Category: Blogs

HNS comment: a healthier nation starts at home

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Healthy homes, healthy futures is the theme of this year’s Scottish Housing Day, on 16 September. To mark the moment, our Head of Policy and Impact Matt Hamill sets out in Scottish Housing News exactly why home matters so greatly in providing the foundation for building settled, healthy lives. As Matt writes, “Investing in homes is not just a question of bricks and mortar – it is an investment in a healthier nation and in all our futures.”

There are few things more central to our overall health and wellbeing than having a safe, secure place to call home.

It is one of the main foundations on which our ability to lead settled and healthy lives sits and when that security is removed or placed at risk, the consequences can extend into almost every other area of our lives. In this respect, it is not possible to have a full discussion around our health without also discussing a place to call home.

The Scottish Government’s Housing strategy, Housing to 2040, recognises as much, saying:

“Homes have never been simply bricks and mortar – good housing and homes support our health, our wellbeing, our life chances and our job prospects. Everyone should have a home that brings them those chances and opportunities.”

There is strong evidence behind this approach. The link between poor quality housing and health is long established and our first laws aimed at addressing the connection date back almost 200 years. Conditions such as cold, mould or damp can lead to serious health issues, while for older people, an unsafe home can increase the risk of a fall or injury. Research from the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence and the University of Glasgow estimates that health conditions associated with poor quality housing cost NHS Scotland around £530 million every year.

Housing conditions are linked to poverty as well, which itself has strong links to worsening health outcomes. Lower income households can have fewer options to move out of unsuitable housing or meet the cost of repairs, further deepening inequality. Poor energy efficiency in a home means higher energy bills and greater pressure on already stretched household budgets just to keep homes warm. Almost a third of Scottish households are living in fuel poverty, with 14% living in extreme fuel poverty.

The impact also extends to people’s mental health and to the risks to this that come with living in unsettled or poor quality accommodation. And when housing insecurity becomes homelessness, there is a real risk of homelessness and poor mental health reinforcing each other in a cycle that can be very difficult to break once it is established.

For children, long spells without a safe, settled home can disrupt their routines, friendships, progress at school, and the formative years that shape how they grow up. With child poverty one of the single biggest predictors of future homelessness, ensuring a stable, healthy home for children is not just about protecting kids from homelessness today, it is about preventing it in the future.

All of this makes this year’s Scottish Housing Day theme – Healthy Homes, Healthy Futures – particularly timely. A healthy, settled home is not just a question of housing policy, it is a question of public health as well. Housing to 2040 makes another important commitment that “everyone can expect the same high standards no matter what kind of home or tenure they live in.” Homeless Network Scotland is committed to working with our partners in the third sector and government to ensure this is not just rhetoric and that this commitment becomes a reality.

It is welcome therefore that next month will see Awaab’s Law come into force in Scotland, bringing with it new requirements for social and private landlords to investigate reports of damp and mould and begin necessary repairs within specified timescales. And with a Human Rights Bill promised in the second year of the current parliament, Homeless Network Scotland will be working with partners to ensure this contains strong protections around housing and homelessness, in light of the fact that the right to adequate housing is an existing human right enshrined in international law.

But the strongest legal protections in the world could not change the fact that in Scotland there are still not enough homes for everyone. With over 18,000 households in temporary accommodation, including record numbers of children, we still need to build the homes needed to meet the scale of the housing emergency.

This last point cannot simply be a discussion about governments hitting or missing targets. It must mean the right homes, in the right places where they are needed, and crucially, of the right quality.

Too often, housing continues to be discussed as something that sits separately from our ambitions to build a healthier country, reduce poverty, grow our economy, or give children the best possible start in life. In reality, achieving any of those goals becomes much more difficult if they do not rest on the foundation of a safe and settled place to live.

This year’s Scottish Housing Day can act as a timely reminder that housing policy is public health policy and that investing in homes is not just a question of bricks and mortar – it is an investment in a healthier nation and in all our futures.

The hidden everyday costs of homelessness

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Recent research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reveals the deep impact of the cost-of-living crisis for 7.4million families on low incomes. But this ongoing crisis takes a bigger toll on people experiencing homelessness – particularly those forced to sleep rough. Kirsty Roebuck from Bethany Christian Trust writes about the impact of paying more and more for everyday necessities.

Without access to clean water, electricity and security, rough sleepers are seriously disadvantaged when it comes to buying food, water and other necessities and as a result are locked into a cycle of higher spending with less money to save. People on Universal Credit receive £98.50 a week, which works out as less than £15 a day to spend on essentials that most of us take for granted. It might be interesting to consider how much you would have spent this week.

Bottled water – 40p

One of the clearest examples of this is water. As with many things, buying in bulk is key and can cost as little as 20p per litre for 6 x 2 litre bottles compared to 40p per litre if buying 1 x 2 litre bottle. However anyone who is sleeping rough is unlikely to want to carry 12 litres and more likely to buy less, more often at double the price. This can lead to drinking less water, resulting in dehydration which causes headaches, brain fog and in chronic cases, kidney trouble and high blood pressure. Coupled with an inconsistent diet and lack of shelter, this inevitably puts those rough sleeping at higher risk of serious illness and longer recovery time.

Shower – £5

Not having regular access to water also means not having regular access to showers. Showers are a part of daily life, helping us to feel clean and refreshed, but at £5 per use in Edinburgh city centre, a routine habit suddenly becomes a luxury you have to think about if you’re on a budget. The effects of not showering are twofold. On a physical level, the natural build-up of dead skin, oils and bacteria can lead to skin irritation, itching and a higher chance of infection overall. Mentally, being aware that it’s been a couple of days since you’ve showered is enough to make anyone feel self-conscious, especially when increasing the visibility of your situation and the stigma that follows it.

Public toilets – 30p

Having a home means access to a bathroom, but this is another problem to contend with for people sleeping rough. Thirty pence might not seem a lot, but multiple times a day for multiple days adds up quickly – and it’s not just about cost. Public toilets tend to have opening times, with a majority closing at 8pm. Inconsistent access to toilets can lead to digestive issues, especially when coupled with dehydration. Not having access to public toilets may give people no other option but to relieve themselves outdoors, risking police charges. Those with a criminal record then face significant hurdles in terms of future employment and housing.

Meal deal – £4

Meal deals are a popular lunch option including a sandwich, crisps and a drink that will set you back roughly £4, which isn’t much more than a week’s worth of sandwich ingredients and a multipack of crisps if you’re not too fussy about brands. The higher cost can be considered a ‘convenience tax’, almost like a surcharge for those either without the time or ability to bring something from home. But even a simple cheese sandwich requires a fridge run by electricity, clean cutlery and a space to prepare your sandwich and somewhere to store it until you need it.

Another common money saving tip is to bulk buy when things are on offer, which works out cheaper in the long run assuming, again, you have somewhere to store it. Without somewhere to store, preserve and prepare food, your only option is to buy as you go which means higher day to day spending and less opportunities to save for the future.

Storage – £7

In addition to not being able to store food, people sleeping rough, and in some cases in temporary accommodation, or sofa surfing, have to work out what to do with their belongings. Carrying your life in a backpack all day isn’t great for your back, causing aches and pains worsened by sleeping on a cold, hard ground. Another option is to hide your belongings to come back to later, leaving them open to the elements and at risk of theft if discovered. The third option is to pay for the storage services typically used by tourists, to keep items safe and dry for the day. However, as with any ‘make your life easier’ service, it comes with a convenience tax costing £7 a day for something that most people get for free by locking their front door.

Homelessness is a complex issue, often with mental health, trauma, physical health and housing intertwined before considering the costs for essentials that we take for granted. I hope this post has highlighted the resilience of those rough sleeping and experiencing other forms of homelessness, in spite of the challenges they face on a day to day basis.

How Scotland’s eight relevant bodies can act as one to drive deep change

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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. These public bodies, listed in the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025, are health boards, Integrated Joint Boards, local authorities, police, registered social landlords, prisons and young offenders’ institutions, social security and special health boards.

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.

A voice for change: GHIFT’s journey in understanding overnight services in the winter

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Earlier this year, Glasgow Homelessness Involvement and Feedback Team (GHIFT) investigated people’s experiences of using winter night shelters or welcome centres last winter. The team carried out a survey and interviewed people in three day centres, including a women’s service, to gather evidence of what’s happening on the ground right now and find out what people want prioritised in winter 2025-26. Their findings were published in the Homeless in winter report. GHIFT is a team of Associates of Homeless Network Scotland with first-hand experience of homelessness in Glasgow and at the forefront of work to improve services in the city. Below, team member Jeremy Wylie shares his experience of the project.

Glasgow in the winter is a challenging place. The cold and dark exacerbate the challenges people experiencing homelessness face, such as exposure and further isolation. As a team of people with lived experience of homelessness, many of us are aware of this issue and have slept rough in the winter.

So we wanted to turn our experiences into something constructive and positive. Night services play a vital role in helping people. GHIFT designed a survey of people using those services, so that the experiences of other people can inform solutions and strategies that will benefit everyone who needs support during the rough winter nights in future.

Designing the survey

Our goal in designing a survey was to gather evidence from people using night-time services to advocate for ways to improve this journey. While as a group we acknowledge that there can be trauma associated with shelters, we recognise that these places will continue to exist without better solutions being put in place.

We know there are better solutions, such as rapid rehousing into settled housing or access to community-based temporary furnished flats. But the immediate need for night-time services can’t be overlooked. The survey questions were carefully crafted to bring to light the experiences of individuals in order to identify the benefits and drawbacks of overnight services.

We included questions on people’s sense of safety and security, and challenges such as overcrowding and the lack of privacy. We knew it would not always be easy or comfortable for people to share their experiences, so we thanked participants with a £20 shopping voucher.

Conducting the research

Despite all members of GHIFT having an involvement in this project, three members conducted interviews with 16 individuals – 11 men and 5 women. We spoke to people in the day centres as we know how important it is to meet people where they are, in a familiar setting, with a central location and supporting a diverse range of people, all with different experiences.

To ensure the interviews were conducted ethically and respectfully, we obtained informed consent from each participant and assured them of their anonymity. The interviews were structured around the survey questions but we allowed room for open responses to capture a richer range of responses and experiences.

With all our feedback gathered, we sat down as a team and analysed it to pick out themes, barriers to support, and what is and isn’t working well. All of this is contained in the report. After it was published, we presented our findings to councillors, officials and an MSP at an event in the City Chambers in Glasgow.

Emotional and personal impact

Being involved in this project was a deeply meaningful experience for GHIFT. We had different roles including designing the questions, conducting the research and analysing the responses.

As people with personal experience of being homeless, we felt a strong sense of responsibility – it was gratifying to know our efforts could potentially make a small difference and raise awareness in our city, a place we are proud of, with a rich history and culture.

Glasgow has a global reputation as a leading city in tackling homelessness. However, GHIFT are not oblivious to the challenges the city faces.

At the City Chambers we had an in-depth discussion and to hear the honest truth about those challenges from the people we invited made us feel like we were not wasting our time with this piece of work.

We were all one team in one room, all connecting and trying to come up with a solution. This engagement made members of GHIFT feel respected.

Conclusion

There is no denying that over the past few years there has been a lot of change in the world, from the cost-of-living crisis to wars, and not to mention the lingering effects of the pandemic – an event that forced people to use hotels as emergency shelter and which mentally was a very challenging situation for people trying to get back on their feet.

However, the difficult times we are all experiencing won’t stop us from trying our best and persevering through choppy waters. Despite all the hardship, we saw and heard incredible examples of resilience and people’s determination to overcome their circumstances.

It became clear that addressing homelessness is a complex challenge influenced by many factors. This project reinforced our belief in the importance of compassion and the need for continued efforts to support those experiencing homelessness. It also made us more determined to advocate for those better solutions mentioned above, such as a rapid rehousing that works, and can provide a more dignified and sustainable path forward for people.

We hold power and responsibility to deliver equality for people

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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.