A distraught man stood up at a meeting in Glasgow more than twenty years ago, during the hostel closure programme. “It’s too late,” he said, over and over. He wasn’t asking why it had taken so long. He was delivering a verdict on everything he had witnessed there. Once buildings are filled, the practical case for keeping them becomes hard to resist. Closing them, or refusing to expand them, is never the right time. We are in that moment again.

The UK Government has made homelessness and rough sleeping a political priority, with substantial new funding to get people off the streets and into accommodation, alongside wider commitments on social and affordable housing. Those decisions will generate Barnett consequentials for Scotland. This is the scale of political leadership on homelessness that many have been calling for.

But the pressure for visible, rapid results brings a familiar risk: more large-scale temporary units, purpose-built developments designed specifically for people who are homeless, modular homes grouped together on sites set aside for them. The argument is usually the same – that this is better than, or at least no worse than, the shelters, hostels, hotels or B&Bs that people are already in.

And on the surface, that is hard to argue with. Anyone who has spent time in the system knows how unsuitable much of that provision is, how long people have to endure it, and that some people do not survive it. But the surface is not where the decision should be made.

The numbers show the pressure

At the end of March, 19,004 households were in temporary accommodation in Scotland, the highest on record, including more than 10,700 children. Average stays run to around eight months nationally, longer in the most pressured areas. Councils have breached temporary accommodation standards thousands of times. Homelessness and rough sleeping are rising. These figures describe a system under severe strain. They also describe a system that has become very practised at placing people somewhere else while it waits for settled homes.

The numbers show the pressure, but they should not dictate a panic response. In Scotland, and across the UK, people without a home continue to be congregated in shared living spaces, even while better, more inclusive options stand ready to scale. This has been normalised, an outdated reflex that still equates homelessness with hostels and shelters. Homelessness remains one of the last areas of social policy where deliberately separating people from ordinary communities – when they have done nothing wrong – is still treated as acceptable, too often politically and in parts of society.

The harms are well documented – isolation, stigma, rigid rules and damage to health, relationships and belonging. What is harder to explain is why these harms continue to be tolerated. Part of the answer is cultural, part financial. Hard-pressed local authorities are locked into an expensive cycle of crisis management that drains the capacity needed to

prevent and systematically reduce homelessness. Separating people by homelessness status carries costs that improved service design does not remove. And the more money is spent managing people in parallel systems, the less remains for the ordinary homes that would end their homelessness.

What we already know

What already exists is not a standard to refine, it is a problem to end. Creating polished versions of the same congregate accommodation does not solve it. It groups people together solely because of the crisis they have in common, marks the place out as different and limits the basic choice everyone else takes for granted about where and among whom they live.

People can form connections in almost any setting. Belonging can happen in many places. But inclusion – the chance to live as an equal among others – thrives in ordinary communities. And this has never applied only to homelessness.

Scotland has already had this argument. After devolution we moved away from large-scale hostels in the early 2000s, and from shared-air night shelters in the largest cities two decades later. It is sometimes assumed that any accommodation must be better than none. If that were true, those hostels and shelters would not have needed closing. Many people felt safer sleeping rough, or making other unsafe arrangements, than staying inside them. Grouping strangers by their homelessness status compounded difficulties rather than resolving them. Homelessness is a crisis people want to leave, rarely a shared identity around which a community can build or celebrate.

Housing ends homelessness. Even among people who have braved the most and faced severe and multiple disadvantages, rapid rehousing keeps temporary accommodation as a short bridge into mainstream housing, not a parallel system that becomes more established. Housing First has demonstrated that almost all of us can sustain an ordinary home in the community when the right support is there. That evidence has not changed. The most important shift remains greater ambition on housebuilding that delivers the social and affordable homes we need – proper homes.

How to add capacity

The pressure on councils is immense and so is the need for capacity – especially ahead of winter. So how should this new funding be spent?

High-quality temporary options are needed to support unplanned housing transitions safely, but they do not have to be organised as a separate place. The solutions that protect progress are less eye-catching than a new dedicated development. They add capacity without recreating separation and stigma, and without treating exclusion as the price of acting quickly. If something is only being built or commissioned for an already disadvantaged group, we are still organising exclusion, just with different specifications.

Capacity can be added without congregating people by their homelessness status. One of the main routes is to use existing stock: empty homes and assets, acquisitions, compulsory orders, conversions of vacant commercial units, community-based furnished flats and private

sector leasing inside communities. These approaches are already being prioritised by councils, housing associations and non-profit providers – who can do more with more. For-profit temporary accommodation has come to dominate unsuitable provision in some areas but has no logical incentive to shorten stays or move people into settled housing. A higher share of social housing lets to homeless households would also help.

New capacity can be built or commissioned. Innovation is welcome when it expands the stock of ordinary homes. It is far less helpful when it creates a parallel, temporary system. Modular housing comes in two quite different forms. One is the high-quality modern method of construction that some housing associations and councils have delivered as part of ordinary housing supply. Done at scale, with proper investment and a reliable pipeline, it has real potential to deliver decent homes faster and to a consistent standard. The other is the ‘tiny homes’ or mobile pods brought in specifically as a homelessness response.

If either form is chosen, a careful principle should apply. If local decision makers believe modular housing has a place in their local area, it should meet general local housing need - mixed into communities and let to a range of households, not reserved for people who are homeless. These are not abstract or idealist principles. They are what evidence and experience have already shown works – and they deliver more for the money spent.

The same standard

We know what works and what does not. The useful test is whether any new capacity is treated as housing good enough for everyone, not a specialised solution reserved for people who are homeless. The maths is the same – more homes locally, allocated to people in acute housing need. What changes is whether people are concentrated by their crisis or able to build and live their lives as part of an ordinary community.

UK, national and local government can avoid recreating the old problems of segregation and stigma if they can answer yes to these questions:

• Can the new capacity become, or is it already, a regular home in a regular community?
• Does it integrate local residents rather than concentrate people who are homeless?
• If it has a non-standard specification, is it part of a mixed development for a range of local households, not reserved for people who are homeless?
• If it is not settled, is move-on into mainstream housing a clear, time-bound expectation?
• Is support optional rather than a condition of staying there, and does it follow the person rather than remain tied to the building?

When we stop treating people who are homeless as a separate group who need separate places, we build communities that work better for everyone – because the same standards, the same choices and the same sense of belonging are available to all of us. Scotland has made progress by rejecting the idea that people experiencing homelessness should be grouped, labelled and managed separately. That progress is incomplete and fragile in a housing emergency. If we allow new ways of separating people who are homeless, we risk reversing it.

Those whose exclusion is most acute need included most of all. People deserve better than another version of what has never really worked. We have learned that the hard way. More importantly, so have they.