EXCLUSIVE: Scottish housing minister Paul McLennan has written to UK Housing Secretary Michael Gove urging him to link Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates to rents.
The Scottish Government has urged the UK Government to reform its housing benefit for private renters.
It comes less than a week after Fife became the fifth Scottish council to declare a housing emergency. It followed Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Argyll and Bute. But the rates were frozen for the last three years, which McLennan said "forced people to make difficult choices between paying their rent, feeding their family, or heating their home."
“In order to plug this gap, further worsened by the bedroom tax and the benefit cap, we are allocating £84 million of our limited budget for Discretionary Housing Payments in this financial year. This will rise to £90 million in 2024-25, due to the continued difficult choices facing households. Aitken said: “We have reached a crisis point in Scotland, with recent statistics showing that homelessness numbers are on a sharp incline.
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