Tag: homelessness

One in three Scots fear losing their home in coming years

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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

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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.

February Network Briefing

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The first Network Briefing of 2026 follows a busy start to the year, with the Scottish Budget and Spending Review, plus the announcement of a new national housing agency, More Homes Scotland.

Read the briefing for commentary and reaction to those events, plus all the latest research, news, updates and opportunities from within and beyond our sector. And this month we welcome a guest contribution to the Network Briefing from the Cabinet Secretary for Housing, Màiri McAllan.  

Read on for more and stay in the loop – subscribe here to receive your free briefing every month.  

Read the briefing

Cabinet Secretary for Housing Màiri McAllan writes for the Network Briefing

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“A budget is more than just a series of numbers on a page; it is an embodiment of our values”

– Barack Obama

Scotland already has a strong housing and homelessness policy framework, including some of the strongest homelessness rights in the world. By providing the financial backing needed to turn policy ambition into practical action, the 2026-27 Scottish Budget aligns investment with our vision for Scotland as a nation of prosperity, fairness and equality, where no one is left behind.

With a record £926 million committed to the Affordable Housing Supply Programme, this represents the largest single funding allocation for affordable housing since records began. This is part of our wider commitment of investing up to £4.9 billion over the next four years to support the delivery of 36,000 affordable homes, including family homes for up to 24,000 children – helping to tackle child poverty and end reliance on unsuitable temporary accommodation.

Everyone deserves somewhere to live that is safe, secure and meets their needs. The Scottish Government wants all temporary accommodation to be of good quality, and we have clear standards in place through the Unsuitable Accommodation Order and temporary accommodation standards framework, which local authorities are expected to meet.

However, I recognise the intense pressures councils are facing as they work to meet their statutory homelessness duties – pressures that have been exacerbated by a shortage of affordable housing, UK Home Office policy and Brexit, as well as global economic factors, including post-pandemic inflation and the energy crisis.

I have been clear that local authorities cannot be left to manage this challenge alone. Through my housing emergency action plan, £80 million has been targeted to the local authorities experiencing the most sustained temporary accommodation pressures, supporting the acquisition of homes and helping to reduce the use of unsuitable temporary accommodation such as bed and breakfasts and hotels.

This approach is already delivering results, with both City of Edinburgh and Fife councils giving positive indications they will achieve compliance with the law by March 2027. This must clearly be what we are all working towards.

Whilst these are undoubtedly steps in the right direction, hearing directly from people with lived experience of homelessness about the instability, trauma and barriers they face has convinced me that incremental change will not be enough. To successfully tackle the housing emergency, we must be prepared to take brave, bold action and change our approach.

That is why we intend to establish a new national housing agency providing simplicity, scale and speed in the delivery of the homes Scotland needs. This will help ensure that increased investment delivers the homes needed to prevent and end homelessness.

By accelerating the supply of affordable and social housing, unlocking stalled sites, and addressing barriers to delivery, it will create more settled housing options – helping to prevent the harm of homelessness, shorten time spent in temporary accommodation, and ease pressure on local authority homelessness services across Scotland.

Increasing the supply of homes, while essential, is only part of the solution. To successfully end homelessness, we must focus on prevention as well as provision, because preventing homelessness protects dignity, reduces inequality and unlocks opportunity.

In 2026-27 we are making a record £106 million available to local authorities to spend on Discretionary Housing Payments to help struggling households stay in their homes and prevent homelessness. This includes £83 million to ensure no one in Scotland pays the UK Government’s Bedroom Tax.

The ‘Ask and Act’ duties in the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025 place early intervention at the heart of our approach and will make preventing homelessness a shared responsibility across public services. To support this shift and to supplement funding for prevention activity included in the local government settlement, we provided £4 million this year to help non-housing services prepare for the new duties, alongside a further £4 million in 2026-27 for a range of homelessness prevention and response initiatives.

We will continue to report annually to Parliament on progress against the actions set out in our Ending Homelessness Together strategy, ensuring transparency and accountability, as we seek to deliver the systemic change needed to achieve real, measurable outcomes on the ground.

Ending homelessness is both a moral imperative and a measure of who we are as a nation, and I am determined to continue to drive the momentum needed to make that ambition a reality.

Budget Round-up: Advances in housing supply – but the gap to ending homelessness persists

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The final Scottish Budget before the Holyrood election is a step in the right direction on housing and homelessness. But amid a continuing emergency that is causing real harm to people across Scotland, the next Scottish Government must go further to reverse chronic underfunding that is leaving thousands of people without a home.

The Budget confirms £4.1billion in public funding to deliver 36,000 affordable homes over the next four years, including 25,200 for social rent. This includes a welcome 21% increase on the original budget for 2026-27 – but falls short when independent research shows we need at least 15,693 affordable homes delivered every year to address homelessness.

A multi-year approach with funding rising year-on-year provides more certainty to attract investment and deliver on commitments. But this platform can do more than offer stability, important though that is – it can serve as a launchpad to significantly ramp up delivery towards that target.

Today, more than 17,240 households are trapped in temporary accommodation, including 10,180 children, who are waiting on average 238 days for a settled home. Without aiming higher, the human cost of this situation will rise alongside the eye-watering financial cost.

Prevention is key, alongside bricks and mortar. The Scottish Spending Review sets out a focus on preventative approaches across budgets and reform to join-up services. These commitments echo what the Everyone Home collective and All in for Change are calling for in their Housing Justice manifesto.

Targeted funding for Ask and Act

We urge the Scottish Government to prioritise implementation of a coherent and effective homelessness prevention system – including targeted resourcing now to lay the essential groundwork for the new Ask and Act homelessness prevention duties, so they work as intended when enacted in future years

The same goes for reforming public services. Those hit hardest by the housing emergency often face overlapping crises, yet services are built to tackle just one issue at a time.  Fixing that will prevent the worst harm to those worst off and save money for the public purse.

These are laudable policies that promise meaningful change. They must not be allowed to fall by the wayside with a change of administration – and the same goes for spending commitments on homelessness services and support, including Housing First.

On 7 May, we will cast our votes for the next Scottish Government. Whoever takes the reins needs to know that taking decisive action commensurate with the scale of the task to make sure everyone has a home may not be easy, but it is achievable and it is worth it – for people, communities and wider society.

As the Finance Secretary said when delivering her Budget:  “The choices we are able to take, in this, our national parliament, make a real difference for the people we serve.”

Our questions of the Finance Secretary and Cabinet Secretary for Housing are:

  1. What specific additional actions and updates will be allocated in the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan and Housing to 2040 action plan to ensure the affordable housing commitment translates into enough social rented homes to prevent and end homelessness?
  2. How will the Ending Homelessness Together Fund be monitored to ensure it delivers systemic change, including targeted resourcing to lay the essential groundwork for the ‘Ask and Act’ duties with non-housing services?
  3. How will the Scottish Government work with local authorities and providers to reduce the use of unsuitable temporary accommodation, including setting clear expectations and timelines?

Homelessness and housing in the Budget at a glance:

  • £4.9billion investment in affordable homes over the next four years, including £4.1bn public sector funding, to support delivery of 36,000 affordable homes and wider all-tenure ambition. 

For 2026-27:

  • Continued funding of Discretionary Housing Payments to mitigate the UK bedroom tax, benefit cap and welfare shortfalls including the freeze in Local Housing Allowance rates.
  • £1.3million towards Scottish Empty Homes Partnership to expand the core service and fund new small‑scale projects.
  • £11.5million for the multi‑year ending homelessness together fund, for measures including Rapid Rehousing transition and the Fund to Leave, which supports women and children affected by domestic abuse.
  • £49million for Housing Support, Fuel Poverty and Housing Quality. 
  • Anti-poverty measures including a boost in weekly Scottish child payment to £40 for households with a baby under the age of one.

Find the full Budget and spending plans here: https://www.gov.scot/budget