What ‘Home’ means

Home Group director, Sandra Brydon, blogs on housing as a human right and the work the organisation is doing with Shelter Scotland to understand it better.

With Scottish Housing Day fast approaching, the team at Home Group in Scotland have been looking closely at this year’s theme; housing as a human right.

As a provider of social housing, as well as mid-market rent properties, this is something we have always felt passionate about.  We’re constantly reviewing our services to ensure that customers have safe homes they can be proud of.

It seems obvious that every person should have a place to call home, but this basic right is not actually protected by law in Scotland.

A change in legislation could provide a legal right to an adequate home for everyone. Until then, we are working to ensure that our customers have good quality affordable homes which meet their needs. We are already building new homes to the highest standards of energy efficiency that exceed the efficiency of most homes built in the private sector. In some areas of Scotland, we are even including the technology to charge electric vehicles at the new homes.

But we know we could do more and, as part of our journey in understanding housing as a human right, we’ve teamed up with Shelter Scotland to explore this and understand what more we can do.

We have developed a workshop with Shelter for our teams and our Board to help us all gain a better understanding of what a human rights-based approach to housing should look like.

It will also help us to have a better understanding of how human rights relate to housing in Scottish law, and we will use this understanding to develop our own practices at Home Group in Scotland.

Home is such an important word and something that everyone should have. We asked some of our customers what home means to them and their answers all revolved around family, love and safety – things that everyone has a right to.

We’re supporting Scottish Housing Day and proud to be working with Shelter Scotland to improve our knowledge and support our customers even more.

You can view our short video below