Homelessness conference 2025: Early bird booking & speaker news

Scotland’s housing emergency is more than stats and headlines. It’s a human issue that affects individuals, families and communities every day. This year’s homelessness conference is focused on the impact of the housing emergency on people. As the conference title says: It’s personal.

So it’s fitting that we can announce a great keynote speaker with a big personality. Someone who will inspire us all when we meet to explore how to build a better future where everyone is safe, well, respected, and in control.

Baroness Floella Benjamin: ‘Childhood Lasts a Lifetime’

A pioneering star of stage and screen, beloved former host of Play School, award-winning writer, campaigner and prominent member of the Windrush generation, Baroness Floella Benjamin has overcome adversity and prejudice since she arrived in Britain aged 10 to achieve stellar success in her career and as a champion for diversity and childhood wellbeing.

Baroness Benjamin’s keynote address, Childhood Lasts a Lifetime, is a powerful and anecdote-filled narrative of resilience to inspire us all to work for positive change.

The theme will resonate deeply with delegates, with childhood poverty still the strongest predictor of later homelessness, and 10,000+ children living in temporary accommodation in Scotland.

Sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities

Get your message across to an engaged and expert audience from across multiple sectors. This year we have 9 great sponsorship and exhibitor packages to suit all budgets and preferences. Check out options below, get in touch at hello@homelessnetwork.scot or call for a chat on 0141 420 7272.

Over two unmissable days, Scotland’s Annual Homelessness Conference 2025, titled It’s Personal: the human face of the housing emergency’, will unite experts, advocates and those with lived experience to address the real-world impacts of the housing emergency.

Dive into four powerful themes – Safe, Well, Respected, In Control – and discover cutting edge strategies, share solutions and must-hear stories:

  • Safe: Champion the approaches needed to protect people and make homes the ultimate community safety solution.
  • Well: Build the case for health and social care to integrate with housing to transform housing options and lives beyond homelessness services.
  • Respected: Uphold people’s rights and redress the inequality they face, with a bold push to shape policy before the 2026 Scottish elections.
  • In-Control: Unlock solutions to financial inclusion, choice and the active participation of people navigating homelessness.

Expect inspiring stories, evidence-based practices and practical solutions that put people first. By focusing on the human impact, this year’s conference can help build a better future where everyone is safe, well, respected and in control.

June Network Briefing

In this month’s briefing: A year after the housing emergency was declared and with less than 12 months until the 2026 Holyrood election, demands for bold, urgent action to increase homes, address inequality and prevent more people becoming homeless are swelling to a chorus.

Two academic papers in recent weeks echo our sector’s call for radical transformation – not least from the Everyone Home collective, whose statement criticising a lack of ambition in addressing the crisis was cited in the Scottish Parliament Housing Emergency debate.  

What these perspectives have in common is a plea for fresh thinking not only to address today’s crisis but also to put in place a strategy to build the homes we need to prevent homelessness for generations to come.  

And on a grander scale, to create the fair, equal and dynamic country we aspire to be in reality, not just on paper, which means getting both the human and economic parts of the equation right. 

You’ll find those papers, statements and other related research below, along with news, webinars and training opportunities in this month’s briefing, along with a subscription link.

What’s new in our summer training programme?

Since the last training update, we have learned with nearly 50 of you by delivering trauma-informed approaches training and holding a fantastic session with Clan Childlaw about the UNCRC, homelessness and care leavers’ rights.

We were also invited to host a workshop at the Share annual conference, exploring what housing associations need to know about the Housing Bill and the new prevention duty. And during Mental Health Awareness week, from 12-18 May, we hosted a session at the Creating Hope Conference convened by Suicide Prevention Scotland. 

Here is a quick reminder of our upcoming training programme this summer, perfect for inducting new team members or returners, and building new connections across the sector.

New workshop

  • You asked, we listened. We are returning to the city centre of Glasgow for an in-person coproduction workshop on 12 August, when we will share our learnings from 20 years of coproduced services in Glasgow – to reserve a ticket, prices £100 for members and £150 for non-members please email hello@homelessnetwork.scot

Summer programme

  • There are a few last spaces on the Rough Guide to homelessness legislation and policy on 20 May delivered live and via an online learning platform
  • Homelessness prevention: what can you do in your community 10 June
  • Unequal risk: a human rights and equality lens is on 10 July. Curious about the impact? Find out more about what Lizzie from Cyrenians learned at a previous course.
  • Trauma-informed approaches on 22 July

Wider events and resources

  • Ending Youth Homelessness – hosted by the Frontline Network Scotland on 22 May
  • Barriers & Belonging: the real challenges for young asylum seekers – from the Scottish Centre for Conflict Resolution on 10 June
  • The Frontline Network Conference is being held online on the 24 June
  • Platfform are hosting a series of free, short online courses including Understanding and preventing burnout at work on 27 June
  • Homeless Link have bitesize video modules about mental health and homelessness

To suggest a training topic you would like to see on our programme, or to send us details of webinars, learning events or workshops for including in the next training bulletin, please email laura@homelessnetwork.scot

We hold power and responsibility to deliver equality for people

We’re not all at equal risk of homelessness. Every person carries their own unique experiences and faces different barriers to housing. Some groups of people are systematically disadvantaged, and despite legal duties, the evidence tells us that inequalities persist in Scotland.

The Unequal Risk, an online course provided by our training and consultancy social enterprise All In, is focused on this issue. The training encourages reflection on how we can better listen to and represent diverse communities, covers the underpinning legislation, and offers practical tools to create better services. Read what community resilience worker Lizzie Ashworth experienced during a recent session.


I recently joined a Homeless Network Scotland training session, ‘The Unequal Risk: an equality and human rights lens in housing and homelessness’.

The training offered an inspiring and constructive opportunity to reflect on the unequivocal entitlement of all individuals to have their rights fully upheld and respected in their engagement with housing and homelessness services across Scotland, and the continued gaps in service-user experience.

The trainers facilitated great discussion on how best to redress inequalities around service access, including a consideration of the encouraging move across housing and homelessness provision to embed person-centred and trauma-informed best practice into frontline service delivery. The training also touched on the huge value lived experience from diverse communities brings to informing service design and appropriateness.

For the past 20 years, I’ve worked in community outreach and development, most often directly with marginalised and disenfranchised communities around themes of inclusion, rights and diversity.

I have seen first-hand how individuals’ rights have been breached both implicitly and explicitly in service design and delivery, from Gypsy/Travellers failing to access women’s health advice due to services being ill-equipped to provide culturally appropriate services, to adults experiencing homelessness failing to access mental health support due to an absence of assertive outreach provision.

People in meeting round a table talking

The training supported a broad consideration of how an absence of rights awareness in how community services are developed and delivered both create and sustain significant and enduring barriers for individuals accessing critical advice and support.

It is encouraging to see best practice in inclusion, person-centred and trauma-informed support becoming increasingly commonplace across housing and homelessness services. Creating safety and ensuring that choice, compassion and respect permeate service delivery go a significant distance in meaningfully upholding the rights of service-users.

However, an acknowledgment of current challenges seems unavoidable, and the widespread funding cuts across Scotland’s health, social care and housing sectors paired with the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on service-users and sector professionals are significant.

Together, these circumstances create an increasingly demanding and challenging context in which professionals find themselves under mounting pressure to sustain delivery of high quality humane and dignified support.

Ethical commissioning and ethical funding cycles seem to me fundamental to ensuring organisations and their staff retain capacity to deliver rights-informed and upholding services.

However, increasing job market competitiveness, impermanent job contracts and the worrying wider context of world events increasingly create conditions for declining mental health and burnout amongst statutory and third sector staff.

It’s easy, in the busyness of day-to-day service delivery, to overly focus on the task at hand, particularly where the task is assisting vulnerable individuals to access urgent and critical support. It can be easy to lose sight of good process, of checking what supported individuals value, need and want themselves – and how we can empower them towards improved circumstances, as opposed to services “doing to them.”

I found Homeless Network Scotland’s training a refreshing antidote to the bleak reality of current day-to-day news, and a potent reminder of the power and responsibility we all hold to make this world a more humane and dignified place, for ourselves and others, and striving to embed a rights-based approach into all our relationships and the services we deliver.  

Lizzie Ashworth, Community Resilience Worker, Cyrenians Reset Project

Join us for the next unequal risk session on 10 July to explore how you can make your practice, service and organisation more inclusive.