Two half-day seminars being held by Shelter Scotland will throw the spotlight on prevention of homelessness and explain the implications of housing benefit cuts.
The seminars will be held on Tuesday 30 November, 2010 in Edinburgh, at St Paul’s and St George’s Church, featuring a range of expert speakers. The first seminar will focus on helping prevent homelessness by looking at how the housing sector can take a proactive approach to managing rent arrears and ultimately reduce the number of people being evicted from their homes. The second seminar will examine current and future cuts to housing benefit and the key issues for local authorities, social and private landlords and the voluntary sector.
This comes at a time when Shelter Scotland analysis recently showed people in Scotland on local housing allowance will have to find an extra £56 a month to pay their rent (2). Gordon MacRae, Head of Communications and Policy, Shelter Scotland, the housing and homelessness charity, said: “These seminars are unmissable for housing professionals and will provide useful insight into how to prevent homelessness from experts in the housing sector. “Not only does preventing homelessness help families avoid the nightmare of losing their home, it also has a crucial role to play to help Scotland keep its commitment to end homelessness by 2012. Ultimately stopping people becoming homeless in the first place is also cost effective for local authorities and housing associations in the long run.”
Shelter Scotland’s three half-day seminars on homelessness prevention kick off on Tuesday 30 November at St Paul’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh. The first seminar is ‘Preventing Evictions for Rent Arrears’ from 9am until 12.30pm. The second seminar is ‘Understanding Changes to Housing Benefit’ from 1pm until 4pm. A third seminar, ‘Effective tenancy sustainment’ will be held in Glasgow on the morning of the 20 January 2011. For more details and to book your place, go to http://scotland.shelter.org.uk/events
