Meeting of the Parliament 18 November 2015
I will begin where the previous speaker left off. There is complacency written right through the Scottish Government’s motion. It says at the outset
“That the Parliament recognises that housing helps promote social justice, strengthens communities and tackles inequality as well as being good for the economy”.
Those truths cannot be denied, and no one will try to remove that statement from the motion.
However, other clauses in the motion are recognisable because we have heard them so often before. The first is that we apparently welcome
“the Scottish Government’s commitment to providing access to good quality housing”
and recognise
“that it is a high priority for the current administration”.
Let us look at the Government’s record and use the motion as its agenda.
It has been said already but I say again that the Government’s claim to have achieved its objective of building 30,000 affordable homes is a misrepresentation of the truth.
The manifesto commitment was to build 30,000 socially rented homes, but an early action of the Scottish Government was to revise that to 30,000 affordable homes, of which 20,000 would be socially rented, which is a much easier target to achieve. That means that if the Government achieves the objective that it describes in the motion, it will have missed its manifesto target by a full third.
Let us remember that that is not the only sleight of hand. In one year, early in the administration, the Government shrewdly switched from counting starts to counting completions. That means that when the Government counts its total at the end of this five-year period, it will count houses that were built over a longer period. There is a great deal of sleight of hand going on.
The motion goes on to call on us to acknowledge the
“achievement being made despite the drastic reduction in capital budgets as a result of the UK Government’s spending cuts”.
The Government’s next approach is always to blame the UK Government. The problem is that in successive budgets the Scottish Government singled out the housing budget for disproportionate cuts. If that is a demonstration of how the Government treats a priority, I do not know how the Government defines “priority”.
The fact is that this Government has been doing all that it can to encourage house building without taking responsibility for it. For example, it slashed the housing association grant, which meant a vast reduction in the number of houses being built by housing associations. To prevent the number from dropping and to keep building, our housing associations borrowed up to their limits and stretched their assets.
What did the Government do in relation to local authorities? It found ways to encourage councils to build houses, but almost invariably councils were left to borrow the money that was needed to meet the Government’s targets. The great claims that have been made about the number of council houses that have been built under this Government might be accurate in terms of the numbers, but to suggest that the Government is paying for those council houses is to misrepresent the truth.