The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA) said it was “simply intolerable” that ever-growing numbers of children were growing up without a stable home, warning the crisis extends far beyond housing itself.

SFHA chief executive Richard Meade said a lack of stable housing was undermining children’s education, health and life chances, and accused the Scottish Government of falling “significantly behind” its target of delivering 110,000 affordable homes by 2032.

He called for urgent action to ramp up building to the roughly 15,700 affordable homes a year he said were needed to meet the scale of the emergency, warning that delay would only push more families into temporary accommodation at growing cost to public services.

Homeless Network Scotland was similarly critical. Head of policy and impact Matt Hamill said the figures painted “a stark picture of a homelessness crisis that risks becoming the new normal,” a year on from the launch of the Scottish Government’s Housing Emergency Action Plan.

Hamill said Scotland’s strong legal rights around homelessness were “not translating into protections on the ground,” pointing to almost 21,800 cases in which people were not offered temporary accommodation at all despite a legal duty to do so. He called for a shift toward preventative approaches and a major scale-up of Housing First, a programme he said currently meets only around 10% of demand.

The statistics, published by the Scottish Government on 22 September 2026 and covering the 2025-26 year, show:

• 41,443 homelessness applications were made — roughly flat on the previous year.
• 35,002 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness, up 1% on 2024-25.
• 19,004 households were in temporary accommodation as of 31 March 2026 — the highest figure in the series, up 10% year-on-year.
• 10,715 children were living in temporary accommodation as of 31 March 2026 — also a series high, up 5% on the previous year.
• Rough sleeping the night before application rose from 2,464 to 2,949 cases; rough sleeping in the three months prior rose from 3,579 to 4,115.
• Households spent an average of 237 days in temporary accommodation in closed cases during 2025-26, three days fewer than the previous year, though open cases averaged 325 days.
• 83% of households assessed as unintentionally homeless secured settled accommodation, unchanged from 2024-25.

It is the first annual homelessness release since the government launched its Housing Emergency Action Plan just over a year ago, data that campaigners say shows the situation “getting worse across the board.”

Cabinet secretary for social justice and housing Shirley-Anne Somerville acknowledged the figures “remain far too high” but pointed to government action including a £50 million Homelessness Prevention Fund, a £2m Fund to Leave scheme for abuse survivors, and 1,500 Housing First tenancies. She also cited a further £2m investment in Social Bite’s homelessness work.

Somerville said the government would continue “shifting our approach from crisis management to prevention and rapid rehousing,” and highlighted £4.9 billion earmarked for affordable homes over the next four years, building on what she said were 146,000 affordable homes delivered since 2007. She added that Scotland’s affordable housing supply per head had, on average, outpaced both England and Wales over that period.

She also called on the UK Government to scrap the freeze on Local Housing Allowance in its forthcoming budget and provide councils with further funding, arguing that Home Office policy failures were compounding pressure on local authorities.