BSL Plan 2025 - 2031
Introduction
Our draft plan follows the second BSL National Plan, which the Scottish Government published in November 2023. The National Plan’s ambition is for Scotland to be the best place in the world for BSL users to live, work and visit.
The National Plan focuses on ten priority areas with an emphasis on children, young people and their families, health and wellbeing and celebrating deaf culture. It also tackles accessibility for BSL users that impacts on a number of areas such as transport, democratic participation, and access to justice.
Our plan supports the National Plan’s ambition. We are committed to promoting and supporting BSL, including in its tactile form. This plan reports on what we achieved during the period of our first plan and sets out future actions we will take that are relevant to our role and our work.
Giving us your feedback
We welcome feedback from organisations and individuals with an interest in our work on any aspect of our proposed plan. You can give us your feedback by 7 March 2025 by contacting us at:
Email: shr@shr.gov.scot
British Sign Language (BSL) users can contact us via Contact Scotland BSL
If you prefer, you can send us a video in BSL. If you would like to do this, please send us an email with YouTube or Vimeo links to videos of your responses. Please do not attach the video by email as we can not receive large files.
You can also send feedback to us in hard copy at:
Scottish Housing Regulator
5th Floor
220 High Street
Glasgow
G4 0QW
We will publish a short report which summarises responses alongside our final plan. We will not publish individual responses.
Summary
Our role is to regulate the housing and homelessness services provided by Scotland’s local authorities and Registered Social Landlords (RSLs).
Although we are not a direct service provider, we recognise how important it is that tenants, people who are homeless, other service users and others with an interest in our work can find out about what we do and contact us if they need to. People who use BSL should be able to easily access information:
- about how we regulate;
- that we publish about their landlord; and
- about how they can take forward any concerns or queries they have in relation to a landlord’s services.
Our plan aims to achieve this.
We also recognise the important role that housing and homelessness services play in people’s lives, and the importance of all service users being able to access these services when they need them. So, our plan includes a regulatory focus on access to housing and homelessness services for BSL users.
What we did during 2018-2024
In our first BSL Plan 2018 – 2024 we said we would:
By June 2019
- improve access to our information for BSL users, including making our website more accessible to BSL users
- promote the BSL online interpreting video relay services called ‘Contact Scotland BSL’ and train our staff on how to use it
- raise our staff’s awareness of BSL and our BSL plan
- ensure that we have access to registered BSL / English interpreters
We completed all these actions by June 2019 and refreshed them during 2024.
These actions are embedded in our ways of working and continue to be ongoing activities for us. For example:
- We make information about access to BSL / English interpreters available to our staff.
- We promote the BSL online video relay service on our website and in our staff’s email signatures.
- We produced two short information videos in BSL about who we are and what we do and how to make a complaint about a social landlord.
- To support the launch of our new Regulatory Framework in 2024 we produced BSL videos of two key tenant-focused publications: How we regulate – a guide for tenants and service users; and our How to make a complaint or raise a serious concern about a social landlord factsheet for tenants and service users.
By March 2020
- update our Equalities Statement, taking account of this Plan and any other considerations in relation to BSL
We published updated equalities statements in 2019 and in 2023. Our current Statement runs from 2023 – 2026 and notes our work in relation to BSL under its accessibility objective.
By March 2023
- carry out thematic work to explore access to housing and homelessness services for BSL users.
We carried out a thematic review of access to social landlords’ housing and homelessness services for BSL users. We completed this work in autumn 2024, later than originally planned in our first BSL plan. This was a wide-ranging project in which we reviewed the websites of all social landlords in Scotland to assess the existing provision of BSL content to see what information was available for BSL users. We also commissioned British Deaf Association (BDA) Scotland to get an insight into the BSL community’s experiences of accessing social housing services in Scotland. The review set out a series of recommendations for social landlords to consider.
What we will do 2025 - 2031
Many of the activities we carried out during our first plan are now embedded in how we work and will be ongoing during our second plan. Our actions also take account of those recommendations to landlords from our thematic review of access to services that are relevant to our own work.
Throughout the period of this plan we will:
- continue to look for ways to improve access to our information for BSL users, including making our website more accessible to BSL users;
- continue to promote the use of the Scottish Government’s nationally funded BSL online interpreting video relay services called ‘Contact Scotland BSL’ and ensure our staff know how to use ‘Contact Scotland BSL’;
- continue to raise awareness amongst our staff on BSL, including in its tactile form, and our BSL Plan; and
- continue to ensure that we have access to registered BSL / English interpreters, recognising that face to face meetings can be the most appropriate way to engage with BSL users where a more in-depth discussion is required.
Alongside these ongoing activities we will:
By March 2026:
- update our Equalities Statement, taking account of this Plan and any other considerations in relation to BSL users; and
- explore options for ways to make the content we publish on our website even more accessible to BSL users.
We will also:
By March 2027:
- carry out a follow-up to our 2024 thematic review to examine social landlords’ responses to our recommendations.
What happens next
We will reflect on the feedback we receive on this draft as we develop our second final Plan which we will aim to publish by the end of March 2025.