THE front of Lorraine McGrath’s office building is being painted today, but not in any ordinary way. The street artist Danny McDermott, aka EJEK, is creating a huge mural right across the front wall and already a flock of blue birds is flying over a forest of red trees. Later, he plans to add more flowers and grass but already, on one of the longest streets on the south side of Glasgow, the building is looking like a multi-coloured beacon, a lighthouse amid the grey.

Which was pretty much Lorraine McGrath’s intention. For the last four years, the 50-year-old has been chief executive of the homelessness charity Simon Community Scotland and she likes her message to be bold, direct and colourful. When she talks, there’s a refreshing lack of social sector jargon and she’s also clear about how we should be tackling homelessness and what the Scottish Government isn’t doing that it should. You get the impression that if she were to pick up EJEK’s spray paints and cover her HQ with one simple message in big bright letters it would be: prevent, prevent, prevent.

In her office at the top of the building, which has another bold artistic statement – a giant poster of the cover of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds – McGrath says a prevention strategy means going into schools and helping people while they are still at risk of homelessness rather than out on the street, but there’s a danger, she says, that Scotland is being left behind on prevention. She points to Wales in particular where the Government has passed legislation which places a much greater emphasis on prevention and McGrath is happy it’s happening there, but frustrated it isn’t in Scotland.

She is also distinctly unhappy with the Scottish Government’s public consultation on a new mental health strategy. It’s called the 10 Year Vision and is due to be published later this year but, much to McGrath’s astonishment, homelessness has not been included in the plans.

“We are all a bit astonished by that,” she says. “More than 80 per cent of the people we work with have mental health problems and increasingly so. If you don’t have a mental health problem as part of your journey into homelessness, the experience of homelessness itself is so traumatic and damaging, you’re not going to bounce back with your mental wellbeing intact. It’s a huge issue in homelessness and sadly that’s been missed. The vision is sadly not that visionary.”

There are several reasons McGrath cares so much about the vision and tackling mental health problems and homelessness. Firstly, she was raised in Dennistoun in Glasgow by two Irish Catholic parents and many of her values came straight from them (and from her straight to her 21-year-old son). She also worked in a series of jobs that slowly nurtured and developed her natural ability to care – in the old Gartloch Hospital in Glasgow, she worked with mental health patients preparing to go back into the community. She then worked for the Scottish Association for Mental Health as a support worker and was there for nearly 20 years. And, although she can’t talk about the details to protect her relatives, she has personal experience of homelessness in her own extended family and how hard it can be to help. “We are an ordinary family with all the opportunity and access to resources and knowledge,” she says, “but it still happened.” She sees that as a kind of warning. "Sh*t happens to us all and homelessness can happen to any of us."

She says she has some regrets about her personal history – she wishes, for example, that she had gone to university rather than going straight into a job. “I chickened out I suppose is the easiest way of putting it,” she says. “Nobody in my immediate family had gone to university – my mum and dad probably weren’t university savvy so it was a bit too scary.”

However, she says the time she spent working at Gartloch Hospital helped to form her views on the state of Scotland’s mental health services. Have they improved? “No. I wouldn’t say so,” she says. “At the moment the mental health system is under unbelievable pressure. I think it’s gone full circle. When I worked in Gartloch, I saw an awful lot of people there who shouldn’t have been there, but had been there for decades. And then the hospital closure programme enabled an awful lot of people to move out and I was part of that. But now we have the opposite problem of people who would potentially really benefit from that kind of 24-hour intensive care being unable to access it. We have people who are extremely vulnerable who are not able to access the service.”

The major reason for the inadequate service is the pressure on council budgets, which McGrath has seen have a profoundly negative effect on caring organisations such as hers. McGrath took over as chief executive of Simon Community Scotland in 2012 and financial cuts, forced by the wider pressure on council budgets, meant she had to oversee redundancies and other cuts in the organisation. Things got so bad that the organisation was on the brink of collapse. And it wasn’t easy for McGrath personally – she is direct, but also instinctively compassionate so she found having to tell staff that they have lost their jobs difficult.

Four years on, with Simon Community Scotland celebrating its 50th anniversary, the ship has been steadied and the focus is on a series of relatively small scale initiatives with big aims. Just up the road from the offices are the archways where many homeless people sleep and where the Simon Community runs an advice hub – what McGrath likes to call a homeless A&E. However, the chief executive’s focus is also on the bigger ways in which homelessness in Scotland could be tackled.

The most obvious of them is housing and the fact behind much of the homelessness problem: we are not building enough houses. I ask McGrath about the right to buy council houses, which was recently discontinued in Scotland and, although she has her concerns, she is not prepared to call it a bad policy. Her own mum and dad bought their council house and she believes the policy empowered a lot of people. The problem was that as people bought their homes and that resource ebbed away, there was no equivalent building programme.

“Right to buy wasn’t matched by development – the two things weren’t going together,” she says. “It’s a bit like if you chop down one tree, plant three. The foresight wasn’t built in to the system in terms of just how many houses were going to be taken out of circulation. I can’t knock right to buy but the pitfall was that we weren’t building at the same rate.”

McGrath says part of the solution is helping people get access to the right kind of housing, which is why a common housing register is about to be piloted in Glasgow – it will allow people to look in one place for all the housing that’s available. She also wants to think of other new ways to help and one of them is the new Nightstop scheme in which volunteers offer to open up a spare room in their home to a young person aged between 16 and 25 in need of emergency accommodation. In time, McGrath hopes it could offer a serious alternative to hostels and she would like to see the scheme in every major area of the country.

She knows, though, that the path is steep. Recently, the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said there had been a decline in homeless in the last four years, but McGrath says that only applies to the number of people formally asking for help – the point is that people do not always come forward to ask for help so it can look like the problem is smaller than it really is.

So does McGrath think there really has been a decline in homelessness? “It doesn’t feel like it no,” she says. “In Scotland there’s some concern that rough sleeping is going up and there’s some concern that an awful lot of people aren’t asking for help anymore.”

She also talks about the hidden homelessness – people sleeping on sofas and floors – and the ongoing effects of the austerity agenda. If the government keeps saying ‘we have to make cuts’ the expectation builds up that help is not available and so people do not come forward. That might create the impression that things are getting better, says McGrath, but the opposite is the case: homelessness is still a problem in Scotland and it’s still far from solved.