Beyond Shelters: Unpacking Global Lessons from Scotland’s Journey Towards Housing Justice

Globally, shelters dominate accommodation-based responses to homelessness, offering dormitory-style ‘shared air’ accommodation at a significant scale in many cities, with specific rules on length of stay, curfews, and behaviour. Despite their widespread use, shelters are associated with negative experiences and a range of harms. Based on this evidence, this paper argues that reducing shelter use in favour of less damaging alternatives is necessary to the pursuit of housing justice, by which we mean minimising housing-related harms to the very worst off. The paper’s key contribution is to demonstrate that ending shelter use is an achievable policy goal, as demonstrated in Scotland, where a shelter-free response to homelessness was in operation from 2020 to 2024. Drawing on data from a longitudinal study of trends in and responses to homelessness across Great Britain, we identify the factors that enabled the closure of shelters in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic - including Scotland’s comparatively low levels of rough sleeping - and the immediate steps that were taken to do so. We also assess the sustainability of Scotland maintaining a shelter-free homelessness response and key risks to it, including rising demand, gaps in provision, and public opinion/community action. The paper closes with a discussion of the implications for homelessness policy and practice globally and the potential for a paradigm shift away from shelter-based responses.