Govan Law Centre’s (GLC) Women’s Rights Project have been approached by a young woman seeking homelessness assistance. The teenager presented herself as homeless to Glasgow City Council’s homelessness services earlier this week following a period of sofa surfing.
The case has been reported in the Glasgow Times newspaper here: Homeless Glasgow teenager put in hostel dorm ‘full of men’ | Glasgow Times (29 July 2025).
We were disappointed to learn that the council refused to offer this woman temporary accommodation following presentation, citing an increased demand on their accommodation services due to the number of events occurring in Glasgow that week.
There was some evidence of gatekeeping of services, with council staff advising our client to present as homeless to a different local authority area. Our client advised that her concerns were minimised given the fact she was sofa surfing as opposed to street homeless.
If the local authority has reason to believe a homeless applicant may be homeless, then they are compelled under section 29 of the Housing (Scotland) Act 1987 to provide temporary accommodation. You do not have to be living on the streets to make a homeless application to the local authority. Sofa surfing means you have no permanent address and require to stay in insecure accommodation with other people.
The recent Scottish Government qualitative study on housing insecurity and hidden homelessness issued on 3rd April 2025 finds that young people are at the highest risk of sofa surfing, ‘unaware that they are considered homeless or unaware of available housing options’. Women are also a group at high risk, ‘who often experience hidden homelessness due to domestic abuse, may exhaust social networks before seeking help’.
This is compounded by the fact women have ‘fear and anxiety about the homelessness system’. This is particularly pronounced given the council’s current practice of allocating women to mixed-sex homeless hotels, hostels and B&Bs which can place them at further risk of gender-based violence.
The Women’s Rights Project at GLC took instructions on 23rd July 2025 to intimate our client’s intention to Petition for Judicial Review against this statutory breach. The council were advised on the client’s vulnerabilities, including her diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), learning difficulties, and anxiety and depression. The client also had experiences of gender-based violence including sexual violence. At the end of that day, the council offered the woman temporary accommodation within a hostel in order to comply with their section 29 duty.
The woman described the fear she experienced entering the hostel accommodation. Not only was she placed in mixed-sex accommodation, she was advised that she would require to share a mixed-bed dormitory. She advised that she went to the room she was allocated and it was ‘full of men’ and she felt ‘terrified’ by the experience. She describes being offered a top bunk bed to sleep on.
She asked to switch to a single room and this request was refused. In the end, she had no choice but to leave the temporary accommodation that night. This heavily impacted our client’s mental health, given her experiences of trauma, and required her to seek help from others in order to avoid rough sleeping that night.
It is deeply concerning that the local authority did not appear to have any safeguarding measures in place or undertake any risk assessment regarding the placement and the potential harm this could have caused our, already vulnerable client.
The following morning the Women’s Rights Project took instructions to intimate a further intention to petition for judicial review but, this time, in respect of a breach of Article 4(b) of the Homeless Persons (Unsuitable Accommodation) (Scotland) Order 2014. The legal challenge also submits that the council have acted wholly unreasonably and irrationally in the provision of this type of accommodation.
Following intimation our proposed petition for judicial review in the Court of Session, the local authority has now provided our client with a hotel room with her own room.
