Jamie Milne, Policy & Communications Advisor at Homeless Network Scotland, on why the people who need help most still pay the highest price – and how The Level can raise the floor.
When life gets complicated, people need more than one kind of help.
A safe home. Support with mental health or recovery. Help with money. Protection from harm. A fair chance with the justice system.
But the services meant to help still often work in separate boxes. People cannot unpack their crises one by one. They get passed from door to door – or fall through the gaps entirely.
For people whose lives have been shaped by poverty, trauma, violence and inequality, this is not rare. It’s routine. Siloed systems do not cause these problems on their own. But they deepen them, repeat them – and make recovery far harder.
These are the hard edges of Scotland’s public services.
A system that asks the impossible.
Severe and multiple disadvantage is what happens when mental health, addiction, homelessness, offending, poverty and trauma overlap in one life. These issues reinforce each other. A prison sentence can trigger the loss of housing. Homelessness can deepen mental ill-health. Distress is self-managed with substances, increasing the risk of further justice. And round it goes.
No single service can break that cycle alone. Yet we still too often ask people to recover in sequence: sort this problem first, then that one, then the next.
The human cost is profound. People retell their trauma at every door. Some disengage. Some only find continuity through crisis. Hard Edges Scotland even found people offending in the hope of getting support through the justice system. When that is what “access” looks like, the system has already failed.
There is a public cost too. Repeated emergency responses, revolving-door demand and missed prevention create what can fairly be called a silo tax: the extra price paid when fragmented services meet complex lives. People at the hard edges pay it first. Public services and communities pay it too.
Everyone agrees on the direction. Delivery is the gap.
For years, Scotland has committed to prevention, integration and No Wrong Door. The ambition is shared. The problem is consistent implementation for the people whose lives cross multiple systems at once.
That is why The Level matters.
The Level is Scotland’s practical Delivery Protocol for people facing severe and multiple disadvantage. It is not another strategy competing for attention or resources. It turns existing commitments into everyday practice. It sets a national floor while enabling local leadership. And it gives practitioners, practice leaders, funders, commissioners and policymakers shared tools to work across boundaries.
At its simplest, The Level helps us do three things:
- Prevent system failure where it hurts and costs most.
- Integrate services from the margins inward.
- Raise the national floor so the most marginalised are not left behind.
It is built from evidence, lived experience and frontline learning – including a three-year test of change across different local contexts. It is about culture and practice as much as process: rebuilding trust with people who have been let down before – and stopping the system from adding harm.
When the system works for people at the hard edges, the floor rises for everyone
If we keep failing the same people in the same ways, nothing else we do will fully work. A system that can hold complexity, act earlier and stay with people through overlapping needs becomes more preventative and more resilient for the wider population too.
On 6-7 October at Perth Concert Hall, Scotland’s National Summit on Severe and Multiple Disadvantage will bring together people from housing, health, justice, social care, community organisations and lived experience to face this challenge directly.
Day 2 includes the formal launch of The Level.
This is not a conference for stating the problem one more time. It is a moment to agree how Scotland turns No Wrong Door into consistent practice for people at the hard edges – and to leave with shared tools, clearer expectations and a strong common purpose.
Join us.
Raising the Level: from hard edges to whole lives.
Perth Concert Hall, 6-7 October
If your work or life connects to multiple disadvantage, you should be in the room.