LGBTQ+ people face alarmingly high rates of homelessness, yet many avoid seeking help due to mistrust, discrimination, and a lack of inclusive services. This blog from Dr Edith England and Dr Neil Turnbull explores the barriers LGBTQ+ individuals encounter when accessing support, the systemic gaps

Surveyor Calum Allmond believes that while it is good news that domestic and non-domestic Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) are both set to be revised, full alignment with UK measurement goes unaddressed. Scottish Government plans to reform Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) by late 2026 ha

Jimmy Black digs into the Scottish Land Commission’s new report, Community Land Scotland’s “Right to Live” and living on Solid Ground.

Prof Vikki McCall and Prof Kim McKee of Stirling University explore how the housing sector can play a crucial role in addressing the intersectional stigma of place-based ageing, highlighting how housing, disability, and ageing intersect to shape experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and discriminatio

Jimmy Black relives a few housing decades with Laurie Naumann, a campaigner on single homelessness, and a founder of Kingdom Housing Association. This is a story about Laurie Naumann, who recently retired after 44 years as a board member at Kingdom Housing Association. But it’s also a step bac

Jimmy Black cycled to Stornoway to meet Calum (Barney) MacKay, chair of TPAS Scotland and long-standing tenant activist. Barney is a trade unionist, and that explains a lot. Trades unions teach their active members how to do many useful things, including basic skills, like how to run a meeting or th

Jimmy Black meets the energetic Evie Copland, multi-award-winner and housing evangelist. “The biggest problem is … how do I change the world with this?” Evie Copland is finishing her Master's in Housing Studies, and she has been a distinguished student. In 2021 she won the Malcolm

Jimmy Black meets Bill Banks, retiring CEO of the multi award-winning Kingdom Group. Bill Banks looks relaxed, calm and entirely at home in his relatively modest office at Kingdom Housing Association. He’s a man at the height of his powers with a very solid track record of achievement. But Bil

Below is a full transcript of episode 65 of the Scottish Housing News Podcast titled ‘Rural housing: Public land acquisition and the Right to Live with Hamish Trench and Ailsa Raeburn'. Listen to the episode here.

“We go into this project not looking for awards but it's good actually to recognise the contribution of our staff and it's also a good way for our suppliers and the other stakeholders in this to be recognised as well. So it's a win-win-win for customers, us and the contractors.” If you c

“If we can get 90% of it right, I'd be delighted if somebody else came up with the other 10% and built on that. That's the history of social housing, right? Standing on the shoulders of giants and keeping getting better and better and better. We're just part of that chain.” Kieran Findla

Below is a full transcript of episode 63 of the Scottish Housing News Podcast titled ‘Accessible housing (part 4) with Simon Fitzpatrick'. Listen to the episode here.

A trip to Greenock to see the award-winning retrofit project at Prospecthill Court for the Scottish Housing News Podcast provides Jimmy Black with renewed vigour regarding the potential for multi-storey to play a part in Scotland's housing landscape. Take an elderly multi high above the Clyde on an

Following a conversation with Simon Fitzpatrick for the Scottish Housing News Podcast, Jimmy Black thinks about wheels and lifts, beautiful new Blackwood Homes and folks stuck up thousands of tenement stairs. Wheels. Perhaps architects should have an app which lets them push a virtual pram through e

Jimmy Black hears about some great work happening in Perth & Kinross; then thinks about people excluded from the housing market by high prices and poverty. We’re running out of words. We’ve used “housing emergency” to explain the failure of our housing markets to provide

Jimmy Black hopes Integrated Joint Boards (IJBs) will find inspiration at the Housing & Social Care Accessibility Summit, after a chat with Hanover Scotland's Angela Currie.

In the latest article in the ongoing Our Housing Heritage series, Scottish Housing News discusses the Glasgow Rent Strikes of 1915. In the absence of social housing, families across the UK in 1915 were at the mercy of private landlords who could hike rents and evict tenants at will with little restr

The Springburn office of ng homes is named after Ned Donaldson. But who was Ned Donaldson? Kieran Findlay recalls the contribution of the activist and the post-war battle to stop the privatisation of council housing at Merrylee. It was a cold sleety December day in 1951. Slum landlordism and sublett

Duncan Smith, who works in the social housing sector, has contributed this piece as part of his quest for more information about housing architect George Gibson. Several years ago, just after starting my current job, I undertook some research on the properties we were refurbishing at the time. I fou

Next month marks the centenary of Scotland’s first council housing estate, the Logie Estate in Dundee. Lauren Brown reports.

Orkney Islands Council has welcomed a £300k boost from the Scottish Government, for home energy efficiency works for homeowners, delivered locally by Warmworks on behalf of the council.

A new partnership has been set up to tackle fuel poverty which affects around one in four households across South Lanarkshire.

As Glasgow’s Retrofit Action Week kicks off this week, across Scotland the urgent need to equip our homes for a warmer, greener future becomes ever clearer.  Figures released last month showed a worrying increase in fuel poverty thanks to rising energy bills, and campaigners hope that the

Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) is demanding action from energy regulator Ofgem to tackle what it calls a ‘massive crisis’ in household energy debt.  In a hard-hitting response to an Ofgem consultation on the issue, CAS is today calling for a new energy debt relief scheme, which woul

In celebration of its 100th anniversary in 2025, property, land and investment firm Mac Mic Group has announced new partnerships with five exceptional charities dedicated to supporting homelessness and cancer care. As part of this milestone, Mac Mic Group is committed to raising £100,000, with

An independent evaluation of youth homelessness prevention model Upstream Scotland has concluded that the initiative shows promising early indications. Scottish youth homelessness charity Rock Trust launched Upstream Scotland over a year ago as part of a three-year pilot. The innovative programme is

An employment initiative supporting individuals with lived experience of homelessness delivers significant economic and social benefits, a new report from The Centre for Homelessness and Inclusion Health at the University of Edinburgh has revealed. Social Bite’s Jobs First programme is un

The Salvation Army is calling on the UK Government to scrap the planned freeze on Local Housing Allowance (LHA) to help prevent homelessness in Scotland as new figures for 2024 reveal an increase in applications for the fourth year running. Figures released yesterday show that from 1 April to 30 Sep

Reforms to the rental market in Scotland are not empowering tenants to challenge bad practice in the sector, according to new research.   The data shows that only a small minority of tenants are taking complaints about property conditions to the Tribunal created to resolve disputes where landlo

A bespoke property factoring service operating across Scotland has announced a major new recruit. Nic Mayall, formerly managing director of James Gibb and a past president of the Property Managers Association Scotland (PMAS), played a key role in transforming James Gibb into one of Scotland’s

Lettings and estate agency DJ Alexander has said rent levels in Scotland are best left to the market to determine, arguing that rent controls have inadvertently fuelled rent increases. The firm said that the latest statistics on rent levels in the private rented sector (PRS) show that rents have bee

Temporary restrictions on rent increases in the private rented sector will be withdrawn at the end of March 2025, the Scottish Government has confirmed. The measures were introduced in 2022 to help people during the cost-of-living crisis and were due to come to an end in March.

Housing minister Paul McLennan has written to the UK Government calling on them to reverse the recent budget decision to keep rates at 2024-25 levels for the coming year. In his letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Mr McLennan said the move will further widen the gap between Local

Funding for local authorities to test and improve how they deliver wrap-around support for parents and families will be doubled to more than £6 million by the 2025-26 budget, the Scottish Government has revealed. Social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said the government's Fairer Fut

More than 456,000 people are due to receive inter Heating Payments totalling £26.8 million this winter, social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville will tell MSPs today. Updating the Scottish Parliament on support with fuel costs for people on low incomes, Ms Somerville will confirm the S

West Lothian Council has approved plans to reduce the priority level for Scottish Welfare Fund grants, which will mean more local people will be eligible. The council administers both Crisis and Community Care grants from the Scottish Welfare Fund, to support vulnerable West Lothian families. Crisis