Temporary accommodation: Scotland’s housing emergency is leaving children growing up in limbo

“One of the families I support has been living in a one-bedroom temporary flat for six and a half years. There are four of them sleeping in one room – the mother, father, and their two children,” says Julie Wood, a lead support worker for the homelessness charity Crisis. 

She’s been in the role for over a decade, supporting vulnerable people who are trying to secure permanent accommodation from the City of Edinburgh Council, and says the current state of homelessness in city, and Scotland more widely, “is by far the worst it’s ever been”, and the amount of time people are living in temporary accommodation is “crazy”. 

“In my 10 years, I have never experienced anything so bad. I never thought it would be like this.” 

Woods continues to explain the situation of the family she had been supporting. “The kids are five and 11, meaning the youngest has spent his whole life in temporary accommodation. 

“They are Kurdish but have British citizenship; the dad was part of the group that was being ethnically cleansed. He’s disabled and has a lot of issues.” 

She says they were offered a flat that was miles away from the children’s school and nursery, in an area they had not a bid in for. The mother refused it on that basis.  

Woods explains: “This tenancy she was offered was a way far away from where her kids are in school and nursery. As a result, they had their gold priority [which is given to people with mobility issues] removed. 

“The council were threatening to discharge them, telling her she could be on the street with her children. It’s been a horrendous situation; thankfully, it has been somewhat rectified. Of course, legally, they can’t put her and children out on the street, but the system is brutal.” 

She says that for families in their situation, they will be waiting triple the length of time a family without mobility issues does. 

Sadly, stories like this, of children spending years of their lives in temporary accommodation, are not uncommon. According to Scottish Government figures from March, there are over 10,000 children in similar situations.  

Since 2014 this figure has increased by 149 per cent, according to research conducted by homelessness charity Shelter Scotland. The same research also found that households with children tend to spend longer in temporary accommodation than households without children. In 2024/25, a couple in Scotland with children spent an average of 386 days in temporary accommodation, compared to an average of 238 days for all household types. 

It’s a problem that has hit some local authorities particularly hard, namely Edinburgh, Glasgow and Fife, with figures showing that Scotland’s two largest cities each have more children living in temporary accommodation than in Wales.  

The demand for housing in Edinburgh has reached a new level in recent years, and this has seriously impacted how legal challenges can be made, Wood explains. “We’re now having people coming into the office [on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile] who are rough sleeping because they’ve been turned away because there’s no accommodation. 

“The solicitors are now not even able to challenge unsuitable temporary accommodation as they used to do. They’re now just challenging the council people away because they’re breaching their duty [to house people], they’re breaking the law.” 

There appears to be a consensus on how Scotland has got to this point. Shelter Scotland’s assistant director of communications Gordon Llewellyn-MacRae explains: “For 30 years, there has been a lack of investment in social housing, and too little of a focus on the experiences of children.” 

Last year Shelter Scotland published sobering research titled “In their own words”, which was led by paediatric consultants from De Montfort University and University College London. It uncovered over 4,000 breaches of the Unsuitable Accommodation Order, meaning children were being placed in homes that breached statutory standards, over a six-month period in 2024. 

It also published testimonies from children living in these environments, describing experiences of violence, vermin, ill-health, isolation and financial hardship. 

Speaking about living in unsuitable temporary accommodation, a six-year-old child said: “We have to brush our teeth in the bedroom sink. People were pooing on the ground.” 
Asked where this was happening, the child said: “Inside, inside the toilet. Sometimes, if they poo, they get them on the wall, and sometimes they poo on the ground.”  

Llewellyn-MacRae says that as a result of children living in these unsuitable conditions, some children have had physical health problems, such as respiratory issues due to damp. 

The mother of the six-year-old said he spent “six weeks in total” in hospital. “That was because two environments were dirty, and that’s what I blame it on,” she said. 

“He ended up spewing blood from his mouth due to it, and that was an infection. So yeah, in six weeks he was in, he lost about two and a half stone, it was quite scary.”  

However, it’s not just physical conditions that children are experiencing from long stays in temporary accommodation, Llewellyn-MacRae explains. “Very often, accommodation can be far away from their school and the wider family support network that may form the backbone of childcare, so that the parents can go to work. 

“There are children who are receiving educational maintenance allowance (EMA), but because some of them have been moved so far away from school, and because, for whatever reason, they weren’t getting transport provided, they were habitually late, and they were given EMA sanctions, which is money taken off them by the same council that located them miles away. 

“Thankfully, from that report, the Scottish Government has taken steps to address that, but it shouldn’t have taken the voices of children to make that change.” 

Tackling the issue of children living in temporary accommodation has quickly become the cornerstone of housing minister Mairi McAllan’s brief, as she unveiled the Scottish Government’s Housing Emergency Action Plan in September. She told Holyrood in the same month: “I have said, unapologetically, that I will prioritise getting children out of temporary accommodation who’ve been in there for a long time.” 

The action plan also includes £4.9bn over the next four years, aimed at delivering around 36,000 affordable homes by the end of the decade, which McAllan says could provide a home for up to 24,000 children. She also committed to doubling the national acquisition plan fund to £80m this year, which she says should help take between 600-800 children out of temporary accommodation. 

However, in places like Edinburgh, there are worries from councillors that building homes will not be easy. Local councillor Susan Rae, who sits on the housing committee and meets with delegations of families living in temporary accommodation most weeks, says “it’s now a matter of where you build”. “Where is the land? In a lot of cases, across the city has been banked for many years by corporations, and in many cases it’s hard to find out even who owns them; often they are concealed in different shell corporations across the world.” 

And while Scottish Government’s pledge to prioritise getting families out of temporary accommodation is of the highest priority to some, there are others working in the sector that are concerned it is bringing back ‘priority need’ – a legal test used to decide which homeless people were entitled to settled accommodation, with families, pregnant women and those deemed vulnerable eligible, while many single adults were not – through the back door.  

Maeve McGoldrick, head of policy and communications for Crisis Scotland, tells Holyrood: “We welcome the ministers’ deep concern for the plight of families. The impact of homelessness on children is profound, and we want to see families settled much more quickly into suitable accommodation.  

“But we urge ministers to broaden that ambition and extend the same sense of urgency to rehousing everyone who finds themselves homeless.  

“After it declared a national housing emergency in Scotland last year, we recognise the Scottish Government is under extreme pressure to resolve this. However, with no clear definition of what constitutes an end to the housing emergency, there’s a risk that some groups of people will be prioritised for help over others, even if unintentionally. Securing a settled home is crucial for everyone in the homeless system.” 

According to the Scottish Government, around seven in 10 households living in temporary accommodation are single people. One of those people is Beraki, an Eritrean refugee in his late 30s who has been living in emergency accommodation, which a person should only live in for no more than seven days, in the north of Edinburgh, for almost three years. 

He lives in a single room, which is part of a larger complex. The kitchen and laundry facilities are shared and only accessible at certain times during the day. He works as a delivery rider, but at times has been unable to work because his bike has been stolen or intentionally damaged.  

“The first time my bike was stolen. When I replaced it shortly after, the motor was then cut. I repaired that, but then they cut the connection to the headlight.  

“It’s been a big challenge for me, I’m living in fear, asking myself if this will happen again. I’m always thinking about tomorrow, and my safety.” 

He seems a bit uneasy at times, but throughout the conversation he never complains about his living situation. You can tell he’s resilient in the face of difficult times. Every week he bids on properties through the council’s system, but he’s yet to have any success.

“They told me this could maybe take four or five years.”

While he waits, he tells me he hopes to become a car mechanic after he finds a place to permanently live.  

It’s clear the housing crisis is starkly affecting all types of households waiting for a permanent home, and it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t agree that the state of social housing hasn’t been in a worse state for decades.  

While Beraki and the families Wood supports continue waiting, Llewellyn-MacRae says that while recent steps by the Scottish Government have been positive, “they need to be proactively part of the delivery and stop pointing their fingers at local authorities and social landlords for the failure – it’s time to be partners in delivery for the first time in a decade”.