What happened
On 3 March 2022 John Hay, 63, a housing officer with Link Housing and thirty years into the job, went alone into the common close at Glynwed Court, Falkirk, to put up a notice about recycling. Scott Nairns, 51, a tenant in the building, had nursed a grievance since a 2016 eviction that was quickly reversed, and over compensation claims he said had been ignored. He attacked Hay in the close.
Hay got out into the street. Two motorists who stopped said they could not see the colour of his hair and that he kept repeating “I need to get away”. One first-aider assumed he had been hit by a car. He spent 17 days in hospital with facial fractures, a bleed on the brain and partially collapsed lungs. Police found blood up the walls and notices addressed to Link Housing calling its staff “retards” and “uneducated nonces”.
The outcome
On 1 March 2024 a jury at the High Court in Stirling took under two hours to convict Nairns of attempted murder, and of assaulting Hay to his severe injury, disfigurement, impairment and danger of life. On 22 May 2024 at the High Court in Livingston, Lord Young jailed him for eight years, backdated to March 2022, with a non-harassment order and two years’ supervision on release. The judge said Nairns had “developed an obsession” that Link Housing was harming him.
What went wrong
Link Housing had Nairns on its books for years. The grievance emails and the notices on his door were in the association’s hands long before the attack. Whether any of that reached the officer walking into the close is not recorded.
The task was about as low as housing work gets: a notice board. It was done alone, inside a shared close, with both hands occupied and nobody at the mouth of the building. A close is a confined space with a door at each end and no line of sight to the street, so a worker inside it is out of view before anything happens.
What it teaches
Housing has a category of work that nobody calls a visit. Putting up a notice, reading a meter, checking a fire door: the worker is in the building, alone, often with their back turned, and often with no record that they are there at all.
The control is intelligence attached to the address. If a tenant has spent years writing to the association about the association, that history should sit on the file where the person allocating the job can see it. A flag costs nothing.
The second control is the check-in. Nobody was expecting Hay anywhere at a particular time, so nobody noticed a gap.
Questions for the room
- Before you walk into a close on a routine task, what do you know about who lives behind each door?
- If you have complained to your landlord for six years without a reply, does anyone in the association know you are that person?
- What would have told the office that this address needed two people rather than one?
- Who expected Hay to report back that afternoon, and at what time would they have raised it?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. Four sources were read: Falkirk Herald in March 2024 and May 2024, the Daily Record in May 2024, and STV News. The record and the pack agree on the sequence, the conviction and the sentence. No Link Housing review, prosecution or regulatory finding is in the pack, so this page makes no claim about the association’s procedures.
For teams sending one person into a building on a routine task, our lone working training covers the check-in and address intelligence that were missing here.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.