Meeting of the Parliament 17 March 2016
Thank you, Mr Eadie.
Secondly, I thank the alliance that is the living rent campaign, which is led by the National Union of Students Scotland and includes many of the big trade unions, alongside many other housing and tenant representative organisations.
It is always a little unfair to single out any one individual but, in speaking of effective and tireless campaigners, I will mention Mike Dailly and his colleagues at Govan Law Centre. The law centre’s report entitled “Powerless: no expectations, choice or security” illuminates what can and does happen to vulnerable people in an unfair and imbalanced system when they have insufficient rights or little recourse to legal protection.
Those campaigners and many more combined to put the evidence in front of Parliament that highlighted exactly how much housing tenure in Scotland has changed over recent years and how we have ended up, after a decade of difficulty, with not simply a housing shortage but—in the First Minister’s words—a housing crisis. Only 28 per cent of young people in Scotland now own their own homes, which is down from 48 per cent in 1999. They cannot afford a deposit and, with 150,000 of them on local authority waiting lists, there is little chance of them getting a socially rented property.
The result has been a doubling of the numbers who are renting privately; the figure is now up to approximately 330,000 households. Before we all get the wrong impression of the sector, I stress that those who are renting are not always young single people. One in four of those private rented households have children, and those households are often in expensive tenancies that offer little security. The result of that combination is very troubling.
One fifth of all homelessness applications now come via the private rented sector, which represents a rise of 38 per cent in the past five years. As is too often the case, it is those on lower incomes who have been hit hardest. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that a quarter of households experiencing poverty now live in the private rented sector, which is up from one in 10 a decade earlier.
I apologise to members for the barrage of statistics, but I am trying to illustrate that there has been a radical change by any analysis. For some, it means real hardship. For others, it means a depressing lowering of expectations. Today, we are beginning the process of offering greater security to those who live in the private rented sector, but the bigger housing crisis requires a range of answers, of which the most important concerns the need to address housing supply. We need to build tens of thousands more homes across all tenures.
I mentioned earlier that the minister might have done well to have listened and to have been more willing to work with Labour on the issue. l suggest that it is not too late to do so. As an aside, I understand after five years that the Government believes that consensus is a one-way system and applies only when Labour supports the SNP, but it could work the other way round, too.
Labour lodged a series of amendments to regulate the private rented sector two years ago. At that stage, the SNP voted with the Conservatives to stop those amendments. I ask members to think about how much money we would have saved private tenants if the Government had adopted our proposals then instead of waiting until now.
However, I repeat that it is not too late. Many young people in Scotland today simply do not believe that they will be able to secure or afford a home of their own. Three quarters of Scots who do not own their own home think that they never will. The expense of renting privately means that they feel trapped, and they identify saving for a deposit as the biggest hurdle. As the minister will know, Labour has outlined a plan to help people to save for a deposit with a £3,000 boost for savers.
The minister talks proudly of her record on housing, despite the fact that her Government has clearly not got anywhere near meeting the identified need. The new target that she has announced also falls short. Although 50,000 affordable homes over the next five years is an increase, Shelter, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations have all estimated the need at 60,000, which is Labour’s target.
Even within the Government target, we know that the figure on housing for social rent rather than simply affordable housing is the more important figure, and I urge the minister to replace her goal of 35,000 with Labour’s more ambitious, achievable and needs-based goal of at least 45,000 homes for social rent.
In all the years that I have represented Eastwood, housing has consistently been the biggest issue that constituents have raised. East Renfrewshire is a great place in which to live, go to school and bring up a family, but when a person’s family are grown, where do they live? There are very few council or housing association properties and house prices are so high that it is difficult for any young person to get their foot on the property ladder.
Just as I believe that the next Scottish Government needs to do more about the living wage, so I believe that we will have to return to the living rent. However, the bill will at least begin to address the problem of security of tenure.
We want to drive up standards in the private rented sector and we want it to expand. We want the PRS to help meet the demand—the pressing need—for housing and we want private renting to be an attractive option for investors. However, the law needs to be framed to reflect the fact that properties are people’s homes, not just a business. Today is a good step forward on that journey and Labour is happy to support the bill.
17:35