Homeless Network Scotland chief executive Maggie Brünjes discusses how the eight relevant bodies responsible for delivering the Ask and Act duties can use their collective influence – not only to prevent homelessness, but to drive the upstream change needed to tackle its root causes.
For as long as most of us can remember, the homelessness sector has operated as the emergency service. As the Hard Edges Scotland research starkly put it, too often left to “carry the can” for the missed opportunities to help people earlier.
We meet people when their housing, health and relationships have already broken down – when they are already carrying recent or life-long trauma and adversity. The sector provides a vital safety net, but it is ultimately too late. We are the ambulance after the event.
Ask and Act changes that. For the first time, it moves the entire system upstream. The eight relevant bodies named in the Act will now be required to ask about people’s housing situation in their everyday interactions – creating real, routine opportunities to prevent homelessness before it takes hold.
Aside from ensuring the new duties are adequately resourced, their success will rest on three underpinning factors: people, services and systems.
People first
The term ‘Ask and Act’ was coined by people with personal experience of homelessness. While professionals had wrestled with the complexity and enormity of defining the duties, a group of people who had navigated the homelessness system cut through it all: “Just ask.” Just ask people what they need.
That simple, powerful insight is at the heart of this reform. The ‘Ask’ is not a tick-box about housing status. It is about asking people what they actually need to stay housed. It puts the person, not the process, first.
The evidence is clear: preventing homelessness spares people deep trauma and upheaval – whether they are on their own or together in a family. It protects their mental wellbeing, financial stability, security, dignity and relationships. These new duties are not another ambulance after the event. They are the routine check-up that stops the crisis before it starts.
The homelessness sector has every reason to feel hopeful. This is exactly where we have always wanted the system to be: upstream, early and person-led.
Supporting services: where they can and cannot reach
Yet there is a stubborn myth that we can somehow fix services to fix people – that homelessness is simply an individual problem that competent professionals can solve with the right advice, support or rehabilitation, and that preventing it just requires us to act earlier.
This framing misses the deeper reality. Homelessness is driven by structural causes: poverty, the chronic undersupply of social homes, UK policy on welfare and immigration and inequalities baked into our housing system that hit certain groups hardest. These are not failures of people or of service delivery. They are the root conditions that keep producing homelessness.
Ask and Act takes prevention upstream, where services across the eight bodies can make a real and transformative difference – preventing individual homelessness earlier and reducing the risk of other problems developing or worsening. However, even the best services cannot stop the main flow into homelessness. Waiting for that will keep us trapped in a cycle where the flood of new cases never slows because the upstream drivers remain unchanged.
The eight relevant bodies have a powerful opportunity to use Ask and Act not just for individual prevention, but as a platform to tackle these systemic issues too.
Integrating systems: no wrong door
Scottish Government guidance on Ask and Act is in the pipeline and will be crucial. It will help each body embed the duties in its own practice. But homelessness prevention has never been – and never can be – the responsibility of a single agency.
People at the hard edges often face overlapping crises: poverty, trauma, addiction, mental health and offending. They are forced to retell their deepest pain to disconnected services that deal with one issue at a time. Siloed systems do not just fail them; they deepen the harm.
Ask and Act creates the chance to connect health, justice, housing, social care and social security so they work together around a person’s full needs, rather than one issue at a time. It also gives these bodies the platform to feed back what they are seeing on the ground and drive action on the upstream drivers.
Acting together, the eight relevant bodies have formidable leverage – and we urge them to use it. By acting as one they can ease the unsustainable pressure on their own services, deliver better outcomes for the people they support every day and tackle the root causes that keep driving demand.
What success looks like
Ask and Act is pivotal. Investment in it is crucial. But we will get a far greater return if the eight bodies combine their strengths and act together by:
- Learning how to ask and act and creating the right environments for preventative services.
- Committing to joined up, cross-sector working that puts the person’s full needs first, rather than passing people from service to service.
- Using their collective observations and influence to reduce new demand by tackling the upstream drivers – more homes, reduced poverty and inequality and more inclusive welfare and immigration policies.
When implementation is strong and joined-up working becomes real, Ask and Act will stop being a duty on paper and become the new normal: a system that keeps people housed.
The Ask and Act duties make explicit the responsibility of the wider public sector – at both national and local level – to ensure no one in Scotland is forced to live without a home. Now we need the resources to deliver, the ambition from every relevant body to match those intentions, and the courage to go much further upstream and change the conditions that keep creating homelessness in the first place.