Category: News

Joined-up Government urged to act on housing emergency

Posted on

More than 40 organisations call for intervention within Government’s first 100 days

MORE than 40 leading organisations have today urged the new Scottish Government to put joined up working at the heart of its response to the housing and homelessness emergency.

The Everyone Home Collective has welcomed the First Minister’s commitment to a cross-government approach, saying it presents a genuine opportunity to drive lasting progress on homelessness if backed by decisive action within the Government’s first 100 days.

In its expert advice, Protect, Scale, Shift, the coalition – which brings together frontline services, the national lived experience platform and academic partners – argues that sustained reductions in homelessness will only come through strong joined-up leadership nationally and locally, alongside action to tackle the root causes of poverty and Scotland’s chronic shortage of affordable housing.

The coalition, convened by Homeless Network Scotland, says housing justice must become a central priority for the new administration, with stronger accountability, faster delivery of social housing and better coordination between housing, health, social care and justice services.

The warning comes alongside recent polling commissioned by Everyone Home revealing more than a third (35%) of Scots fear they could lose their home within the next few years, rising sharply to almost half (49%) of all 18 to 24-year-olds.

It also found 61% of people were more likely to vote for a political party in the recent Scottish Parliamentary Election if they prioritised tackling homelessness over the next five years.

Maggie Brünjes, Chief Executive of Homeless Network Scotland said: “We strongly welcome the First Minister’s priority on a joined-up government. Too often, siloed services intensify disadvantage, widen inequality and drive-up public costs.

“By raising the floor for people facing the hardest challenges – with stable housing, adequate incomes and coordinated support – we raise the floor for everyone.

“Resolving record levels of homelessness requires tackling root causes at scale, not short-term fixes, reclassifying cases or gaming definitions to improve headline numbers. We need a binding commitment to sustainable, joined-up solutions.”

Campaigners warn that without a substantial increase in housing supply, wider efforts around homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing will continue to fall short.

As of September 2025, 18,092 households were living in temporary accommodation, including 10,480 children, exposing what campaigners say is a widening gap between Scotland’s homelessness ambitions and the reality facing families.

Ms Brünjes added: “More than 10,000 children growing up without a settled home is not a statistic that can simply be absorbed into the system. It is a warning sign that the current approach is failing too many people, despite Scotland having some of the strongest homelessness rights in the world.

“We are concerned that the enormous Social Justice and Housing portfolio has once again been assigned to a single Cabinet Secretary rather than a dedicated Housing Secretary. While the joined-up ambition is positive, the sheer size of the brief risks weakening focus on the housing and homelessness emergency.”

The Protect, Scale, Shift advice sets out clear priorities across housing supply, prevention, rapid rehousing and joined-up services, including:

  • Delivery of at least 15,693 new social and affordable homes every year throughout the parliamentary term, backed by clear targets and accountability for the new More Homes Scotland agency.
  • Stronger homelessness prevention through a public health approach and better alignment across housing, health, social care and justice.
  • A renewed national commitment to Rapid Rehousing to reduce time spent in temporary accommodation and close the gap between policy ambition and lived reality.
  • National expansion of Housing First and transformation of supported housing for people with the most complex needs.
  • Robust cross-Government and cross-portfolio oversight to ensure genuinely joined-up working and accountability.

Ms Brünjes added: “Too much public money is spent responding to crisis after it has already happened. We know what works.

“The challenge now is closing the gap between Scotland’s progressive policies and the reality facing individuals and families. More homes, rapid rehousing and preventative, joined-up services offer the path to better lives and better value for public resources.”

The collective says the newly created More Homes Scotland agency could play a major role in reversing the crisis, but only if ministers attach clear targets and meaningful accountability to its work.

The advice briefing also calls for the return of a cross-ministerial oversight group in Parliament, mirrored by a cross-portfolio structure within Government, to ensure housing policy is properly aligned with wider public services.

Ms Brünjes said: “The next Government has a narrow window to demonstrate it understands the scale of this emergency.

“That means committing to more than 15,000 social and affordable homes each year, giving More Homes Scotland clear responsibilities it can be judged against and making sure housing, health, justice and social care are finally working in unison instead of in isolation.”

View the Advice Briefing: Protect, Scale, Shift.

Homeless Network Scotland is relocating

Posted on

Homeless Network Scotland will be relocating our offices in the coming weeks.

After 14 happy years at the Adelphi Centre in Glasgow, the riverfront building has now closed for redevelopment. Following a thorough search across Scotland, we are pleased to have secured a new central office in Glasgow that will enable us to continue delivering our work and supporting our members effectively.

New Office Details

New Address:
Suite 30, Ladywell Business Centre
94 Duke Street
Glasgow, G4 0UW

Timeline
We get our new keys on 11 May 2026. We will use the following weeks to move in, set up the office and upgrade the facilities. We expect to be fully operational from the new premises from early June 2026 onwards.

Contact Number:
Our main phone number remains unchanged: 0141 420 7272

During the Transition:

  • All member communications and support will continue as normal.
  • All staff email addresses will remain the same.
  • Scheduled events and activities will proceed as planned.
  • There may be short periods of disruption to phone lines or slightly slower response times while we move, but we will keep these to an absolute minimum.
  • We are particularly excited that our new office includes a dedicated training suite, which we look forward to using for in-person network events and training sessions.

Next Steps
If you have any questions about the relocation, please contact Janice Higgins at janice@homelessnetwork.scot or on 0141 420 7272. 

Thank you for your continued support and understanding during this period of change. We are confident the new premises will provide a significantly better base for our work.

One in three Scots fear losing their home in coming years

Posted on

Polling shows 61% more likely to back parties prioritising homelessness action in this election

More than one in three Scots are worried they could lose their home within the next few years, according to new polling that highlights mounting anxiety over Scotland’s housing and homelessness emergency.

The research found 35 per cent of people across Scotland are concerned about losing their home because of pressures including the cost of living, a lack of affordable housing, high rents and rising mortgage costs. Concern is highest among 18 to 24-year-olds, where almost half (49 per cent) share that fear.

Concern about housing insecurity remains elevated well beyond the youngest age groups, with 45 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds worried about losing their home in the coming years, followed by 42 per cent of 35 to 54-year-olds.

The issue is also being felt across Scotland’s cities and regions, with concern highest in Glasgow at 41 per cent, followed by Inverness at 37 per cent. In Aberdeen and Dundee 32 per cent of Scots are worried about losing their home in the next few years and 31 per cent of people in Edinburgh.

The findings came in polling commissioned for the Everyone Home collective, an expert group of more than 40 expert organisations focused on housing and homelessness in Scotland.

Homeless Network Scotland, who convene the collective, said the findings show housing justice must be a central concern for the new administration, with growing public sentiment reflecting the scale of the country’s housing emergency.

Margaret-Ann Brünjes, Chief Executive at Homeless Network Scotland, said: “These figures confirm that housing insecurity is no longer a fringe issue – it is a weight on the minds of people across Scotland.

“Younger generations, in particular, feel increasingly locked out of the stability they need to build their lives. Voters are sending an unmistakable message: homelessness and housing must be treated as urgent national priorities.

“While these issues are appearing in party manifestos, the level of ambition shown so far falls short of the radical action this emergency demands.”

Around 250,000 people are currently on housing waiting lists across Scotland, while more than 17,000 households, including around 10,000 children, are living in temporary accommodation according to Everyone Home, a coalition that unites third and academic sector expertise with lived experience knowledge of the issue.

Everyone Home’s Housing Justice manifesto called for a significant increase in social and affordable housebuilding to reverse those trends. Research commissioned by The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, Shelter Scotland and the Chartered Institute for Housing found Scotland must deliver 15,693 new social and affordable homes every year to reduce homelessness.

The collective warned that failure to act is costing the public heavily, with some local authorities now unable to meet their statutory duties, and forced to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on unsafe and unsuitable temporary accommodation – with a knock-on impact on wider council spending.

Brünjes said: “Homelessness is the harshest consequence of Scotland’s housing emergency. Our broken system is failing far too many people and causing untold harm. Housing justice means fixing that system so everyone has access to a safe, secure and affordable home.

“The human and financial cost of inaction is rising every year, and it is taxpayers who are footing the bill for a system that is being forced to rely on temporary fixes instead of long-term solutions.

“We are spending public money managing crisis rather than preventing it. That is why Scotland needs not only more homes, but better joined-up support across housing, health, justice and social care to stop people falling through the cracks.”

‘Prevention must become a pillar of housing policy’

The collective is also calling for full and effective implementation of new homelessness prevention measures and proper resourcing for frontline public services to identify housing risks earlier and allow intervention before crisis point.

The expert coalition said prevention must become a central pillar of housing policy if Scotland is to reduce pressure on councils, the NHS and wider public services.

Brünjes added: “We know what works. Prevention, early intervention and joined-up services can stop homelessness before it starts – but only if they are properly funded and delivered.

“This election is a major opportunity for all parties to show they understand the scale of the housing emergency and are prepared to meet it with the ambition required.” The polling comes as housing and homelessness campaigners urge political parties to commit to stronger action ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, with calls for housing justice to sit at the heart of the next parliamentary term.

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

Posted on

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.

Joint Coalitions Urge Scottish Government: Embed Fairness in National Housing Agency to End Housing Inequality Crisis

Posted on

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.