Test, learn, scale: what the Ask and Act pilots are telling us

Scotland’s work to embed homelessness prevention across public services has reached an important milestone. Advice Direct Scotland, which administers the Scottish Government’s £4 million Homelessness Prevention Pilot Fund, has published the third quarter evaluation findings from the 15 “Ask and Act” pilots. With the new prevention duties in the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025 to take effect from late 2028, the findings give the housing sector, and every public body that will carry these duties, a clear view of the practical benefits and the systemic challenges ahead.

So, what have we learned so far?

One of the clearest lessons is that effective early intervention depends on a real shift in culture. It cannot be achieved through checklists and toolkits alone. If public bodies treat Ask and Act as a compliance exercise, the duties are far less likely to keep people safely in their homes. Simply adding mandatory questions to a form will not prevent a crisis.

Instead, the pilots show that real prevention means supporting our wider public sector partners, including health boards, education and justice settings, to look at housing through a completely new lens.

For staff outside housing, this means widening the definition of risk beyond the most visible forms of homelessness, such as rough sleeping. Several pilots have shown how good training can break down misconceptions about what counts as a housing risk, and reveal the true scale of hidden homelessness: people who are sofa surfing, stuck in unstable living arrangements, or facing the immediate threat of eviction.

The pilots also show that prevention on the front line is rarely about mounting a major crisis response. It is about spotting vulnerability early and offering practical support at the right moment, long before a household needs to approach their council’s homelessness service. Rapid family mediation, targeted benefits advice to maximise household income, or a small discretionary grant to clear minor rent arrears: this kind of early, focused help leads to lasting stability.

Part of the learning has been understanding what tools each service already has, and the wider benefits that stable housing brings. One encouraging finding is that some of this work was already happening regularly across services, even if it had never been recorded or described as homelessness prevention.

Scaling up prevention

While the local outcomes are encouraging, the findings also highlight the structural hurdles that must be tackled for a national rollout to succeed.

Connected information systems. Linking separate public services remains difficult. Data platforms need to talk to each other, backed by secure information sharing agreements that are simple to operate and allow referrals to be managed across several sectors.

Frontline workload pressures. Staff are clearly willing to help identify housing instability, but capacity constraints in several pilots point to a real risk of an implementation gap once initial training ends. Prevention tools must be simple and built into existing workflows, and staff need the time and support to adopt what may be a very different way of working.

Sustainability and staffing. As the pilots enter their final stretch, some partnerships have flagged the imminent risk of losing skilled staff and local expertise when their time limited funding ends. The report particularly highlights the impact on third sector partner organisations.

Keeping up the momentum

Formal funding for the pilots ends this December, but our collective work cannot stop there. With the duties not expected to take effect until late 2028, there is a real risk that the skills, relationships and evidence built over the past year drain away in the gap between the two. At Crisis, we believe December must be treated as a catalyst, not a cliff edge.

The evidence still gathering across the pilots should be used to keep developing the training resources, secure data pathways and shared governance models needed to make these duties work at national scale.

Ask and Act has the potential to be genuinely transformational for housing rights in Scotland. But turning small pilot successes into a universal safety net needs a strong, clear plan for national implementation, with sufficient investment to make these excellent frontline practices the standard in every public service.

Crisis has championed this change from the beginning. Ask and Act was first proposed in 2021 by the Prevention Review Group, which Crisis led, because we know that a shared commitment to early intervention is essential if we are to end homelessness for good.