The Everyone Home Collective and the Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland (CCPS) have jointly issued a position paper calling on the Scottish Government to integrate housing equality and strategic support into More Homes Scotland, the national housing agency announced by the First Minister John Swinney in January 2026. This arrives ahead of an anticipated parliamentary update this month on the agency’s co-design phase.
Titled Toward A Fairer National Housing Agency, the paper is grounded in the persistent inequalities of Scotland’s housing system, where structural barriers mean that for many people, access to a settled, suitable and affordable home is still determined by who you are, where you’re from and what you earn.
It emphasises that housing inequality drives economic instability, public health disparities, and social exclusion – and manifests in systems with both housing surpluses and deficits. Consequently, increasing supply alone will not resolve the housing emergency without proactive, strategic interventions that account for support needs, inclusive housing options, affordability, quality and access.
“More homes alone aren’t enough to end housing inequality – experience has proven that,” said Maggie Brunjes, chief executive of Homeless Network Scotland, who convene the Everyone Home collective. “Our joint submission brings together frontline, research and policy expertise to make More Homes Scotland a keystone for real change and to ensure Scotland’s housing recovery leaves no one behind.”
Drawing on direct experience supporting those at the sharp end of Scotland’s housing and homelessness challenges, the paper advocates for housing equality as a core mission and outlines five recommendations to build on the housing support duty, embed a whole-system approach, deploy grant capital strategically to attract larger-scale social investment and establish a publicly accountable outcomes framework that is co-designed with people and communities who have experienced housing insecurity and inequality.
The full paper is available here with further details on the Everyone Home Collective and CCPS. The groups stand ready to collaborate with policymakers and stakeholders during the ongoing co-design phase of More Homes Scotland.
The Scottish Government has announced More Homes Scotland – a new national executive agency to speed up and maximise affordable housing delivery across Scotland.
Key details:
Focus: in three parts – simplicity (reducing duplication and inefficiencies), scale (delivering large projects, including rural and island needs), and speed (unlocking stalled sites, land, infrastructure and collaboration with the Scottish National Investment Bank to leverage private finance).
Timeline: co-design phase commencing now; starts operating 2027-28; fully functional in 2028-29 (subject to the May 2026 election outcome).
Resources: backed by record funding of up to £4.9 billon over four years to deliver 36,000 affordable homes.
This is a welcome move that shows the Scottish Government means business on tackling a housing emergency decades in the making – by embedding safe and settled homes as a national infrastructure goal, as well as a fundamental right for everyone.
That focus is needed. Stagnation in housebuilding has driven rising homelessness, and a dedicated executive agency offers real potential to break through long-standing blockages in planning, finance, land and skills. By maximising public investment, it can build sector confidence, attract additional private funding, and help deliver at the scale we urgently need.
The commitment to investment in housing in last week’s budget, while record-breaking, falls short of independent research showing we need at least 15,693 affordable homes delivered every year to meaningfully address homelessness and reduce the backlog affecting tens of thousands of households. More Homes Scotland can provide the strategic and delivery mechanism to get us closer to closing that gap, and its ability to do so will be a key measure of success.
In shaping this new agency, two key lessons stand out: the need for a relentless focus on measurable outcomes to ensure real, sustained impact beyond initial outputs; and ensuring root causes of housing inequality – such as poverty and systemic inequalities – underpin the co-design phase, strategic decisions and resource allocation from the outset. By embedding these lessons, we can help create a people-first agency that drives the structural change needed to chart our way out of the housing emergency.
At Homeless Network Scotland, we’re ready to harness the insights of the third sector and people who’ve been through homelessness to help make that happen.
On 20 June 2025, Maggie Brünjes, Chief Executive of Homeless Network Scotland, was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Heriot-Watt University at a ceremony on its Edinburgh campus. The doctorate recognises her leadership in advancing evidence-based, collaborative solutions to homelessness in Scotland.
For over 25 years, Maggie has championed transformative approaches to homelessness. Since 2010, as Chief Executive of Homeless Network Scotland, she has led the national network uniting organisations to deliver innovative solutions and advocate for a Scotland where everyone has a home. During that time she has co-founded impactful initiatives such as Housing First Scotland (2016), the UK-wide Centre for Homelessness Impact (2018), the Everyone Home Collective (2020) and Fair Way Scotland (2022). As a member of the Minister-appointed Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group, Maggie helped shape Scotland’s national plan to end homelessness and continues to influence policy through national frameworks.
(left to right): Professor Beth Watts-Cobbe, Heriot-Watt University; Janice Higgins, Head of Corporate Services, Homeless Network Scotland; Dr Maggie Brünjes, Chief Executive, Homeless Network Scotland; Jackie Erdman, Chair of Homeless Network Scotland; Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Heriot-Watt University.
Accepting the award, Maggie said: “I am deeply honoured by this recognition from Heriot-Watt University, whose Institute for Social Policy, Housing and Equalities Research leads global efforts to address housing disadvantage and social inequality, with their relentless pursuit of knowledge directing transformative change in Scotland, the UK and beyond.
“This award reflects the dedication of the Homeless Network Scotland team and our wider partners and associates. While we’ve made significant strides in addressing homelessness, the housing emergency has halted progress. This moment only fuels our resolve to pursue urgent solutions to Scotland’s housing and homelessness challenge.”
Professor Richard A. Williams, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University, said: “Maggie Brünjes has brought about lasting, system-wide change in the fight against homelessness, inspiring policy and partnerships across Scotland and beyond and whose work exemplifies the values of purpose, compassion and global impact that Heriot-Watt holds dear.”
The laureation was delivered by Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Director of the Institute for Social Policy, Housing and Equalities Research at Heriot-Watt University. This, along with Maggie’s response, can be viewed at this video link from around 30:40m.
Almost 18 months after declaring a housing emergency and amid spiralling homelessness in the capital, Edinburgh Council is taking the kind of bold action needed to address the problem – an emergency brake that will create breathing space to fix a system in meltdown. Councillors approved a suspension of council homes letting policy to reserve almost all properties for people experiencing homelessness.
As the proposal stated, in the last twelve months Edinburgh City Council has breached its statutory duty to provide accommodation on 3,263 occasions, a rise of 115% in a year. The proposal rightly recognised that “Doing nothing is not an option”.
People who are experiencing homelessness are the worst hit by the housing emergency, and this emergency situation requires an emergency response. That is why we strongly support this prioritisation of housing allocations for people who are homeless. This is the right way to go if local authorities are to stop breaching people’s legal right to housing. And it is the way for councils to escape the trap of spending hundreds of millions of pounds on poor quality temporary accommodation in low quality hotels and B&Bs that no one wants or benefits from other than private owners.
We urge other councils facing similar pressures to do the same.
We also urge registered social landlords to explore how they can use their resources to prioritise people who are homeless in the midst of the housing emergency.
For at least the period of the housing emergency, a significant increase in the allocation of all available housing to households who are homeless needs mandated by Scottish Government. In the areas with the greatest pressures, this needs to go beyond current convention and apply to the development of new builds and to the acquisition and allocation of existing homes.
Doing so will reduce homelessness, and free up more quality temporary accommodation in communities, preventing people, families and kids being stuck in those hotel and B&B rooms.
Importantly, this move can also give the system more flexibility to make sure people have a safe place to sleep rather than having to use a communal ‘shared air’ night shelter or sleep rough. We need to accelerate these actions now, so that adequate accommodation can be accessed during the critical winter months, in Edinburgh and Glasgow especially.
Prioritising housing for those experiencing homelessness is a legal and moral imperative and an urgent emergency response. But let’s be clear: a functioning homelessness system should serve as a safety-net for when homelessness has not been prevented, not a primary pathway to stable housing. While a functioning housing system would place affordable housing within everyone’s reach in Scotland.
Maggie Brunjes, chief executive of Homeless Network Scotland, on why the housing emergency can’t become a cover for deepening exclusion.
Picture two paths: one leads to an ordinary flat, a space to call your own, no different from anyone else’s. The other to a sleeping pod, a hostel room, a homeless B&B or shelter – a separate setup designed ‘for people like you.’
For those navigating homelessness, that second path might provide shelter, but it often comes with a catch – rules, labels, and a subtle message that your choices don’t fully count and your life not fully equal.
The first path, though? It’s mainstream housing, a key to stability, safety and a chance to decide and be who you are beyond your circumstances.
This is not only about roofs and walls. It’s about recognition, dignity, belonging and the radical idea (it sometimes feels) that no one’s life is less important.
Why does this matter?
When housing can’t be provided for everyone, as is the case in Scotland today, then the shape of ‘the next best thing’ becomes extraordinarily important. It reveals what matters and to whom.
Housing isn’t just shelter; it’s a space where life unfolds – and on our own terms. When we offer something lesser or distinct, we’re implying that not all lives deserve the same texture or possibility.
The housing and homelessness sector in Scotland is crying out for a political intervention that is inspiring, ambitious and passionate about housing in Scotland – and which wholeheartedly embraces three truths:
First, that homelessness is a housing crisis – and the most devastating outcome of a broken housing system.
Second, that most of us – if we want it – can thrive in an ordinary home as part of an ordinary community.
And third, that inequality is healed through reform and redress – not by deepening divides that scar the lives of people already at the hard edges.
We have a progressive homelessness sector in Scotland which has delivered major changes to modernise its response over many years. At the heart of that, an understanding that inclusion thrives in the ordinary, framed in a modern policy of prevention and rapid rehousing into mainstream homes.
Progress has included an intentional move away from services like large-scale hostels, ‘shared air’ communal night shelters, outdoor soup kitchens. Away from any initiatives that create stigma by ringfencing people affected together. And away from any services that label or reinforce people as ‘homeless.’
But there is a risk that this direction of travel is forced to retreat by a deepening set of housing challenges that will only mask the extent of deepening exclusion.
What are the big risks?
Currently, the ‘next best thing’ on offer to many people navigating homelessness is the exact reverse of what they need, a parallel system of temporary accommodation of the type and standard that can cause frustration, fear and anxiety – and with the sting of stigma too.
That councils are paying out millions to private operators to profit from substandard temporary accommodation should concern everyone. When fundamental housing services are an opportunity for profit, we send a message: that homelessness is not only an acceptable status quo, but a market to tap into. Literally banking on exclusion, rather than investing in inclusion.
The segregation, short-termism and typecasting that goes hand in hand with these services can have long-term consequences for people’s sense of identity, value and belonging, which for many eclipses any short-term benefit. And we know that these services often become a default, not a bridge, that harden into our systems.
Congregating people in close quarters builds stress, affects health, damages relationships and forces everyone’s hand around fundamental issues like ‘risk.’ Who isn’t at risk when people are held together for long periods at the most difficult time of their lives – in casework waiting rooms, in hotel rooms and B&Bs, in outside queues for food and shelter.
How did we get here?
Scottish Government already has policies restricting the use of unsuitable temporary accommodation and has made funding available to all councils since 2019 to make transitions that will ease and accelerate routes to settled housing.
But three forces have strained local budgets and plans and driven cascading setbacks for councils tackling homelessness:
Global factors: the pandemic and its aftermath, cost-of-living crisis, and the international displacement of people due to conflict and unrest.
UK-wide factors: including UK government fiscal policy, welfare benefit reforms and immigration policy and procedure.
National factors: an accumulating housing deficit leading to the Scottish Parliament’s declaration of a housing emergency in 2024.
What needs to happen now?
In times of crisis, it has been described that we should attend both to the most affected, and the most able to be assisted.
So we need investment in real housing outcomes for people at the hardest edge.
We need to go further to ensure that housing and support services offered are not just equal to but also seek to redress the extraordinary set of challenges and disadvantages that people have faced in their lives. Housing First works by combining ordinary housing with extraordinary support. And because it says, you belong here too.
We need to mobilise the transformation of shared, supported housing for the small number of people that don’t want their own place. This needs jointly planned and commissioned by councils and health and social care partnerships, losing the ‘homeless’ label entirely and helping to break down other ‘care group’ silos and stigma in this provision at a local level.
The most pressured council areas also need investment in a replacement plan for unsuitable temporary accommodation so that there is no commercial profit from homelessness in Scotland. Councils, housing associations and the third sector can provide better for less but need invested in to do so.
And we need to keep working toward the ideal housing system which provides an affordable home for everyone and a tight supply of temporary accommodation to support housing transitions for households that need a safety net in in the short term.
In the platforms we create for people with experience of homelessness, the themes of belonging and being treated with respect are among the most recurring themes. Because people experiencing homelessness aren’t a distinct, separate group with unique needs. Navigating tougher conditions than most, yes, but driving toward the same goals – agency, privacy, stability, safety.
Quick fixes may fill a gap today, but they can carve a deeper divide tomorrow, subtly shaping how we see ourselves and each other in the long run. Inclusion thrives in the ordinary – with thoughtful, inclusive action, the housing emergency can be a powerful catalyst for a fairer Scotland.
The Everyone Home Collective has set out a course of action for the Scottish Government’s Housing to 2040 Strategic Board about taking a people first approach to the housing emergency. Read it here.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
You can revoke your consent any time using the revoke consent button.
