday September 15th 2025
Edinburgh multi-storey flat blocks
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Joe Sullivan
Some 200 households with young people were accommodated in unsuitable accommodation by the council at the start of this month, according to a report for councillors.
And almost 1,000 households total were in unsuitable accommodation, including 20 families with children.
It comes as Edinburgh enters the sixth month of its suspension of council housing allocations, which is aimed at tempering the homelessness crisis the city faces.
Only those presenting to the council as homeless are presently able to get allocated a council house, with very few exceptions.
And despite the efforts, August saw 427 instances of the city being unable to house homeless people, coming from 217 households.
The stark figures come from a report before the city’s Housing, Homelessness and Fair Work committee, which will discuss the figures next week.
Officers say that the statistics still mark an improvement, as 25 families with children were in unsuitable accommodation in July.
And 440 people, from 230 households, were denied housing in July, meaning the figures published on Friday show forward progress.
Unsuitable accommodation refers to the use of unlicensed HMOs to house people experiencing homelessness, a policy the council began using during the pandemic.
For the purposes of the figures, ‘young people’ are those aged between 16 and 25.
Edinburgh was forced to step back from the policy due to it causing the council to be in breach of legal obligations around licensing.
The housing suspension was originally to be in place until June 13 of this year, but has been extended since then, with the current expiry date being set in December 2025.
Council officers had wanted to push this out to March 2027, but councillors struck back, with some calling the request ‘stark’ and the proposals put forward to tackle the crisis ‘vague’.
At a meeting last month, SNP councillor Danny Aston said: “I certainly wouldn’t disagree with anything that’s been said so far. I suppose I’ll add something else, the shock I got when I opened the papers and saw the date of March 2027.
“I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that having put forward such an extreme recommendation, there wasn’t a briefing for councillors around that.
“At the moment, what we’ve got are proposals that are still quite vague, that still don’t have price tags.”
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