How we are changing the law to prevent homelessness in Scotland

Beth Reid, Senior Policy Officer, Policy and Campaigns, Scotland

01.05.2025

For nearly ten years Crisis has been campaigning for a stronger system to prevent people becoming homeless in Scotland.  

It was one of our main asks ahead of the 2016 Scottish Parliament election and we campaigned to include the plans in parties’ 2021 election manifestos. Launched last year, the Housing Bill contains those plans – and we’ve been working to improve the legislation ever since. 

The good news is that MSPs on the Social Justice and Social Security Committee have now voted for the aspects relating to preventing homelessness to move to Stage 3 – though other parts of the bill are being examined by another committee. Once that work is completed, the bill has one more opportunity to be strengthened, before MSPs finally vote to decide if it becomes law. 

This is a momentous point for our campaign to prevent homelessness in Scotland – yet in many ways this stage is just the beginning.  

Because while we are now on the verge of changing the law, there is still work to do to show how we make the new system operate in practice, so it has the greatest benefit for people living with a threat of homelessness. The legislation provides a framework, but lots of the details still need to be worked through. 

One of the most important changes Crisis has achieved is a new mechanism for strengthening the new law in future when we know more of the details of how to do things most effectively.  

That’s why Crisis campaigned with Homeless Network Scotland for the Scottish Government to provide additional funding to run a series of pilots to test how the new system will work in practice. As a result, in the last budget Scottish Government announced £4 million for public services to tease out the practical aspects of how services work together, like sharing information and systems, and crucially, making sure no one falls through any gaps. 

Once this piloting work has been complete, the amendments we secured in the bill mean that the Scottish Government will use the information from these pilots to create more detailed laws, called regulations.   

These will provide more detail about what these services must do to support people facing homelessness, assessing what the issues and solutions are for each person or family, and providing a minimum level of support, all based on real-world testing.  

It will create a consistent approach across Scotland, and agencies can be properly held to account. This is vital to create the culture shift we need so that the help really does start early before things have escalated towards crisis point. 

This all needs to happen before the end of 2028, the final deadline for when the new requirements will have to be fully in operation – another change Crisis managed to achieve. And that is when people facing homelessness will really start to see the impact. 

This is a really innovative approach to developing policy – we don’t believe it’s been done anywhere else. And we believe that it’s an approach that will help us get to a world-class system for people living with the fear of losing their homes.