This week is Challenge Poverty Week, when organisations across Scotland come together to show that poverty can be solved. It is also 10 years since I wrote the housing chapter in Child Poverty Action Group’s Poverty in Scotland 2016. It feels timely to pick up that book and ask where we are a decade later. 

Low social rents are a large part of Scotland’s protection against housing costs turning a low income into poverty. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) puts it plainly in its new report, published this week: more social and affordable housing has “historically helped Scotland keep its poverty rate lower than the rest of the UK”. The case back then was affordable housing as an anti-poverty policy. The case remains the same today. 

Some of the numbers from 2016 are difficult to compare because the way poverty is measured has changed. But one measure tells its own story. Temporary accommodation has nearly doubled since the figures I cited in 2016, from more than 10,000 households then to a record 19,004 on 31 March this year, including 10,715 children. 

For a child in temporary accommodation, school, health and life chances all suffer, and the public services now being reformed pick up the bill. The choice is not whether Scotland pays for the housing emergency, but whether it pays through investment in social and affordable homes or through the growing human and financial costs of homelessness and poverty. 

This rise has happened despite real progress. The protections in place in 2016 have held: every unintentionally homeless household has the right to a settled home, and the bedroom tax remains mitigated through Discretionary Housing Payments. New prevention duties have since followed. JRF notes child poverty is around six points below the UK rate but, at 21%, far from the 10% legal target for 2030/31.

The Scottish Government is rolling out a ten-year, £50 million homelessness prevention fund, and the first Upstream round, run by SFHA and Homeless Network Scotland, helped 662 households avoid homelessness. Yet the gap between policy and practice remains. Despite stronger rights and prevention measures, homelessness has continued to worsen.  

While prevention funding is crucial, so too is the supply of social and affordable homes, which gives people the best chance of securing and sustaining a home. 

In 2015, research commissioned by SFHA, Shelter Scotland and CIH Scotland found Scotland needed at least 12,000 affordable homes a year. New research in 2025 puts the need at 15,693. Yet only 6,772 affordable homes were completed in the year to June 2026, well under half of what is now needed annually.

Starts are up by a third from their lowest level since 2013, and the Scottish Government’s multi-year funding commitment should help sustain that. But Fraser of Allander’s research for SFHA and ALACHO projects that only around 75,000 of the 110,000 affordable homes the Scottish Government has targeted by 2032 will be delivered on current trends. 

JRF is clearer than I was on tenure. For 44% of private renters in poverty, rent is a primary driver of poverty. That is around twice the rate among social renters in poverty, 22% of whom were pulled below the line by housing costs. A low rent cannot raise a low income. That takes secure work and adequate social security too. Social and affordable housing is not sufficient on its own, but it is necessary. 

Although housing associations raised £563m of private finance in 2024/25, public investment still covers more than half the cost of a new social home, with most of the rest borrowed against future rents. When public investment falls short, the pressure lands on rents, putting at risk the very thing JRF credits social housing with doing. Existing homes face the same pressure.

The Scottish Housing Regulator has calculated that funding the cost of decarbonising housing association homes by 2030 through rents alone would require annual increases of between 48% and 92%, landing on social housing tenants who can least absorb it: almost half are already in fuel poverty, according to the Scottish House Condition Survey. 

The 2016 publication called it a crisis. Scotland has since declared a housing emergency. Poverty is not inevitable, and lower housing costs are one of the surest ways to reduce it. Universal Credit, including its housing costs element, and energy market reform sit with Westminster. That makes the levers Holyrood does hold, above all the supply of social and affordable homes and the investment that keeps their rents low, matter all the more. 

Social housing is critical economic infrastructure, and investing in it is some of the best-targeted preventative spending government can make. The Scottish Budget on 3 December should be judged by what it means for families in temporary accommodation and tenants closest to poverty: whether it funds the homes Scotland needs and keeps the cost off their rents. Ten years on, Scotland still can’t reduce poverty without social and affordable homes.