‘Confronting systemic racism in housing’ with Gordon Llewellyn‑MacRae and Dr Nadia Ayed - podcast transcript

Kieran Findlay (00:08)

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast. I’m Kieran Findlay, and today with Jimmy Black, we’re looking at one of the groups most disproportionately affected by the country’s housing emergency. Black people and people of colour.

Late last year, Shelter Scotland and the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights released a stark new report which revealed that systemic racism is shaping who gets help, who gets turned away, and who is left waiting the longest for a safe permanent home?

Jimmy Black (00:41)

So the findings are sobering and have prompted calls for action and for social landlords to adopt a meaningful anti-racism policy. But it’s not just a Scottish issue; these patterns echo what researchers across the UK are finding too. So today we are bringing these perspectives together to find out what systemic racism looks like in practice, why it’s still embedded in our housing systems and crucially, what needs to change.

Kieran Findlay (01:09)

We’re pleased to be joined by Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae, who is Assistant Director of Communications and Advocacy at Shelter Scotland, and Dr Nadia Ayed from I-SPHERE at Heriot-Watt University.

So Gordon, let’s get into the findings of your own report. It concludes that systemic racism is embedded in Scotland’s housing system. Could you give us some of the headline figures, please?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (01:36)

Certainly, I think the one thing I would say at the start is we need to really understand what we mean by systemic racism. What we’re trying to address is why does Scotland’s housing system create different outcomes for people based on their skin colour? And that’s not all down to direct discrimination, although that does exist, it is also because of the way in which we build the system.

The report finds that, an analysis of equalities data, that black and people of colour in Scotland are two and half times as likely to experience homelessness compared to white Scottish households, and that black people of colour are more likely to reside in private rented sector, which is intrinsically less secure and more expensive.

We see that black and minority ethnic groups use a different terminology here because it was a different data set. And more than twice as likely to struggle to pay their mortgages or rent. Ultimately, we see that, or we believe that current housing strategies lack sufficient detail on how the people in power understand the impact of race on the housing outcomes of the population, which is why we’ve made a series of recommendations on the UK and Scottish Government to start embedding an anti-racist approach into Scotland’s housing system.

Kieran Findlay (02:55)

You’ve reported and you’ve mentioned there, that they are 2.5 times more likely to face homelessness than white households. What factors are driving this disparity in particular?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (03:06)

We believe some of the things that driving that most recent change are issues to do with the kind of acceleration of the Home Office decision making on refugees. But it would be wrong to say that this is a uniquely recent phenomenon. Even if we go back before when the Home Office made that change, we believe it was something that 1.8 times as likely black people are coloured to experience homelessness. That has risen to two and a half times in the last few years, but it was still disproportionately high.

The drivers of that are multiple and complex, but there are things like where new communities are forming, they will tend to form, some of them will form in areas of higher housing costs and lower security, where people are denied the right to work as we see in the recourse of public funds or we see elsewhere, when we see people pushed into more precarious forms of housing.

We don’t know all the answers, but we think one of the key answers is to start talking about this, start improving the visibility, the representation of black and people of colour in our own organisation and in others across the sector. And most importantly, the kind of how do we do it? We need to do it together. We need to create a network, which is why we’re supporting the Scottish Anti-Racism and Housing Network to really be that community.

Jimmy Black (04:31)

Gordon, we’re going to come on to that and we’re going to look at these issues in detail. First, well, we’re going to go to Nadia as well in a moment, but one of the puzzling things is that the Asian community seems to be less likely to suffer homelessness. Is that an anomaly?

Dr Nadia Ayed (04:48)

So that’s a really interesting question and something that we dealt in during our report. And I think something to think of is what we mean by homelessness. And if we have a kind of broad definition, which includes housing insecurity and precarity, then we can see that particularly Asian communities are at risk of more hidden forms of homelessness.

So I can give you a few numbers from our report in regards to this. So if we look specifically at rates of sofa surfing, we can see that Pakistani and Bangladeshi-led households are at particular risk of sofa surfing. And that means that when we look at sofa surfing numbers, those groups are significantly more likely to be found within those numbers.

And similarly, in fact, even more so, the ethnic and racial disparity when we look at overcrowding. So yet again, Pakistani and Bangladeshi households are over seven times more likely than white households to be experiencing overcrowding.

And so I guess that kind of comes back to the point in terms of regarding kind of what do we mean by homelessness. So if we’re looking at statutory homelessness, then rates for Asian communities generally are lower. What we see is that black communities in particular are at risk of statutory homelessness, but overcrowding and sofa surfing in more hidden forms of homelessness certainly affect a variety of Asian ethnicities.

Jimmy Black (06:10)

So, Nadia more about the English research and some of the inequalities which you uncovered.

Dr Nadia Ayed (06:16)

Yeah, so we published a report in summer in 2025 and we were looking at race, ethnicity and homelessness in the UK. The data was largely skewed towards England, but there are some tables and kind of figures relating to Scotland and Wales. But what we found is that kind of across the board, ethnic and racially minoritised groups are at elevated risk of homelessness.

So in fact, we find a slightly higher rate than what Gordon mentioned in the Shelter report, which may likely be a reflection of different datasets that we were looking at. But we found that black households are almost four times as likely to face statutory homelessness as compared to white households. As I just mentioned now in terms of sofa surfing and overcrowding, particularly those rates were elevated for Pakistani and Bangladeshi households.

What we’ve kind of tried to delve into as part of our report as well, which was a kind of three-and-a-half-year-long project, is to look at the potential drivers for these kind of elevated risks and discrepancies. And we also importantly looked at outcomes after people have gone through the statutory homelessness process. To understand what is the kind of that people are going through.

I can go into that in more detail perhaps in a minute. Those kind of racial and ethnic disparities existed as well when we look at the outcome. The other side of the statutory homelessness process, social housing, white households were more likely to be allocated social housing as compared to many minority groups. And as Gordon said as well, there’s kind of differences in terms of housing tenure. So minority, minoritised groups are more likely to be found in private rental, which of course, puts people at kind of even more elevated risk.

Kieran Findlay (08:03)

Gordon, I’m keen to hear if your research uncovered anything about the human impact of these policies or of these outcomes. In Nadia’s report, she talks about black and other minoritised people feeling compelled to change their names or accents or appearance in an attempt to avoid discrimination. Anything like that in Shelter’s report?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (08:30)

Our report was very much an analysis of equalities data. So there wasn’t the same kind of experiential research, but we did do a previous piece of work with, actually with Heriot-Watt, that was funded by the Aberdeen Financial Fairness Trust. They did look at people’s lived experience of the system. And what that showed us was fear, sometimes well-placed, sometimes just an inherent fear, of how people would be treated.

So, not wanting to complain about a landlord because they fear reprisals. And I’ve said that includes the social sector as well. There’s just a general sense of precariousness that means you don’t cause trouble. You don’t create problems. That was definitely the kind of thrust of what was being reported.

We also recognised that people experience the threat of and the actual violence, external violence, which they often attributed to race and racism. And they weren’t always confident of what support they would get if they engaged the social landlords or the private landlord over that.

So people’s fear and experiences of racism certainly informs how they then are able to navigate the housing system. And I think the challenge for people working in the system is to say, we can’t just expect people to all funnel through the same front door with the same leaflet and the same way of engaging with services if the different fears and different experiences that would cause them to respond differently.

That’s why we talk about an anti-racist approach really being how do we understand why some people perceive one organisation as a good place to go and one that they’ll be listened to and another one somewhere to avoid. The other big issue we found is language and access to interpretation and materials in languages.

That’s sometimes not always about the ability of a person to read things in English or to engage in English, but it can also just be a signal of the intent of that service provider to make themselves available and considering how do you include different people? Do you make sure that we are thinking about how accessible we truly are? It’s difficult to cover all languages and all the kind of differences, but taking a few first steps can make a massive difference in our view.

Jimmy Black (11:26)

Can I ask, given we’ve got a situation where people are worried about coming forward and asking for help and advice from the kind of established agencies. It would be better if there were agencies set up in Scotland which directly advised people who were from ethnic backgrounds, perhaps an agency for every different ethnic background. At the moment, we have Positive Action in Housing but that’s just one agency.

And I noticed that in England in the past, housing associations have been set up to focus specifically on ethnic minorities. People like Manningham Housing Association in Bradford, where 80 % of their tenants are actually from an ethnic background. Also, Odu Dua, a smaller association in Camden in London. So, you know, is that a better approach to make it possible for people to get advice from other people who are from their community?

Dr Nadia Ayed (12:22)

Good question. And it’s something that came up in our qualitative interviews in particular, and there were some discrepancies in terms of whether people were looking for kind of services that are more grassroots-based, that are focused and often delivered by people from certain racial ethnic backgrounds, or whether there was, I guess, an appetite for more mainstream services. That was actually a huge theme in the report. And we can see it in a wee bit more detail.

There was a discrepancy in terms of what service providers and professional staff reported compared to what people who have lived experience of homelessness reported. In fact, it was the kind of professional staff that were seemingly keener for more specialist, ethnic or racially specific services. Whereas what came through a lot in the conversations with the participants who had lived experience was that they simply want access to mainstream services and they want these kind of structural and racially biased barriers to be reduced. So it wasn’t so much an ad for asking for specialist services, but in fact for those barriers to mainstream services to be removed.

Just another comment on that question is that certainly what came through in the report was that, you know, legal rights and entitlements was a way through a pathway for empowerment, but for various reasons that wasn’t acceptable to people. And in fact, there were reports in the qualitative interviews that certain landlords, it came up a little bit more in the context of private rentals as compared to the Shelter report, which I know focuses a lot on social.

But there was a lot of discussion around the ways in which private landlords may be kind of leveraging and selectively manipulating possible tenants based on their kind of presumed awareness of their own rights or entitlements. That was something that people raised as well.

Kieran Findlay (14:22)

Okay, Gordon, let’s move on to Shelter’s recommendations. One of them that stood out to me is the call for mandatory anti-racism policies for social landlords. I’m curious, what would these policies need to include to be meaningful rather than symbolic?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (14:40)

The key thing is to start. I know that sounds a small thing, just the existence and the commitment to being anti-racist and then working out what does that mean? How do we then break down those barriers? Our report has a number of recommendations, mainly for the Scottish Government and the UK government, but it has two in particular for social landlords that certainly have been drawn to people’s attention.

So we’re calling for the social housing charter to be strengthened so that when a landlord is presenting the evidence of tenant satisfaction through the charter, that that includes what steps they have taken to understand the specific experiences of black and people of colour who use their services.

And we recognise that that’s going to need some exploration. We’re going to need to work out how to do that. So that’s why we’re delighted. We’re currently working with Wheatley Group and commissioned researchers who are currently exploring what that means for Wheatley, but also what it means for Shelter Scotland’s own advice services so that we’re able to provide a tool for housing providers to start to critically evaluate what are the unseen barriers we may be putting in place that prevent black people of colour from engaging in the same equal basis as white Scottish colleagues.

So we think it’s proportionate. We think we’re trying to use the existing frameworks, the Scottish Social Housing Charter, the role of the Regulator. But we also recognise it’s not a silver bullet. This is about mitigation, not eradication in the first instance.

The other big one is about the clear accountability and ownership of, when we see evidence of inequality, well, who’s gonna do something about it? How do we result in that? So we don’t want to be gathering data and then nothing happening from it. So we social landlords to step up and show that leadership. We recognise there’s still a lot more to do in the private sector in terms of where things like landlord registration, suitability, reasonableness tests in the tribunal and so on can be understood.

But let’s get moving with the frameworks we have. And that’s why we’re saying let’s start with one of the things we want to start on, is the social housing charter.

Jimmy Black (17:28)

It worries me that we’re talking in this way. We had a race equality action plan. There was a report which reported in 2021. What happened to that? Where did that go? Why do we seem to be talking about all the same things all over again?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (17:34)

I think it is important to draw the distinction between anti-racism and the kind of diversity and equity and inclusion type of work that many organisations do. They are obviously interrelated. But when we talk about anti-racism and the systemic racism, what we’re really trying to drive here is how do we get, we can all say we’re gonna make sure that people no matter their ethnicity are listened to and have access to websites or offices. But do we really understand what the combined impact of some communities being kind of isolated in certain geographical areas, not being able to access ⁓ social housing?

We mentioned the benefit of legal rights. Right now in Scotland, legal entitlements to temporary and permanent accommodation are being breached routinely every single day of the week. And when you add into that new shocks to the system like the Home Office and so on, then you’re exacerbating how broken the system is, and what we’re trying to sort of draw out with this is we’ve had lots of reports, we’ve had lots of kind of evidence gathering done.

What are we going to do? How do we know that the people who are the gatekeepers are doing something and have to report that they’re doing something? And the current accountability mechanism we have for social landlords is the social housing charter. So how do we use that to really get that kind of familiarity, that regularity of just saying, well, are black and people colour experiencing a different, having a different experience to white colleagues? If and if so, how do you take meaningful steps to remove that?

Kieran Findlay (19:33)

Nadia, Gordon was speaking there about adding real accountability and extra responsibilities to try and build this or change the existing framework to be more anti-racist. If you were to build one from scratch, what would be needed to be included to actually shift outcomes?

Dr Nadia Ayed (19:53)

Really good question. In our report, we kind of frame our recommendations in terms of short-term priorities and long-term priorities. And I think in regards to the short-term, there’s some kind of clear opportunities to embed anti-racist work. And so, for example, taking the issue of racism in private rental accommodation, we welcome the Renters’ Right Bill and encourage consideration of anti-racism within that context.

So for example, using the private rented sector landlord ombudsman as an opportunity to assess whether practices are actually adhering to the existing Equalities Act and also to challenge discriminatory practices such as the Right to Rent policy. So ending policies such as that, which are known to drive racial discrimination.

Another key point that came up quite a lot in our report and sounds like it came up quite a lot in the shelter report too, is around possibly re-engineering the link between the asylum system and homelessness system. We know that the very, very short periods that people have to find accommodation, if they do then receive a positive outcome, doesn’t facilitate positive outcomes because having 28 days to find accommodation, whilst many people also haven’t had the right to work during that period is really problematic and kind of contributes into the homelessness system and is somewhat an avoidable situation.

So we would like to see that period extended to 56 days as it was trialled during the pilot periods back in I think it was July or June. Those are kind of quick wins, it’s all relative but kind of more short term priorities and particularly in the context of the UK, want to emphasise issues around the exempt accommodation scandal and opportunities such as the Supported Housing Act could be places where we see changes to ensure that we tackle these racial and ethnic disparities that we see across the board.

Jimmy Black (22:08)

I really like practical things and practical ideas that can actually be done. One of them might be looking at what the Welsh are doing and redesigning the houses that they’re building so that they actually suit a wider range of different ethnic and minorities needs. So you’re talking about larger houses, for example. Have you any thoughts about the design of the houses that we build and as we retrofit houses, how we can change things to make them more acceptable to ethnic minority needs?

Dr Nadia Ayed (22:42)

Yeah, just to jump in on that, that was something that came up in the report, particularly around larger households and the particular lack of stock for people who have slightly larger families. And that was, to some extent, one possible explanation. It’s by no means the kind of full picture, but particularly in the context of our, we did a deep dive in the West Midlands as part of this project, as part of one of the outputs.

And it was flagged that for black African families in particular. On average, they said that people have larger households and therefore there was just less availability in terms of where they could go. So I think having some consideration as to the sizes of the properties that we’re building is really key here to kind of tackle racial and ethnic disparities.

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (23:36)

Certainly something that came up in our research was the issue of larger households, but also not making sweeping assumptions about the needs of particular ethnic groups. So one of the things that comes up a lot is multi-generational households. The households that stay the longest in temporary accommodation are the largest ones. That’s one of the drivers for the number of children in temporary accommodation going up 145 % over the last 10 years. But what we have seen in practice is that sometimes, some local housing teams fall into the trap of assuming that they want to all stay together in one house. Therefore, we can’t move them on until we get a six-bed or a seven-bed. And of course, we know they rarely exist in most places.

And what we wanted to make sure was that people are treated as individuals, not as representatives of a group. So one of the best things to do is just go and have that conversation about the housing options that that household wish to consider. Make sure that they are informed and actually having a one-bed and a four-bed close by may be enough to keep a family unit together that allows the parent to go to work, that ensures the childcare is available.

But the process of accepting and giving and accepting offers in those circumstances can be precarious because, know, if one, if the grandmother in the household or the grandparents accepted an offer, then the people who would still be trapped in temporary accommodation with the children may find what’s reasonable no longer, no longer applies.

So it’s about being able to take that kind of holistic approach, treating people as individuals. We’ve also seen some examples, most recently with the asylum process, where groups of people are viewed as having all the same or similar needs. And so housing officers are saying, well, because you’re a member of that community, you’ll be wanting one of these, but we don’t have any of those larger properties, so we’re not in a position to do it.

So one of the key things about anti-racism, we think, is encouraging people to be heard on their own merits, to be able to look at what they actually need and giving them more informed housing options advice that doesn’t assume that certain characteristics mean certain needs.

Jimmy Black (26:19)

OK. And Shelter have suggested that choice based letting, where people actually bid for the houses they want, is likely to produce less basis to result in traditional allocation systems. Is that correct?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (26:35)

Well, choice-based lettings, I mean, we would go as far as to say, choice and control over your housing options is what we want to see. It was one of the core tenets of the Ending Homelessness Together plan. That’s the direction of travel we think would be most beneficial. The more people have control over their housing choices, the better, the more stable, the more the tenancies are sustained.

Having said that, we also recognise that is not the world that we’re in just now. You’ve got Edinburgh effectively suspending the normal allocations policy. You’ve got Fife taking certain steps too. We know that the current housing emergency, the systemic failure we see in our three local authorities and the heightened risk of systemic failure and another seven mean that we are in exceptional times. I don’t think that should stop us saying what should good policy look like? But we also need a reasonable route map from where we are to where we want to get to.

Kieran Findlay (27:43)

Moving back to social landlords, David Bookbinder, who is the director of GWSF, that’s a body that represents housing associations and cooperatives in Glasgow, in the west of Scotland, he’s argued that the issue is more complex than the report suggests, that housing associations, many of them are already committed to equality. Gordon, do you believe that the sector is being defensive here or is there a genuine misunderstanding of the evidence?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (28:18)

I was very disappointed to read David’s article. David’s actually been one of the most regular attendees at the Scottish Anti-Racism and Housing Network and has heard some of the evidence. I think, reflecting on his comments, I would say a couple of things. One, we can’t be complacent. We have to acknowledge that Scotland is changing. What we need to do for Scotland of five years from now is not necessarily what we need to be doing today. And so just kind of saying, we’ve got other things to worry about, I think isn’t sufficient

I think there are good examples across the sector of good work. I mean, we’re delighted that Wheatley are taking such a proactive approach to understanding the unplanned barriers that may be in existence with their stock. Surely the point is, if there is good practice, let’s get together and share it. Let’s get together and say, how do we do these things better? I think it’s too easy when challenging evidence is presented just to deflect into, it’s more complicated than that. We need more data.

There’s never a point, and with all due regard to academic colleagues, there’s always a need for more research. There’s always a need for more data, but there’s also always a need to start doing things and start making changes. And I think I’m sure David would be keen to see his members who are doing things well, sharing with their other colleagues in the sector so that we can all learn from each other.

So I think there has been a bit of defensiveness. It’s not the first time when we produced some previous papers and we suggested that Scotland’s housing system as a whole was broken and biased. We got a bit of pushback from people saying, well, I’m not sure, I don’t see how you can say it’s biased. Sometimes it’s unfair. And I think let’s not get stuck in a kind of semantic debate about fair, unequal, discriminatory. I think we all accept that black and people of colour clearly have different housing outcomes than their white counterparts.

Also, if we believe that that is not down to some sort of organised cabal of closet racists trying to keep black and people of colour down, but instead is something systemic to our society, then what are we going to do about it? How are we, people who want to be at the progressive end of society, how are we going to start taking the lead? How are we going to do that work?

And that will probably mean we get things wrong. That probably means we’ll try things that don’t work. But let’s start doing something instead of asking for more evidence as a start.

Jimmy Black (31:22)

Nadia, you found in your study that there were actually housing officers in England who were racist. Sometimes it was unconscious. Sometimes it was unintentional. But sometimes you seem to think it might actually be intentional. So how do we… I think people in housing associations and social landlords generally think that they are the good people. You know, they’re doing good for the world. They’ve got fulfilling jobs where they help people. And it’s hard for them then to be told that actually maybe they’re not.

You know, maybe they have these racist attitudes which are getting in the way of doing the work that they’re meant to be doing. How do you tackle that? How do you get people on board.

Dr Nadia Ayed (32:10)

It’s maybe helpful to think about the kind of spectrum of issues that we’re talking about here. So in the qualitative research that we did, some of the issues kind of manifested in terms of assumptions, as Gordon mentioned, in terms of, you know, assuming what kind of housing is appropriate or desirable based on someone’s ethnicity or race.

There were also assumptions around people’s perceived vulnerability. And then, we also spoke in the report about quite explicit forms of racism. Certain people when they went to the local authority were told to be grateful, I’m paraphrasing here, but be grateful for this because you don’t get it back in your own country. So it’s quite a broad array of things that we’re talking about here.

On one side, perhaps unconscious biases, problematic assumptions to direct verbalised forms of racism. So what we call for in the report is the professionalisation and the training of officers, housing and homelessness officers, and that’s not to negate the extreme pressures that services are under, but to recognise that nonetheless, if someone is coming to you, because they’re either at risk of homelessness or experiencing homelessness, then it is unacceptable for that person to then be treated with kind of such explicit and hurtful forms of racism.

So I think part of it is training around kind of challenging people’s problematic unconscious biases or certain assumptions around people, but also kind of calling out more directly those overt forms of racism when they do occur.

Kieran Findlay (34:03)

I was speaking to a homelessness charity just today, and they were telling me that they’ve been getting some grief on social media for actually helping ethnic minority families. So I guess my question is, these housing officers that have biases and these housing officers that are implicitly racist are also members of the public. So do you believe the public understands the scale of racial inequality in housing, and do they care?

Dr Nadia Ayed (34:40)

I would say that no, people probably don’t understand the scale. And that’s something that we probably didn’t understand as a research team until the report came out. Our report we regard as one of the more kind of comprehensive overviews of the scale of the problem. So it looks at core forms of homelessness, statutory homelessness, but as I mentioned earlier, hidden forms of homelessness. And we also look at drivers.

And I think what was really quite stark from what I read of the report was doing the analysis is that when we look at the drivers, I think, and I probably was quite representative of the done republicanist that thought, you know, all it would be such a complicated picture, and there will be kind of social demographic factors that explain this housing factors. The fact that minoritised groups are more often found in private rental accommodation. And whilst those things do explain some of the variants we see, we also found that ethnicity-related factors and by that we mean kind of direct experience of discrimination, migratory status and ethnic identity, they have a kind of independent effect on these outcomes.

So what I mean by that is that ethnicity in and of itself explains some of these kind of inequalities that we see and I think therefore the public probably aren’t aware of that because that research hasn’t actually disaggregated those different drivers previously. Nor do I think people understand the kind of scale of the problem. So as I mentioned earlier, black households are almost four times as more likely to experience statutory homelessness as compared to white households.

And when we’re talking about social housing,we see that minoritised families are substantially less likely than white families to gain access to social housing. For white families, that’s roughly 24 % of white families that gain social housing, as compared to 10 % of black families. So these are really quite stark findings that I don’t think necessarily filtered out into the general public. Whether they care or not is, I don’t know, that’s a really big question.

I don’t know if I’ve got my finger on the pulse of the public to kind of answer that. But I guess I would kind of throw back the question, does it matter? The public care, because you know, really the power here lies in the government and local authorities and the housing and homelessness sector. Maybe we can kind of lead the way and do what’s right and what we’re legally obliged to do, as opposed to perhaps waiting on more kind of public sentiment for it.

Kieran Findlay (37:19)

Yeah, I guess it was a crude way to ask the question, but Gordon, I think I’m just talking about building political will, and to do that you need the public with you. Do you believe that that’s the case in Scotland?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (37:33)

I think we’re currently going through a bit of a challenge to some of the assumptions in Scotland of we’re more progressive, we’re all these sort of Scottish exceptionalism which sometimes can catch hold. I think if you look at the responses to any news article about homelessness where it doesn’t even mention race, you will see comments that are just explicitly racist and derogatory comments.

If you look at our own social media, we’ve had to instigate new processes to not just to protect other people who may visit our Facebook or Instagram and these kind of channels, but to protect our staff from someone that was violent and abusive comments that perpetuate a lot of these risks. And these are comments, whilst we know there’s bots and all these other things, these are people who, these are identifiable people often that you can see who feel emboldened to associate poverty and homelessness with race, asylum and the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric that we’ve seen.

We joined with another 30 other organisations in Scotland, a couple of weeks before we published our report, calling on the UK and Scottish government to do two big things. Nadia already mentioned the call we support for the UK government to break the link between homelessness by design and the end of a positive refugee process, but also for the Scottish Government to look again at how it allocates revenue to local authorities.

We do not target public service funding to areas of greatest need when it comes to the housing emergency. And the public are looking at rising homelessness, rising rough sleeping, and saying what’s happened to you? What’s changed? Why is this more visible?

And the easy answer is to say, is the answer that some people will give is because of foreigners, because of other people. The harder answer is because of long-term underinvestment in our housing system. It’s about local authorities that are underfunded for the services that they provide. And it’s going to take greater awareness of the relationship between the decisions that politicians make and the experiences that people have in our communities before anything will change.

Kieran Findlay (40:23)

Okay, thanks guys. We’ll bring this to an end. Just quickly, Gordon, Shelter Scotland and their anti-racism housing network, is that still ongoing and when’s the next meeting?

Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae (40:33)

It is. The next meeting is next month (February). We’ll be hosting a session where we’ll be happy to share the ways in which you can sign up to that through Scottish Housing News. We aim to meet once a quarter. We’re trying to make it community of practice where people can come together and learn how to do things. And we want as many people from the social landlords to the third sector to anyone interested in how we can unpick the unintentional and sometimes intentional barriers to ending racism in Scottish housing to come along and get involved. But we’re happy to share the details of how you can go about signing up.

Kieran Findlay (41:18)

Yep, perfect. We’ll share that as well as links to both reports from Shelter Scotland and I-Sphere. My thanks to Dr. Nadia Ayed and Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae. Thanks also to Jimmy Black. I’ve been Kieran Findlay and we’ll be back with another episode in a couple of weeks.