Meeting of the Parliament 13 September 2017
Scotland faces a housing crisis on a scale that has not been seen since the second world war. We urgently need to talk about it, and to act.
Housing, alongside health and education, should be right at the top of the Scottish political agenda. To help to put it there, Ruth Davidson gave a keynote speech on housing at the Institute for Public Policy Research last month, and the Scottish Conservatives are using our parliamentary time this afternoon to debate housing.
Opposition debates in this chamber can serve different purposes. Our purpose today is not to seek to give the Government a bloody nose and to inflict on it another parliamentary defeat, which it can then proceed to ignore, but to start a national debate, in which, I hope, politicians in all parties will want to engage. We have got to act to solve Scotland’s housing crisis, and if the Government will not use its time to lead a debate on how we do that, we will use ours.
When policy makers talk about the housing shortage, they tend to talk in numbers. We know, for example, that 10,000 fewer homes are being built each year compared with pre-recession levels. We know that over a five-year period, between 2007 and 2012, the number of new homes built by the private sector dropped by a staggering 54 per cent. We know that there are up to 150,000 families in Scotland on local authority waiting lists. We also know, based on analysis by Audit Scotland, that it could be more than 20 years before there are enough new homes to meet the projected increase in households in Scotland.
Those statistics paint a stark picture of the crisis before us, and of the immense challenges that lie ahead. It is little wonder that the governor of the Bank of England has emphasised that problems with housing are the biggest risk to the UK economy, or that the Confederation of British Industry has warned that
“A perfect storm is brewing in the housing market”,
adding that the time to act is now.
However, what is often overlooked is the human cost of this crisis. A house, after all, is not just four walls and a roof. It is where memories are made and families are formed. It is part of a wider community. For many, it is the very essence of aspiration. Our belief on these benches is as fervent as it ever has been, that everyone should have the chance to own their own home.