Nobody should be without a home at Christmastime

For most of us Christmas is a time for family get togethers in cosy homes with roaring fires – or at least central heating. Unfortunately, the reality for some in Scotland is that there isn’t a place to call home and the prospects of finding a permanent one remain remote.

The latest Scottish statistics covering 2024-2025 show that 40,688 applications for homelessness assistance were received in one year; there were 31,095 open homeless cases; and 17,240 households were in temporary accommodation, which was the highest-ever figure. There were 34,067 households assessed as homeless containing 34,674 adults and 13,041 children, the highest figure since 2011-12.

Each year these figures get worse, with tens of thousands of Scots continuing to spend Christmas without a permanent roof over their heads. My firm works closely with councils to try to find accommodation for those who find themselves homeless, but demand far outstrips supply, and there remains a feeling that we are losing the battle to find people homes. The private rented sector (PRS) has always played a part in providing emergency accommodation if there is availability, but this is not a permanent solution.

With over 177,000 applications on housing lists in Scotland and just 3,151 social housing newbuild starts in the latest year to September 2025, it will take decades to address this backlog, indicating there is no immediate, or even long-term, solution to meet current housing demand.

The PRS currently provides homes for three quarters of a million people in Scotland who would otherwise need to rely on the social housing sector to provide a home. It is clear, then, that without the PRS the homeless figures would be considerably higher and the housing situation even more unsustainable.

Obviously, this cannot and should not go on. There needs to be an agreed, long-term solution which achieves as broad a consensus as possible on how to resolve this pressing issue. Given the enormous number of people now on the social housing waiting list in Scotland we need to develop answers which will work for decades to come rather than for the next few months or years.

A cross-party agreement is immediately required to generate growth across the three core parts of Scotland’s housing sector: housebuilding for homeowners; the private rented sector; and social housing. Only by uniting the various parts of the entire housing sector will we come close to resolving the terrible problem of homelessness in Scotland. Nobody wants to see anyone living on the streets at Christmas or any other time of the year. Nobody wants people placed in temporary accommodation hundreds of miles from their families and friends with young children living in cramped hotel rooms. A solution to these issues requires a better and faster planning approval system; encouragement and support for more investment in the private rented sector; and a sustained plan for substantially more social housing over a 20-year period.

We need policies which look beyond the short term five-year political parliamentary timeframe and to plan for enough homes to be provided over the next two decades so Scots have a home to be proud of and somewhere to happily celebrate Christmas, and the rest of their lives, in the future.