Who could disagree with the Crisis Scotland charity that the deaths of 40 homeless people in a relatively prosperous city like Edinburgh in 2024 was “completely unacceptable”?

There is no question that homelessness is “traumatic,” as Crisis Scotland’s policy chief Maeve McGoldrick put it this week, but it’s not proven that homelessness was the cause of the fatalities. It’s more probable that underlying causes like drug and alcohol addiction will have contributed to both homelessness and an untimely death.

That is not to say the continued inability of local and national authorities to take meaningful action to tackle the underlying causes of the housing shortage shouldn’t be challenged. “A laser focus on ending all forms of homelessness is needed to drive down these numbers," said Ms McGoldrick, and she’s not wrong, if at the very least it means the lack of a permanent address can’t be used as cover for the Scottish Government’s equally shocking inability to slash the number of early deaths directly attributable to drug and alcohol abuse.

For years, new affordable house construction has run at around half the rate necessary to meet demand, and new schemes take years just to get through planning, as developers of the proposed transformation of the currently dreary Cameron Toll shopping centre are well aware.

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They hope to deliver up to 500 new family homes, up to 175 of them affordable, and last week over 400 people attended a consultation........

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