The year is 2019. The UK is in poor shape and dark clouds hang on the horizon. From our politics to our pay packets, the signs of decline are visible everywhere. None more so than in the growing presence of rough sleepers in our towns and cities. In Glasgow, the temperature has dropped to -8\u00b0C, and rough sleepers are shivering on every street corner.<\/p>\n
A man and his sister prepare to take matters into their own hands. Colin McInnes, who is autistic, and his sister, who is in early recovery from addiction, make their way into the city centre carrying a rucksack with a flask of lentil soup, a sandwich, and some broken bourbon biscuits inside. Colin\u2019s aim is modest: to feed one hungry homeless person.<\/p>\n
Little did he know that this small act of compassion would change the course of his entire life and the lives of countless others. As Colin turns to walk home with the empty rucksack, one street-dweller taps him on the shoulder and asks if he will be back. \u201cI will,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll be here at this time every night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Six years later, homelessness is only worsening, and this winter, Glasgow is as cold as ever. Thankfully, though, Colin has been busy. Inside the headquarters of his Homeless Project Scotland (HPS) \u2014 the result of the promise made on that cold night \u2014 40 or so people are eating hot meals in a warm caf\u00e9. Sustained entirely by volunteers and public donations and operating without government funding, it provides food, shelter, emergency response and advocacy seven days a week. Every meal, bed and item of clothing here is paid for through public donations, and the quiet support of nearby businesses. At the back of the building, in a glass-fronted office, a man with a 1,000-yard stare chairs a meeting. It\u2019s Colin.<\/p>\n
The challenge facing him is acute. Across the UK, the scale of homelessness now runs into the hundreds of thousands. Shelter\u2019s latest analysis<\/a> shows that at least 382,000 people in England were homeless on a given day in 2025 \u2014 including many families stuck in temporary accommodation. Official government statistics<\/a> show 132,410 households in temporary accommodation in England alone, and Shelter has calculated that there are as many as 100,000 children in temporary accommodation in London alone. To put that another way, one out of every 21 children in London is homeless, equivalent to more than one homeless child per class.<\/p>\n Taken together, these figures underline how pervasive housing insecurity has become, extending far beyond rough sleeping into widespread reliance on emergency and temporary housing. These trends reflect deeper structural pressures: a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing, spiralling private rents, insecure tenancies, and a welfare system reformed in ways that leave little margin for error when people hit crisis.<\/p>\n Westminster recently set out a new plan<\/a> to prevent homelessness and rough sleeping, backed by \u00a33.5 billion in promised investment. Yet critics argue that without a major expansion of social housing and meaningful action on poverty and insecurity, little will change.<\/p>\n Another factor worsening the crisis is dysfunction across the system itself. Research by Shelter<\/a> has repeatedly shown how stretched resources at local level create avoidable delays to vulnerable people getting the support they need. This failure is often chalked up to the chaotic lives of the homeless as opposed to services arguably unfit for purpose. People with complex needs face specific challenges. Homeless Link\u2019s\u00a0Unhealthy State of Homelessness<\/a> research found that 82% of people experiencing homelessness have a mental health diagnosis, but only\u00a09% of accommodation providers<\/a>\u00a0state they are capable of supporting people them. They may be judged too risky for mainstream services, while rigid thresholds, poorly integrated services, and turgid referral systems delay timelier intervention. Public misunderstanding compounds the problem<\/a>, allowing homelessness to be framed as inevitable, insoluble, or the fault of feckless individuals, relieving political pressure for meaningful change.<\/p>\n Homeless Project Scotland is determined to change this. The charity represents a radical communitarian response to these traditional systems, many of which have grown overly cautious to intervene in a climate of scarce resources and institutional arse-covering. Powered by working-class volunteers with little experience of, or interest in, navigating bureaucracy, the project is driven by a palpable sense of moral urgency and a clear message to homeless people: if services won\u2019t help you, we will.<\/p>\n Colin describes that night in Glasgow in 2019 as \u201csomething like Armageddon\u201d. And what followed, he tells me, was not a plan but a series of improvised and messy responses to escalating need. He acted swiftly on the impulse to help so many of us feel but resist. Rucksacks became crates. Crates became a battered trailer dragged through the snow under Central Station Bridge. Food was cooked and reheated wherever possible. \u201cWe didn\u2019t care about any legalities,\u201d Colin says. \u201cJust caring about humanity. Get it done and feed people.\u201d<\/p>\n Word spread. Soon, Colin\u2019s team was feeding hundreds. Then Covid hit. As other services shut down and staff were furloughed, Homeless Project Scotland kept going. \u201cWe were the only place providing food in the city centre,\u201d Colin says. \u201cThe whole city just became empty.\u201d Eventually the operation was paused, not because demand fell, but because gathering together in the streets became unsafe.<\/p>\n What followed was even more ambitious. Volunteers cooked in their own homes, met in supermarket car parks and delivered food daily to hotels across the city where the homeless had been lodged during the pandemic. \u201cWe took out thousands and thousands of meals,\u201d Colin says.<\/p>\n Made up of volunteers operating off their own backs and running mainly off proceeds from collection buckets passed around local pubs, HPS lacked a formal structure. When it was time to upscale, crowdfunders were launched and more volunteers signed up. In the absence of a professional PR operation, accusations of poor governance found easy purchase \u2014 and Colin applied to become a registered charity. \u201cI wanted to be above board,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to show everybody where the books were.\u201d<\/p>\n He also needed a premises. First, he persuaded a landlord to let him take over a disused property in a collapsing rat-infested building. After a letter to Network Rail \u2014 owner of a vacant retail unit beneath Central Station bridge in the heart of the city centre \u2014 an Argyle Street office came next. Then, the current base on Glassford Street on the doorstep of Glasgow\u2019s upmarket Merchant City. \u201cWe kept thinking: \u2018This is too big,\u2019\u201d Colin says. \u201cAnd then before you know it, that TARDIS got filled.\u201d<\/p>\n Today the organisation runs what Colin describes as the only fully volunteer-led night shelter in Scotland, alongside a food service producing tens of thousands of meals a month and a volunteer-run national helpline operating around the clock. People call in with all kinds of problems, from loneliness to hypothermia to domestic violence.<\/p>\n Colin is unapologetic about the absence of professional sheen that some apparently mistake for unseriousness. \u201cBureaucracy can fuck right off,\u201d he says. \u201cYou will never fund my charity for a bureaucracy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou will never fund my charity for a bureaucracy.\u201d<\/p>\n What guides the organisation instead is a simpler principle: people before procedure. It\u2019s a principle as risky as it is provocative. Colin traces his distrust of rigid systems back to personal experience rather than ideology. \u201cMy approach is shaped entirely by lived experience,\u201d he explains. \u201cI am someone who has suffered at the hands of systems that were meant to protect, support, and care and which clearly failed to do so. That experience gave me a deep understanding of how easily people fall through the cracks and how invisible they can become.\u201d<\/p>\n We take a break. I step out for a cigarette and get talking to a man named Andy. When Andy first contacted Homeless Project Scotland, he wasn\u2019t in Glasgow. He was in Blackpool; after a period of poor decisions, his marriage had broken down and he\u2019d become estranged from his children. Desperate, he phoned the helpline. Instead of receiving advice, a referral, or a soul-destroying automated message, as he might have done if he\u2019d rung any other hotline, Andy got talking to Colin. Colin jumped in a van and drove south through the night. \u201cHe came down and picked me up from Blackpool,\u201d Andy says. Within days, he was in the shelter. After three months, he moved into a hotel. Now, he has a furnished flat and is being assessed for a two-bedroom home so his children can visit.<\/p>\n Andy had tried accessing services before and \u201cgot nowhere\u201d. If it wasn\u2019t for Colin and the project, he says, \u201cI think I would have committed suicide.\u201d Andy now volunteers seven days a week.<\/p>\n On this brutally cold evening, the shelter is filling quietly. People queue in a seated area, are then greeted by name and guided through a process that is firm without being intimidating. There is no performative authority, no sense of suspicion. The atmosphere is strangely serene.<\/p>\n The dormitories are warm and well-ordered. Each bed is numbered. The system is meticulous rather than bureaucratic. If someone in bed eight takes unwell, staff can immediately access their medical information. There are showers, toilets, laundry facilities and a kitchen area in the shelter. There is a small cinema corner and a few well-stocked bookshelves. Bedding is high quality, supplied by the same company that services the boutique hotel next door. People here are not offered platitudes about \u201cdignity\u201d then fobbed off until Monday morning; rather, they\u2019re treated with care and respect.<\/p>\n In creating such a sanctuary, Colin has come up against many of the computer-says-no types prevalent in officialdom; the kind of people who are so inured to the dysfunction of the sector that they no longer perceive it let alone raise their voices against it. As a result, his antenna for local authority bullshit is extremely well tuned. In a video posted by the project earlier this year, Colin explained that Glasgow City Council had refused him a planning application for a shelter on the grounds that people would queue outside the building for food, a decision he contrasted with the tolerance shown for lines of rowdy revellers outside nearby nightclubs.<\/p>\n The project experiences a fair amount of resistance locally, Colin tells me, much of it framed in the language of health and safety. Risks are identified, concerns are flagged, and safeguards are invoked. In theory, these mechanisms exist to protect the vulnerable. In practice, Colin argues, they are often used to obstruct help at the moment it is most urgently needed. Fire safety was repeatedly cited as a reason not to act, even as people slept outdoors in lethal conditions. At the same time, \u201cshared-air\u201d sleeping spaces were dismissed as undignified, despite the alternative being a doorway in sub-zero temperatures. The contradiction is not lost on him. \u201cThe lengths that the SNP-led council and SNP government have gone to in order to defend the position that night shelters are \u2018a thing of the past\u2019 are extraordinary,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is not about policy, ideology, or box-ticking. This is about life and death. When the choice is a warm, supervised indoor space or sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures, the moral answer should be obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n To Colin, this all reveals a risk-averse system more comfortable managing hypothetical threats than confronting immediate harm. Worse, he believes that bureaucracy has become a way for institutions to distance themselves from moral responsibility. When procedures are followed but people still freeze, starve or die, process becomes a means of deflection. The absurdities don\u2019t stop there: each time someone is forced to sleep rough, the local authority is in breach of its own statutory duties \u2014 yet faces no penalty. In effect, the biggest rule-breaker is left enforcing the rules on everyone else.<\/p>\n By contrast, safety in this shelter is not ignored, it is simply understood differently. \u201cWe don\u2019t have time for sitting writing policies,\u201d Colin says. \u201cPeople are coming in here in an emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n