As the housing charity marks a major milestone, Helen McArdle looks at the challenges past and present in the battle to eradicate homelessness

AFTER four decades of fighting to raise awareness of homelessness, housing charity Shelter Scotland will reflect on past achievements and future goals when it celebrates its 40th birthday on Wednesday.

Following the success of its English counterpart, launched in 1966, Shelter brought its campaign north of the Border in October 1968. Tapping into the heightened public consciousness following the BBC's groundbreaking drama Cathy Come Home - which focused on the plight of a young family as they spiralled into destitution - Shelter was able to take advantage of the widespread outrage and galvanise support at a political level for its aim of eradicating bad housing and homelessness.

In stark contrast to the two-thirds of Scottish households which are now owner-occupied, the vast majority of Scots in 1968 lived in social-rented accommodation. However, the quality of public sector housing in 1960s Scotland was characterised by inner city slums and often squalid conditions in rural areas. The Cullingworth Committee highlighted the "unbelievable" environmental poverty faced by a large section of Scotland's urban population in a 1967 report, describing the "attitude of despair" which had taken hold in the worst affected areas. A growing population, the government's slum clearance initiative and a decline in the private rental market all contributed to a shortage of housing by the end of that decade and an escalation in homelessness.

Graeme Brown, director of Shelter Scotland, believes there have been significant improvements since then, but homeless families still face major obstacles. "I think it would be fair to say this: there was a housing crisis in 1966-1968 when Shelter Scotland was founded and we have today, sadly, a housing crisis of a different nature, but one which impacts on people's lives in really quite harmful ways.

"As a family assessed as homeless, you might be out in temporary accommodation that is small, claustrophobic and has a real impact on children's ability to do their homework. It can also have a real impact on children's health, particularly anyone with respiratory problems because unfortunately some of these homes are not in a very good state of repair. We're rightly proud of our education system in Scotland and constantly trying to improve it, but last year there were some 40,000 households in Scotland assessed as homeless or near to homeless, so you've got a significant number of people, especially children, who are unable to achieve their potential because of their housing."

Most experts date the decline in council housing to the Conservative government's right-to-buy scheme, introduced in 1980. Since then Scottish local authorities have seen their housing stock stripped by half a million properties as sitting tenants were swept up in the zeitgeist for home-ownership - a trend which hit the buffers in the early 1990s recession when hundreds of overstretched borrowers defaulted on their mortgages and faced repossession. Recent reports of a doubling in repossession actions this year led many to fear the present economic crisis would precipitate a new surge in homelessness, but inaccuracies in the Civil Judicial Statistics data-gathering makes the true picture for 2008 impossible to discern - nor do court actions for repossession necessarily result in eviction.

Ultimately, right-to-buy contributed to a chronic shortage of housing and the stigmatising of social renting. Successive governments failed to match investment in housebuilding to population growth, causing massive house-price inflation which culminated in an average Scottish house price of £157,000 in 2007 - five times the average salary. Meanwhile, the best council properties were snapped up, leaving the "disastrous" estates and new towns which were established in the 1960s to relocate slum-dwellers.

Cut off from amenities and precluding any sense of community, these run-down crime blackspots, where family breakdown, alcoholism and drug abuse were rife, came to symbolise what council housing meant in the 1980s and 1990s. But, according to Brown, projects like the New Gorbals regeneration represent the positive face of social renting for the future.

He said: "Effectively, when you put a large number of people with low incomes together, you are in a sense sort of condemning those families and individuals to a pretty miserable experience. What we want to see are smaller developments, mixed communities with a smaller number of socially rented accommodation available."

Carefully investing public money in the right kinds of properties - especially family-friendly accommodation - as house prices fall, is one way he sees of plugging the social housing gap.

Dr Peter Robson, chairman of Shelter Scotland from 1986-2005 and now chairman of Weslo Housing Management, the West Lothian-based social landlord which is sponsoring Shelter's birthday event at Dynamic Earth, believes the current economic crisis could mark a watershed in attitudes to housing.

"In the 1980s and 90s owner-occupiers were the group to aspire to, but it has become entirely clear in the past couple of years - even before the credit crunch - that this was untenable. It had become very unfashionable to talk about social housing. Now people are waking up to the fact that it makes social and economic sense," said Robson.

For the past six years, Weslo has been running a mortgage-to-rent scheme for homeowners who run into financial difficulties.

"We buy their homes and lease them back," explained Robson. "It's well-established as a national scheme in Scotland and we would encourage the Scottish government to advertise its existence more highly - especially in the current financial climate where concerns about opportunistic private firms are being raised.

"Suddenly somebody with an eye for business is seeing a window to make money from others' misfortune, buying properties at knockdown prices but not giving the tenants the rights they would enjoy under a social landlord."

The next four years are crucial for Shelter's central aim of eliminating homelessness. By 2012, the system which allows local authorities to categorise priority and non-priority homeless - in place since 1977 - will be abolished. From then on, single people, childless couples and families will have an equal right to be rehoused. It is an ambition that has put Scotland at the forefront of housing policy, but there are mixed views on whether the right to a home will be translated into bricks and mortar.

Dr Isobel Anderson, senior lecturer in housing studies at Stirling University, said: "There is a great danger, and I wouldn't want to underplay it, that with the tremendous problems we have in the home ownership sector at the minute, people forget that nothing has changed for the vulnerable people out there who are not economically active, who've had really difficult lives, who've been in and out of the care and criminal justice systems, who've got mental health issues - those things haven't gone away just because we've got a financial crisis.

"It's not impossible - there are positive indicators - but we don't want to take our eye off that ball or we will have another crisis of rough sleeping to deal with."