3rd April 2026 – Rough Sleeping Count – Glasgow

Background

Our Glasgow Street Team is out 7-days a week, working from 7am through to 11pm, they engage and connect with people experiencing, or at risk of, rough sleeping, to find solutions. 

Building trust and relationships is key to everything we do at Simon Community Scotland. Our Street Team are easily identifiable in their Simon Community jackets and with their purple rucksacks. We are known faces in and around Glasgow city centre.

Anyone living, working or socialising in Glasgow city centre will have seen why our Street Team and Access Hub (on the corner of Brown and Argyle Streets) are needed now more than ever.

Our 24-hour helpline (0800 027 7466) received 1,567 calls during the month of March. Our Access Hub provided 1,849 support and our Street Team provided 1,937 supports.

Through March, our team prevented 67 people from rough sleeping, working with partners to support them into accommodation. 

Rough sleeping and begging

Rough sleeping can vary from person to person, depending on circumstances. For some people, it can be a short term crisis , 1 or 2 nights, for others it can be much longer term and sustained crisis, most often worsened by significant mental health problems.

Our team works on building relationships to keep people as safe and supported as possible, and to help people into accommodation.

On a daily basis, our team connects with around 50 people who are begging on the streets of Glasgow. We always check and we know that not all people who are begging are rough sleeping and not all the people who are rough sleeping are begging. 

Partners

We are proud to work with a number of partners (those who helped last night are listed below) to collaborate and coordinate our efforts to help people find their safe place and to be connected to health, housing, legal and welfare services.

We are also proud to include volunteers on our Street Team and our Street Cycles team is 100% reliant on volunteers giving their time, energy and skills to help us reach people outside the city centre. We thank them all for their exceptional support.

While the majority of people who are rough sleeping are seeking accommodation, our team also has to consider each person on an individual basis. The trauma that some people have experienced can mean that they don’t feel able, or safe, to come inside and our team continues to connect and support them to be safe while being ready to get them into a safe place when the time is right and the opportunity is right for the person.  We never give up or lose hope.

Meeting people where they are at, connecting, building trust and relationships is what we are all about. 

Organising the Count

6 staff from SCS and 15 volunteers from a variety of partnerships across the city took part in this year’s count. Volunteers were made up of support from 7 partner agencies including: HSCP – Homeless Casework, HSCP – Housing First, HSCP – Complex Needs, The Invisibles, Police Scotland, Lodging House Mission, The Thistle and Shelter Scotland.

 

Number of rough sleepers identified

During the course of the count we  identified 19 people rough sleeping in the city. 

As in previous counts, there was evidence of some begging activity where sleeping bags and mats were stored for the following day. 

Accuracy of Count

The number of people our teams engaged with last night ties in with our daily reports.

We have an extensive network of partnerships and connections across the city, with whom we engage with on a daily/weekly basis. As a result we are able to constantly update our mapping of where people are known to bed down. This includes local police, HSCP Neighbourhoods and Sustainability and local housing associations, parks and recreation sites and car parks. That provides us with a high degree of confidence that only the very few that might go to great efforts to be undetected, or are staying in more remote places outside the city centre are not found during the count.

Help

If you need help, or if see someone who might need our support, please;

CALL our 24-helpline on 0800 027 7466

Or

DIRECT/VISIT – Our Glasgow Access Hub (open 7-days a week, 9am-5pm (10am on a Wednesday) at 74-80 Brown Street, Glasgow, G2 8PD