This month’s free network briefing shares a taste of the action from this year’s annual homelessness conference, including the launch of Everyone Home and All in for Change’s Housing Justice manifesto for the 2026 election.
Click below to catch up – and read all about All in for Change’s peer research report ‘Mapping Journeys through Homelessness’, a report looking back at 15 years of Housing First, a view on the current state of the housing emergency from the Scottish Housing Regulator, a joint letter from Shelter Scotland on refugee homelessness, a round-up of the biggest UK Refugee Week to date, and more.
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Homelessness statistics released yesterday show that the life-limiting impact of the housing emergency on people in Scotland is deepening – and risks becoming the norm with a continued absence of the action needed to solve the problem.
Households in temporary accommodation hit a record 17,240 with a 6% rise in 12 months. More than 10,000 children, enough kids to fill a town, spend long periods of their young lives stuck in temporary accommodation.
The official Scottish Government statistics for the year to March 2025 showed the average number of days people spend in this limbo is 238 days – 386 if you’re a couple with a child.
34,067 households were assessed by councils as homeless, with 31,695 open homelessness cases – the highest on record. The increase in repeat homelessness also signals a deepening cycle of instability, with people unable to secure lasting solutions amid stretched services and a shortage of social and affordable homes.
Meanwhile, the number of people reporting they slept rough the night before applying for assistance rose 28% to 2,465. Glasgow now accounts for 43% of all rough sleeping – followed by Edinburgh (8%), Fife (7%), Aberdeen City (4%), Dundee and Highland (both 3%). We know from research and lived experience evidence how dangerous that desperate course of action is.
And people were not able to exercise their right to temporary accommodation in 16,485 instances – up 106% in one year. This all combines to paint a picture of people being failed at crisis points despite the best efforts of statutory services operating under severe pressure, and shows the reality of a broken system.
More homes and more support
Earlier this month the Cabinet Secretary for Housing Màiri McAllan unveiled measures to heal that system with a housing emergency action plan. While her proposals prioritise creating more social homes and boosting support for people worst affected by the emergency, they don’t go far enough.
Above all, we need more homes. The £4.9bn spend on affordable homes announced by the Cabinet Secretary is well short of the estimated £8.2bn cost of creating the required 15,693 homes each year from 2026-2031, set out in a report by Shelter Scotland, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and the Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland.
If we are to bring these numbers down, we also need to make sure everyone has access to the support they need, delivered by a joined-up system with people at the heart.
More resource for Housing First was welcome. But with an estimated 10% of demand being met today, we need this scaled up dramatically to support people whose homelessness is made worse by severe and multiple disadvantage. This will prevent more people having to sleep rough and ultimately save money for other services including the NHS.
And looking forward, it is crucial that the new homelessness prevention measures in the Housing Bill are properly resourced and delivered, to divert more people from crisis and ease pressure on services.
We welcome measures announced today by the Cabinet Secretary for Housing to tackle the impact of the housing emergency on people across Scotland.
It is right to focus first on addressing the impact of this solvable emergency on children’s wellbeing and health, on the most disadvantaged and excluded groups in society, and on people who face real peril for want of access to safe accommodation.
And it is right to provide more investment for homes and more acquisitions. Without the right level of spending on these national priorities, homelessness and rough sleeping will only get worse, at great cost to people, communities, and the public finances.
While £4.9billion for affordable housing over the next 4 years is significant – along with a commitment to multi-year funding projections – it falls well short of the £1.64billion annual investment that is needed to bring homes in reach for everyone, according to authoritative research released today by Shelter Scotland, the Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations.
Rapid Rehousing and Housing First
We know Rapid Rehousing, including Housing First with wraparound support, is the right plan to reduce homelessness. Extending Rapid Rehousing Transition funding of £8million into 2026/27 will support councils to implement their Rapid Rehousing plans and provide the right housing options for everyone in their community.
A £1million uplift in Housing First funding this year can keep more people in tenancies, breaking the cycle of repeat homelessness and saving money for services people rely on when they become homeless, including the NHS, mental health, and justice.
Providing £3million for social landlords to acquire properties to deliver Housing First in targeted locations is a further positive step in scaling up Housing First, which currently meets just 9% of projected demand – a figure that has not changed from last year.
The next step must be to introduce longer-term funding arrangements and increase funding so Housing First can help more people. Local authorities and support providers are crying out for the certainty that multi-year settlements bring, for the benefit of tenants and frontline workers as well as their own vital operations.
Temporary accommodation
People who experience homelessness must have access to the same range of housing options as other members of the public. For some people, the private rented sector offers the right choice, in the right place at the right time. For that reason, investing up to £2million through the Scottish Government’s Discretionary Housing Payments scheme to support households in temporary accommodation to find settled homes in the private rented sector is also to be welcomed.
Increasing supply of good quality temporary accommodation through private sector leasing will, we hope, divert more people away from unsuitable and unsafe conditions – while also squeezing out providers who make millions by providing squalid accommodation.
The Scottish Government can go further by creating a challenge fund to supply more good quality temporary accommodation delivered by the third sector and social landlords. Increasing supply of good quality temporary accommodation will be crucial, given the measures announced today to proactively ‘flip’ good quality temporary accommodation occupied by families with children into settled homes wherever possible. A positive measure mustn’t have a negative knock-on effect.
No rollback on rights
The Cabinet Secretary has today shown boldness and a welcome sense of urgency with her action plan. We appreciate her strong commitment to preserving existing housing rights, voiced in the chamber, and her demand that the Home Office properly fund and organise its asylum processes.
It is unrealistic to demand that the Cabinet Secretary solve the housing emergency in the remaining nine months of this parliament. But it is crucial that this momentum continues after the election in May. The next Scottish Government must build on this action, not least by stretching to meet the true cost of building the social and affordable homes we need.
Alongside that, the next government must also ensure the prevention measures in the Housing Bill are properly implemented – because the best way to tackle homelessness is by preventing it happening as early as possible.
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.
Fife Council lead officer for Housing Access and Advice John Ashford took time out to come to a Connect event in Stirling earlier this year, where he shared the local authority’s experiences of running Housing First. In this blog John again provides an expert view on the strategies that are working well in the area, and the challenges.
Fife has 89 Housing First cases, with 73 people in tenancies and 16 who are not ready for their tenancy or are waiting for a property. They have gone through the referral and assessment process before signing up.
Support is provided when a person is in temporary accommodation if the service user has not been allocated a permanent tenancy – or wherever they are residing (if sofa surfing etc) – this is a good opportunity to build a relationship.
We upscaled Housing First in March 2023 and now have four organisations providing support – Rock Trust for Youth, Bethany Christian Trust, Fife Women’s Aid and Turning Point Scotland. When the upscaling commenced, there were 29 Housing First tenancies – in just over 18 months we have increased to 73 Housing First tenancies and 16 awaiting the allocation of a tenancy.
One of our greatest achievements is the allocations process. This involves Housing Options discussions with case managers, providers and allocating officers in different areas.
We will identify two or three voids matching what tenant is looking for. This is not always possible due to housing demand but will look to identify at least one property that meets the preferences the customer has confirmed.
We encouraged the allocations officers to understand that we offer people a choice of home because that’s more likely to result in a successful tenancy. However, we do also attempt to manage the expectations that it is not always possible to provide multiple options on properties due to housing demand.
With any person experiencing homelessness we try to balance the preferences of the homeless customer against stock turnover, demand and number. But it also needs to be a realistic conversation.
People in Fife are more likely to be housed in a bigger town with more turnover of stock. There are challenges in the more rural areas – for example a small village might not have good transport links or a chemist. Tenants need to have support provision in those areas too.
Making sure tenants have access to other services can be a challenge for us and for the tenant. Operationally, we have great relationships with the support providers. We have a steering Group for higher end strategy and an operational Group. But once you step out of those groups it becomes harder to get buy-in. People tend to only come to those groups if an issue is raised about a tenant.
If I could change one thing, I would go to other local authority services and say ‘this is how much you will save and reduce returns into your service through Housing First. This is how we can stave off crisis points for people accessing those services’.
I would love to see Housing First models for care leavers or prison leavers – programmes for different groups. At the moment, in Fife, this is not the case but I would like to see this opened out to give opportunity to more groups that require the support given in Housing First to have access to this.
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