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Rough sleeping in Scotland has risen by 106% over the past three years. Record numbers of children are now living in temporary accommodation, official figures released this month show. In Glasgow, the city council leader warned last year that the authority had run out of temporary housing. This looks like a system approaching crisis point.
The paradox is that Scotland has some of the strongest homelessness protections in Europe. More than a decade ago, the Scottish parliament abolished the “priority need” test, creating a statutory duty on councils to secure permanent accommodation for all unintentionally homeless applicants. The charity Shelter considered Scotland to have had “the best homelessness law in Europe”. But having a legal right to a home doesn’t mean having a home.
The trouble is that social and affordable housing supply has failed to keep pace with need – and temporary accommodation has become a bottleneck. People who have been put up in hotel rooms and B&Bs have no way of leaving due to high rents and a lack of social homes. As councils exhaust their options, rough sleeping begins to rise.
Welfare powers are largely reserved to Westminster. But building social homes is a devolved responsibility – leaving the Scottish National party, which has governed from Edinburgh since 2007, exposed. It has responded with plans for a new national housing agency to address criticism that the real failure here is housing supply.
Analysts estimate that Scotland needs just under 16,000 new social homes each year to prevent homelessness rising further. In 2021, the SNP promised to deliver 110,000 affordable homes by 2032. However, it has fallen well short of that target. The Scottish government’s current commitment of 36,000 affordable homes over the next four years equates to around 9,000 per year, still far below the number required. Even those levels may be difficult to meet on the funding allocated. That all explains why homelessness continues to rise.
Perhaps Scotland should take a leaf out of Vienna’s book. It used public housing – built at scale and sustained over decades – so that it shapes the wider market rather than serving only as a safety net of last resort. Less than 1% of the population of Austria’s capital is homeless. The lesson here is that where public supply matches private provision, rents stabilise. Where it falls behind, the opposite occurs: costs rise and housing pressure intensifies.
The plan for a new national housing agency by Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney is a welcome, if belated, recognition that the system is not working. A body with national oversight could direct investment where need is greatest. However, Mr Swinney’s language stresses efficiency and investment partnerships, not a Vienna-style expansion of public housing.
Every year that the government does not deal with its housing supply, the problem compounds and the number of homes that need to be built shoots up. The issue will surely be raised on the doorstep during campaigning for May’s Holyrood elections, and is likely to feature again in five years’ time. Until then, more people will sleep on cold streets or in cramped hotel rooms. Scotland’s homelessness legislation is ambitious and humane. The test now is whether the Scottish state can build at the scale required to deliver on that promise.
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