The human cost of Scotland’s housing failure
On Easter Monday, I volunteered with Steps to Hope in central Edinburgh, serving meals to around 90 people. While many were homeless or in temporary housing, others came simply for the human connection. Among them was a young veteran carrying nothing but a sleeping bag. Caught in the grip of the housing crisis, the council had no bed for him; he was at rock bottom and desperate for help.
Steps to Hope stepped in, providing a warm meal and securing him a place to stay. They later told me he had been carrying a suicide note in his pocket. The fact that such stories are common in Scotland should be a mark of shame for us as a nation.
The next day I attended a community meeting on housing in Edinburgh, bringing together a panel of council leaders, housing associations and homelessness researchers. What was striking was not just the scale of the challenge, but the consistency of the message: Edinburgh is trying to act, but it is being held back by a system that simply isn’t delivering the resources required.
In the run-up to the Scottish elections this May, the homelessness and housing crisis has once again become a political talking point. As an MP for Edinburgh, I see the evidence of this systemic failure every day. Outside of election cycles, it is too often treated as a “hidden” issue, buried in statistics. But it is becoming increasingly visible in the growing number of tents across our city, which should serve as a stark reminder of political choices made, and not made, at Holyrood.
Edinburgh declared a housing emergency in November 2023. While the council and its partners have worked hard to produce an action plan, the central issue remains unresolved: funding. Scotland’s homelessness legislation is among the strongest in the world, placing clear duties on local authorities to prevent homelessness. Yet under the SNP Government, councils are being asked to meet these obligations without the means to do so. Worse still, budgets have been cut.
The consequences are clear. People are being left in B&Bs far beyond the statutory seven-day limit. Even when temporary accommodation is secured, it is often wholly unsuitable. Around 3,000 children in Edinburgh - and 10,000 across Scotland - are growing up in temporary accommodation. That is not just a policy failure; it is a moral one.
We need to fundamentally rethink how we view housing. It is not a “cost” to be managed, but essential economic infrastructure. Stable, secure homes underpin everything, from health outcomes to employment to educational attainment. When we fail to invest in housing, we pay the price elsewhere, particularly in our NHS and justice system.
Right now, the way funding is structured actively works against long-term solutions. One-off, short-term funding pots from the Scottish Government make it nearly impossible for housing associations to plan ahead, acquire land, or deliver at scale. At the same time, the gap between building costs and available grant funding is widening. In Edinburgh, a new social home can cost around £280,000 to build, yet grant funding covers only around £100,000.
Housing associations are forced to borrow the rest, limiting how much they can build and slowing progress at precisely the moment we need to accelerate.
This crisis is not just about new supply, it is about the condition of existing homes. Too much of Scotland’s housing stock is damp, inaccessible, and expensive to heat. While Scottish Labour’s Warm Homes Plan offers a serious route forward, large-scale retrofit programmes remain underfunded and deprioritised by the current Government.
Local authorities are doing what they can with the limited powers available. In Edinburgh, the council has taken action with a plan to triple council tax on second homes to bring more properties back into use, but these measures alone cannot compensate for a lack of national leadership.
Over the last two years, the Scottish Government has received an additional £12 billion in funding. Yet councils on the frontline of the housing crisis are still being asked to do more with less. Too often, resources have been diverted or absorbed by costly failures elsewhere e.g. the ongoing ferry fiasco, while housing slips further down the priority list.
For many, homelessness remains invisible until it affects someone close to them. But for thousands of families in Edinburgh, the lack of a permanent home is not just a housing issue, it is a barrier to employment, accessing benefits, opening a bank account, and building a stable life.
The reality is that the Scottish Government’s current funding covers only around half of what Edinburgh needs to tackle this crisis. That is a political choice.
This election presents an opportunity to choose a different path: one that properly funds local government, prioritises social rent, and treats housing not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental human right and a cornerstone of a fair, functioning economy.
Scott Arthur is the Labour MP for Edinburgh South West and sponsor of the Rare Cancers Bill in the House of Commons.
