Megan’s story of the year – A right without a roof is not a right

This is Common Weal’s last working week before we take a break until next year. So we’re doing something a little different with our Daily Briefing for the next few days, with one of our staffers offering up their “Story of the Year”, looking back at something impactful that they’ve featured in one of our briefings or in one of their magazine articles.

First up, Policy Communications Officer Megan Davidson looks at one of the most revealing stories of the year – the growing gap between rights declared in law and the capacity to make them real.

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As the year draws to a close, one story has crystallised a problem that has run quietly but persistently through Scotland’s politics in 2025: the growing gap between the rights we declare and the capacity we build to uphold them.  

This week, Scotland’s Housing Secretary, Máiri McAllan, was warned that court action may be taken unless urgent intervention is made to stop councils breaching homeless people’s legal right to temporary accommodation. Lawyers acting for homelessness and tenants’ groups have accused local authorities – particularly Glasgow – of routine and knowing breaches of the law, leaving thousands without the shelter they are legally entitled to.  

The figures are stark. More than 30,000 breaches of homelessness law have been recorded in the past five years, with violations accelerating sharply since the pandemic. Senior judges have already made clear that a lack of resources does not excuse failure: the duty to provide temporary accommodation is absolute. And yet, councils continue to breach it, year after year.  

This is not a failure of principle. Scotland's homelessness legislation is among the strongest in the UK. The right to housing exists in law. The failure lies elsewhere – in the political decision to legislate for rights without ensuring the means to deliver them. 

This pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed Common Weal’s work this year. Again and again, we have returned to the same warning: rights are not self-executing. They are not fulfilled by good intentions, progressive language, or parliamentary votes. They require infrastructure, funding, staff, planning, and long-term political commitment.  

We saw it in housing, but not only there. Across multiple policy areas, Scotland has developed a habit of announcing rights while outsourcing responsibility for their delivery to systems already under strain. Councils are expected to meet expanding legal duties with shrinking budgets. Public services are tasked with enforcing rights they lack the capacity to uphold. When failure inevitably follows, the blame is pushed downwards – to local authorities, to overstretched staff, to ‘unforeseen pressures.’ 

But the pressures are not unforeseen. They are structural.  

In housing, the consequences are especially severe. Denying temporary accommodation is not a technical breach; it is a violation with immediate human cost. Families left without shelter, children placed in unsuitable conditions, people forced into rough sleeping – all while the law says they have a right to protection.  

The court warnings issued this week should be a moment of reckoning. Not just for the Scottish Government, but for a political culture that has become too comfortable with symbolic progress. Declaring a right without funding it is not progressive governance. It is a transfer of risk – from government to councils, and from councils to the most vulnerable people in society.  

As we look back on the year, this story matters because it exposes a hard truth: a right that cannot be enforced is not a right at all. It is a promise without substance.  

Common Weal has long argued that rights only exist when the systems to uphold them are built alongside them. That means funding, staffing, planning, and democratic accountability – not simply legislative declarations. If Scotland wants to be a genuinely rights-based society, then next year must be about closing the gap between principle and practice. Otherwise, rights will continue to only exist on paper, while the consequences of failure are lived by those with the least power to absorb them.