Interviews

In the lead-up to Scottish Housing Day on Wednesday, September 13, Larkfield’s maintenance assistant Rebecca Turner shares why her job motivates her and what attracted her to the housing sector. What motivates you about your job?

Jimmy Black cycled to Stornoway to meet Calum (Barney) MacKay, chair of TPAS Scotland and long-standing tenant activist. Barney is a trade unionist, and that explains a lot. Trades unions teach their active members how to do many useful things, including basic skills, like how to run a meeting or th

Jimmy Black meets the energetic Evie Copland, multi-award-winner and housing evangelist. “The biggest problem is … how do I change the world with this?” Evie Copland is finishing her Master's in Housing Studies, and she has been a distinguished student. In 2021 she won the Malcolm

Ahead of the SFHA Development Conference on Wednesday, we spoke with Scotland Excel’s housing services manager Colin Taylor. What will you be discussing at the conference? 

Jimmy Black meets Bill Banks, retiring CEO of the multi award-winning Kingdom Group. Bill Banks looks relaxed, calm and entirely at home in his relatively modest office at Kingdom Housing Association. He’s a man at the height of his powers with a very solid track record of achievement. But Bil

Fanchea Kelly has been at the centre of events in Scottish housing since the 1980s, and will soon leave Blackwood after a stellar career. Jimmy Black asked her to share some memories with Scottish Housing News. Over 9,000 miles from Scotland, Fanchea Kelly was sitting in an Australian radio studio i

In the second instalment of his Housing Champion interviews, Jimmy Black speaks to housing veteran Tony Cain. You would think Tony Cain would understand how housing works. He’s been head of housing in a council, an inspection manager with Communities Scotland and a policy officer working in go

Launching our new monthly feature of Housing Champion interviews, Jimmy Black profiles Kirsty Wells, director of consultancy and partnership at Housemark and the newly appointed chair of WISH Scotland. Kirsty Wells began plunging into the chilly waters of reservoirs and the North Sea during COV

The recent procurement award season went extremely well for Scotland Excel’s New Build Framework - winning Scottish and national awards for ‘Best Procurement Delivery’, but also winning the ‘GO Excellence Award’ at the national final. We caught up with Graeme Sutherland

When Dundee City East MSP Shona Robison was handed the housing mandate following May’s Holyrood election part of her remit was to oversee the delivery of 100,000 new affordable homes over the next decade. Within weeks she had announced that local authorities would be helped to achieve this wit

To celebrate International Women’s Day today, Abbeyfield Scotland CEO Karen Barr talks about what this year’s theme #ChooseToChallange means to her. What does this year's International Women’s Day slogan #ChooseToChallenge mean for you in the workplace?

If you have worked in the housing sector for as long as Laurie Naumann has it is only a matter of time before your name becomes immortalised. His was last year, more than four decades after he joined Edinburgh Corporation to help revolutionise the way that city addressed homelessness, when the Fife-

When news broke in June that a Sudanese asylum seeker had been shot dead after stabbing six people in a Glasgow hotel there was an immediate public outcry. How, people wanted to know, could a system that is supposed to protect the vulnerable have allowed a man with obvious mental health difficulties

As Scotland’s largest local authority landlord, North Lanarkshire Council has responsibility for 36,500 households, almost a third of which were forced to shield the moment the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Many of the affected tenants already had support systems in place, but as 6,500 did not the co

If anything positive can be taken from the coronavirus pandemic it is that, almost overnight, accommodation was found for large numbers of Scotland’s street-homeless population. As soon as the lockdown was announced charities and local authorities mobilised, hotel rooms were acquired and rough