Our strategic plan 2025-2029

Scotland is in the grip of a housing emergency.

Today, at the start of 2025, the promise of securing a warm, safe, affordable home on an average wage looks further out of reach than ever.

Increasingly we are seeing housing rights breached, and year-on-year record levels of homelessness. 

Shelter Scotland exists to defend the right to a safe home. 

As we enter the final four years of our current 10-year strategy (2019-2029), the scale of dysfunction in our broken and biased housing system has never been more apparent.

Systemic bias means that children, Black people and People of Colour and people with disabilities bear the worst of the housing emergency. 

A functional housing system should protect everyone and make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring. Instead of helping, too often the system adds to the harm. 

Over the past 3 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters, the tenacity of our clients, the activism of our campaigners and the professionalism of our teams, we have brought Scotland’s housing emergency to the centre of the nation’s political debate. 

By the end of 2024, 13 local authorities had declared a housing emergency and committed to work with their communities to take emergency action. In May 2024, the Scottish Government declared that Scotland was facing a housing emergency and promised to work with our supporters, especially on the plight of children trapped in temporary accommodation. At the UK General Election in July 2024, every party that returned an MP agreed that Scotland is in a housing emergency and placed housing rights and social housing supply at the heart of their manifesto. 

We achieved this national prominence through our work with individuals and communities:  

• housing rights advisers making sure that individuals are equipped with knowledge of their rights 

• project officers imparting best practice in local services and making better use of empty homes

• solicitors making sure the courts protect people, especially when money is tight 

• campaigners challenging the failures in our housing system in parliament, on the airwaves and on the streets 

Now we must build on that success to secure real, long-lasting and irreversible change. 

The solution to Scotland’s housing emergency is staring us in the face: build more social homes and equip people with legal housing rights that cannot be denied.

But getting there requires politicians to look beyond the short-term of election cycles. They must commit to the long-term rebuilding of our housing system, where houses are homes not commodities. We know that this can only happen if people come together to demand it. 

We cannot afford to fail. We can see around the world that where the housing system fails, reactionary forces move in. Scotland has been spared the racist violence seen elsewhere, but we are not immune to the forces that allow it to flourish.

As we continue to work towards becoming a truly anti-racist organisation, we will speak out on the weaponisation of housing against minoritised groups and play an active role in dismantling systemic racism. 

We must work together to fix the broken and biased housing system from the bottom up.

In 2025-29 we will focus on three strategic goals: 

• demand and secure a new generation of social homes 

• strengthen and enforce the right to a safe home for all 

• build a coalition to secure long-term change 

As we look to the Scottish Parliament election in 2026 and local government elections in 2027, Shelter Scotland is uniquely positioned to lead a public discourse on ending the housing emergency. We will continue to build our local community services, our national homelessness prevention helpline, our housing rights online and our legal expertise – to make every citizen in Scotland literate in their housing rights.

We will use the power of our voice to present a powerful case for change and amplify the voices of those most affected by the failure in our broken and biased system. With our staff, our volunteers, our supporters, and our partners, we will make sure that the progress we achieve cannot be rolled back any time budgets get tight. We believe a home is a human right and we will keep up the fight until there is a home for everyone. 

Kezia Dugdale, Chair Shelter Scotland 

Alison Watson, Director Shelter Scotland

• 10,360 children are trapped in temporary accommodation. That’s up 149% since 2014 

• Every 15 minutes, a household becomes homeless 

• 1,659% increase year on year of instances of local authorities refusing to provide temporary accommodation to those legally entitled to it (up in a year) 

• 9% increase in households living in temporary accommodation compared to last year 

• 15% fall in social homes built compared to last year 

• across the country, 10 local authority homelessness services facing systemic failure 

• 43 children become homeless every day 

• 110,000 households trapped waiting for a social home 

• More than 7,400 occasions of people placed in unlawful temporary accommodation – a 41% increase in 12 months 

At Shelter Scotland we exist to defend the right to a safe home. 

As both a campaigning and service delivery charity we see the impact that the housing emergency has on people every day. At a time of record homelessness levels, social house building slowing down and housing rights being routinely denied, it is crucial that our efforts have the greatest impact possible. 

We believe that the best way for us to realise our vision of a Scotland where everyone has a safe secure home is through ‘the three Ps’: People, Policy and Practice. 

Providing help to people will always be at the centre of our work in our communities. But the scale of demand means that we simply cannot help everyone who needs it. Our duty to those people we cannot directly help is to secure change. Real change in the policies that say what should be done and real change in the practice on the frontline that too often means people are denied their basic legal right to a home. 

Our mission must go further than persuading the government to pass another unfunded law or only answer another phone call. And unless we can secure policy and practice change together, we will become part of the problem, as services are asked to do more with less. This approach leads to exactly the type of system collapse we are seeing today. 

Our greatest assets are our people, our reach and the awareness of our brand. 

Shelter Scotland is well placed to work collaboratively with other organisations, when they may be best placed to pioneer new measures to reduce harm or to help us advocate for new laws. 

At the centre of our approach is lived experience and the imperative to become a truly anti-racist organisation. A fairer housing system can’t be built unless we centre and amplify the voices of those most affected by the housing emergency and address the systemic racism in housing. 

We will bring together experts by experience and our allies across the country, to demand change and win a critical mass of public support that no future government could ignore.

Shelter Scotland is committed to a ‘test and learn’ approach to delivering our 10 year strategy. During the first 6 years we have been able to refine our models of achieving change. 

 Establishing a housing emergency approach 

In 2019-25, we approached our campaigning work for more social housing and stronger rights as two related but parallel projects. Rights work was viewed through the prism of practice failure, evidenced through our casework and escalated through our local relationships. Delivering social housing was primarily the remit of policy development and parliamentary engagement, to secure political support for national targets and resources. 

In the post-pandemic context, it became clear that social housing and housing rights are more interdependent than ever before. We recognise that the right to temporary and permanent accommodation requires there to be more homes for social rent. 

For this reason, we have integrated our work on rights and social housing into a Housing Emergency programme. This programme aims to build local and national support for co-produced action plans, to take us from systemic failure to a fair housing system. 

Partnership working 

Shelter Scotland works with a number of organisations nationally and in local authorities. Our participation in the Royal Foundation Homewards programme provides us with a platform to influence local prevention services in Aberdeen. The National Housing Emergency coalition, secured by Shelter Scotland, brings together the public, private and third sectors to find areas of common interest and challenge the government to move further faster. Our strategic partnership with Public Health Scotland contributed to new research into the harm experienced by children in temporary accommodation. 

At the start of our 10 year strategy, we set out to support our communities to lead their own fights for home. We set up a network of community organisers across our 4 locations: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee. They worked with grassroots organisations to build their capacity to challenge housing injustice. But increasingly the scale of systemic failure in local homelessness services meant that we needed to become more involved in local action. In response we shifted focus towards local public affairs engagement and local practice challenge through our community teams, redeploying the skills and ability of our people to meet the emerging challenge of the time. 

Anti-racism 

When we published our 10 year strategy in 2019, we did not centre the experiences of Black people and People of Colour in our work. While Shelter and Shelter Scotland were committed to challenging direct discrimination, we viewed the poor housing outcomes and experiences of Black people and People of Colour as a symptom of other economic inequalities and the lack of social housing. We believed that fixing social housing would benefit everyone. 

The public response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd forced us to confront our complacency that fixing the housing emergency would address inequalities in housing outcomes. We recognised the systemic racism in housing: that bias is hardwired into the laws, services and opportunities that shape the housing sector – including our own organisation. 

While the demographics in Scotland and England differ, the experiences of Black and People of Colour households in both nations are similar. As our communities grow in diversity, we must act now to build the truly fair, equitable housing system of the future that the people of Scotland - all people - deserve. 

1. Demand and secure a new generation of social homes 

Scotland’s housing system is failing to guarantee a safe, secure home for everyone who needs one.

This is not an unforeseeable outcome: it is the inevitable consequence of political and market failures in housing. 

Politicians have favoured quick wins over long-term solutions: fearful of a backlash from so- called ‘generation rent’ voters, they have focused on regulation of renting rather than building social homes at scale. But building social homes is the only long-term solution. 

While the Scottish Government and UK Government accept the arguments for building social housing, delivery is slow. There has been no target set for social house building during this parliament. This has reduced transparency and allowed the affordable housing budget to be raided when other projects become overspent.

The Scottish Government’s Housing to 2040 vision document recognised the leading role social housing plays in a well-functioning housing system. The lack of an accompanying delivery plan, however, means that most of that vision is still on the shelf.

The Scottish Government’s plan ‘Ending Homelessness Together’ placed the supply of permanent social homes at the heart of interventions such as Housing First and Rapid Rehousing. But once again plans faltered, as waiting times for a social home under Housing First became like those in the traditional homelessness route. The reason: the lack of available social lets in the first place. We need more than good intentions.

The lack of suitable social housing has had significant social consequences. Evidence shows that the people most impacted by poor housing are Black people and People of Colour, disabled people and women with children. 

In 2025-29 Shelter Scotland will work to secure the delivery of the social homes we need, to rebuild our broken and biased housing system.

We will: 

• work with those most affected by the chronic shortage of homes, to improve their access to social housing 

• advocate for a fair approach to allocating social homes where they are most needed 

• work with HACT (Housing Association Charitable Trust) to publish the final year’s research into the social value of social housing. This will show the financial and societal benefits of building more social homes 

• publish academic research into Scotland’s affordable housing need in partnership with CIH (Chartered Institute of Housing) Scotland and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations 

• work with organisations who specialise in support for minoritised groups underrepresented in social housing. Work to assist their efforts to tackle the additional barriers their clients face when accessing social housing 

• target strategic litigation where the evidence from our casework finds systemic discrimination as the root cause of unequal access to social housing 

• make the policy and financial case for buying social housing where no suitable accommodation exists, particularly for households with children who are trapped in temporary accommodation for far too long 

• explore policy options for long term affordable housing budgets to remove the risk of future in year budget cuts 

• co-produce a Scottish Parliament manifesto that places the delivery of social housing and fair access to allocations at the centre of a plan for a fair, rights-based housing system for Scotland. We will collaborate with communities most impacted by the lack of social housing and their representatives. We will engage beyond the housing sector alone to show the impact that the lack of social housing has on health, education, and human rights 

• work with local authorities and the public through our government-funded Scottish Empty Homes Partnership to show the positive contribution existing empty homes can make to the housing needs of our communities – including where practical as social lets for those who need them 

2. Strengthen and enforce the right to a safe home for all 

At the end of 2024, the Scottish Housing Regulator found 10 local authority homelessness services to be in a state of systemic failure, or at a heightened risk of it.  

It is meaningless to have world-beating housing and homelessness rights on paper, if the laws designed to protect people are broken every day. Scotland’s decision makers have compounded the effect by their willingness to break the promise to embed the UN Right to Adequate Housing in Scots Law. 

Since the removal of priority need in 2012 and the equalisation of the right to a permanent home, Scotland’s hard-won housing rights are being eroded. 

It is critical that housing rights are not only strengthened but properly enforced. 

We are proud of the role we played to secure the end of priority need, the right to housing support, the removal of local connection, and the right to suitable temporary and permanent accommodation – all supported by promises to build social homes. 

But if these rights can’t be enforced in Scotland today, we need to do things differently. 

In 2025-29, Shelter Scotland will seek to strengthen and enforce housing rights.

We will: 

• work in communities on local change priorities in each of the 4 cities where we are based. We will show the barriers people face, the causes of rights being breached, build capacity among local groups and individuals to advocate for their rights, and capture the evidence and experiences of people affected so that they can be brought to public and political attention 

• develop our national telephone and webchat service to a national homelessness prevention service for those in crisis 

• redevelop our website and digital services into a national housing rights education resource – as we seek to make Scottish citizens empowered housing rights advocates 

• target the work of our law service to show where housing providers are flouting the law. We will bring forward strategic litigation that can enhance the rights of thousands of people at a time 

• co-produce a Scottish Parliament manifesto that places the protection and enhancement of housing rights as the basis for a fair housing system. We will engage beyond the housing sector to show the detrimental effect of broken housing rights on health, education, and human rights 

3. Build a coalition to secure long-term change 

In 2019-25, we’ve seen that progress made on housing and homelessness can be fragile.

We saw this when the budget for the affordable housing supply programme was cut by 24%, though the overall budget was cut by only 9%. Ministers wrongly believed that there would be a higher price to pay for cutting transport and roads, than social housing. Thanks to our campaigning with our supporters, those cuts have been largely reversed - but it exposed the vulnerability of affordable housing investment. 

Similarly, ministers believed that dropping the Scottish Human Rights Bill would only anger charities and human rights advocates. But we cannot accept the idea that people won’t miss rights they never had. We know that this bill could have been a catalyst for change: transforming how local services target poverty and inequality, helping those who need it most. 

There are several reasons that these decisions can be made. Many members of the public still see homelessness as a problem caused by ‘broken people, not a broken system.’ 

Politicians don’t believe that voters will reward them, at the next election, for building homes. So-called NIMBY voters (‘Not In My Backyard’) are prioritised over younger, non-voters who need a home. 

The way that budgets are distributed makes it easier to cut housing than other areas like transport. 

But politicians would be less likely to target housing if there was more public scrutiny of the long-term impacts of short-term cuts. 

Only with a widespread consensus across voters, decision makers, civic society and activists, can we hope to secure lasting change. We must make sure that housing providers and decision makers hear the voices of the people most affected by political and market failure. 

In 2025-29, Shelter Scotland will work to secure a coalition for change. 

We will: 

• offer visitors to our website a way to advocate for system change alongside the information they need to tackle their individual housing problem 

• make Shelter Scotland the charity of choice for people who want to end the housing emergency. We will offer people more opportunities to campaign, fundraise and advocate for social housing and housing rights 

• help our corporate and community supporters to enhance housing literacy among their people and create a deeper connection with our cause 

• mobilise supporters in every constituency to make their voices heard in the 2026 Scottish Parliament election

• for the 2027 local government elections, ensure that every party seeking election in one of the 10 local authorities in systemic failure can show our supporters how they will end the housing emergency 

• work with other civic society organisations to proactively challenge racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric that the housing emergency is caused by immigrants or asylum seekers 

• host the Scottish Housing Anti-Racism Network to advocate for every housing provider to publish and implement their own anti-racism approach 

By 2029: 

• people experiencing homelessness are treated with dignity and have their rights enforced without intervention 

• public bodies adopt anti-racist and non-discriminatory policies 

• UN Human Right to a Home is enforceable in Scots law 

• net number of homes for social rent is increasing year on year 

• our supporters understand the causes of the housing emergency and the solutions 

• Shelter Scotland is the charity of choice for people who want to end the housing emergency 

• more existing homes are prioritised for those in greatest need more quickly 

• number of children in temporary accommodation is reduced by 25% 

Beyond 2029: 

•  more people can choose a social home 

• housing costs are reduced across tenures 

• housing security is increased for all communities including marginalised groups 

• homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring 

• people experiencing homelessness are treated fairly, quickly, and equally at all steps 

• the housing system incentivises dwellings as homes not commodities