Taylor Swift is showing just how bad Edinburgh’s housing emergency really is

A family or individual in Edinburgh who is going through the trauma of homelessness should not be asked to move miles away from their jobs, their schools, or their communities to access emergency accommodation. But that is the sad reality of what’s happening in Scotland’s capital.

Taylor Swift’s Murrayfield concert brought this issue into the headlines, but this concert isn’t the first time we’ve seen the situation emerge. During the Edinburgh Festival, the Six Nations, and over the festive period the same thing happens again and again. Without urgent intervention from the Scottish government, it will keep happening.

The housing system is now so broken that people experiencing homelessness are pitted in direct competition with tourists; that injustice is as obvious as it is shameful. It simply shouldn’t be the case that a city like Edinburgh, a global destination for tourism, can’t host a major event without it having a significant knock-on effect for people experiencing homelessness.

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To give the City of Edinburgh Council it’s due, they know this is a problem. The city simply doesn’t have the resources required to meet the unprecedented demand placed on its homelessness services. Record numbers are stuck in temporary accommodation, including 3,000 children. The city is chronically over reliant on using tourist accommodation to fulfil its legal obligations to citizens who become homeless.

Edinburgh is among the most acutely affected parts of the country but the situation here isn’t unique; we see a similar picture across Scotland. Local authorities are failing to meet their statutory obligations to homeless people, breaking the law in other words, at an industrial scale. Nearly half the population of Scotland lives in an area which the Scottish Housing Regulator has said doesn’t have a fully functioning homelessness service. They’re over stretched, overwhelmed, and homeless people are paying the price. In that context it’s no surprise that seven separate councils, including Edinburgh, have declared housing emergencies.