Seven projects across Scotland are to receive funding from a £1million homelessness prevention fund created by the Scottish Government.
The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and Homeless Network Scotland are jointly administering the Upstream Homeless Prevention Fund.
The successful projects form a learning programme running from June 2025-April 2026, with an overarching aim to prevent homelessness by funding tenancy sustainment and early intervention activities.
Funded activities help tenants remain in their homes, and the pilots will add to learning about the role of Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) in delivering new ‘Ask and Act’ homelessness prevention duties in the Housing Bill.
The projects support new and existing partnerships between RSLs and the third sector to provide community-based activities dedicated to tenancy sustainment. Each local partnership includes a cash fund to enable individual cash payments of up to £1,300 to practically help people avoid or exit homelessness.
The successful homelessness prevention projects are:
Orkney Housing Association Housing First Orkney (Orkney Isles)
West of Scotland Housing Association Ready, Steady, Roots (Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire)
Fife Housing Group Fife Housing Alliance Tenancy Support Project (Fife)
Sanctuary Housing and Community Connector (Dundee)
West Granton Housing Association Get Settled Archie project (Edinburgh)
Berwickshire Housing Association Domestic Abuse Tenancy Support Project (East Scottish Borders)
The fund will promote learning ahead of implementation of the Ask and Act duties, which will require a wider range of ‘relevant bodies’ to be involved in preventing homelessness.
It is supporting RSLs, the third and community sector to understand respective roles and connections to other relevant bodies and test local route maps to the new prevention duties. In doing so, the fund is supporting understanding of the role of housing associations to:
• Ask about housing circumstances through existing functions.
• Act on the information received to prevent homelessness or mitigate risk by using existing powers.
• Refer to local authority for homelessness assistance, if necessary, rather than by default.
The Fund will be accompanied by a programme of peer learning sessions and a final evaluation in 2026 that SFHA/HNS will make available to the wider memberships.
In this month’s briefing we share a report from the Housing Taskforce, research on ‘missingness’ in healthcare, a long read on the Thistle Safer Drug Consumption Facility in Glasgow, and details of the First Minister’s prevention-focused public service reform agenda.
And you’ll find a wide range of learning opportunities, events and research across homelessness and related sectors. Find the link below and sign up here to get the monthly briefing delivered straight to your inbox – the easiest way to stay in the loop.
Scotland’s housing emergency is more than stats and headlines. It’s a human issue that affects individuals, families and communities every day. This year’s homelessness conference is focused on the impact of the housing emergency on people. As the conference title says: It’s personal.
So it’s fitting that we can announce a great keynote speaker with a big personality. Someone who will inspire us all when we meet to explore how to build a better future where everyone is safe, well, respected, and in control.
Baroness Floella Benjamin: ‘Childhood Lasts a Lifetime’
A pioneering star of stage and screen, beloved former host of Play School, award-winning writer, campaigner and prominent member of the Windrush generation, Baroness Floella Benjamin has overcome adversity and prejudice since she arrived in Britain aged 10 to achieve stellar success in her career and as a champion for diversity and childhood wellbeing.
Baroness Benjamin’s keynote address, Childhood Lasts a Lifetime, is a powerful and anecdote-filled narrative of resilience to inspire us all to work for positive change.
The theme will resonate deeply with delegates, with childhood poverty still the strongest predictor of later homelessness, and 10,000+ children living in temporary accommodation in Scotland.
We’ll be bringing you more updates on details of the conference programme and speakers in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned and share thisHNS mailout subscription link with your networks.
Sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities
Get your message across to an engaged and expert audience from across multiple sectors. This year we have 9 great sponsorship and exhibitor packages to suit all budgets and preferences. Check out options below, get in touch at hello@homelessnetwork.scot or call for a chat on 0141 420 7272.
Over two unmissable days, Scotland’s Annual Homelessness Conference 2025, titled It’s Personal: the human face of the housing emergency’, will unite experts, advocates and those with lived experience to address the real-world impacts of the housing emergency.
Dive into four powerful themes – Safe, Well, Respected, In Control – and discover cutting edge strategies, share solutions and must-hear stories:
Safe: Champion the approaches needed to protect people and make homes the ultimate community safety solution.
Well: Build the case for health and social care to integrate with housing to transform housing options and lives beyond homelessness services.
Respected: Uphold people’s rights and redress the inequality they face, with a bold push to shape policy before the 2026 Scottish elections.
In-Control: Unlock solutions to financial inclusion, choice and the active participation of people navigating homelessness.
Expect inspiring stories, evidence-based practices and practical solutions that put people first. By focusing on the human impact, this year’s conference can help build a better future where everyone is safe, well, respected and in control.
In this month’s briefing: A year after the housing emergency was declared and with less than 12 months until the 2026 Holyrood election, demands for bold, urgent action to increase homes, address inequality and prevent more people becoming homeless are swelling to a chorus.
Two academic papers in recent weeks echo our sector’s call for radical transformation – not least from the Everyone Home collective, whose statement criticising a lack of ambition in addressing the crisis was cited in the Scottish Parliament Housing Emergency debate.
What these perspectives have in common is a plea for fresh thinking not only to address today’s crisis but also to put in place a strategy to build the homes we need to prevent homelessness for generations to come.
And on a grander scale, to create the fair, equal and dynamic country we aspire to be in reality, not just on paper, which means getting both the human and economic parts of the equation right.
You’ll find those papers, statements and other related research below, along with news, webinars and training opportunities in this month’s briefing, along with a subscription link.
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.
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