Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 11 November 2020
I, too, congratulate Alasdair Allan on securing the debate, and I pay tribute to the young people whom he talked about in his speech, who have raised the issue recently with many of us. They highlighted their experience of trying to find affordable housing in island and rural communities.
This week, they contacted us again to say that the situation is getting worse. Young people who moved away for further and higher education want to come home, but they cannot. Those young people want to live and work in the communities in which they were brought up. They are also being forced out because the jobs and salaries that are available locally mean that they cannot compete with people who have spare cash for a holiday home. Those young people are at the beginning of their careers and have not accumulated the wealth that is needed to compete with people who can afford a second home.
When I visited West Harris Trust, I was told that when it bought the estate there were fears that nearly half of local housing would become second homes. Not surprisingly, therefore, their top priority was to build houses. Many community landowners have done the same; indeed, communities that do not own their land have been setting up trusts so that they are able to build houses. Therefore, Community Land Scotland’s report on the issue, which was published today, is timely.
Sadly, it is not a new problem—it has been a problem for decades—but it is getting worse. It causes the break-up of communities and families, and young people being forced to leave causes a brain drain and depopulation. Covid-19 has made the problem worse through its impact on the economy of rural and island communities. It has caused greater disparity between what local people can afford and what people who have even more spending power due to the pandemic can afford.
The young people who wrote to us expressing their concerns about access to homes asked that houses for sale be advertised locally before being advertised further afield as holiday homes. That suggestion has merit; in their submission to us, the young people highlighted a case in which that had worked well. However, we could go further. Alasdair Allan mentioned Norway; the Channel Islands, as well, operates two housing markets.
We could have a holiday home market that is proportionate to the housing that is available in the local housing market. Every home that is built with assistance from the public purse should be available only to locals. That would include council houses, housing association houses and homes that are built with help from a croft house grant or other public incentives. People could also opt in to the local housing market, making it clear that a house is to become a family home.
We also need opportunities to build houses. The croft house grant scheme is not fit for purpose, because it does not reflect the fact that people who run crofts also need other employment opportunities. Too often, I have heard of young people being turned down by the scheme because they might want to include an extra bedroom for bed and breakfast accommodation, an office for another job, or a workshop, depending on what they do. That needs to be put right.
We also need to ensure that young people in rural areas have access to good-quality well-paid jobs to allow them to get the mortgages that they need in order to compete. Therefore, I ask the Scottish Government to protect good-quality jobs, such as those of air traffic controllers, in our island and rural communities. It is not good enough that those jobs are being taken out of our communities and, with them, young families. The survival of Gaelic depends on growing communities of Gaelic speakers, and that depends on there being a solution to that problem.
The Scottish Government depopulation task force has not met since January; it needs to be given priority. We need to decentralise civil service jobs and encourage public bodies to ensure that their staffing structure supports rural communities. We cannot wait; that work needs to be carried out urgently. To do nothing will fail our island and rural communities.
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