Meeting of the Parliament 31 October 2023
I would absolutely support more capital spending on housing, and I will come on to talk about some of the policies that we have been suggesting in the chamber for years that the SNP Government is dragging its heels on.
The reason why I talked about the numbers and about the Government’s risk register’s warning that there is a high risk that those targets might be missed is because the Government’s house-building programme is now defined by decline, with starts and approvals in 2023 being at their lowest point since 2015.
We need a renewed commitment that those homes will be delivered. Rural communities need to know that the Government is focused on securing homes for them. Labour’s amendment calls for the Government to cement its ambition and to set an interim target of 5,500 rural homes to be delivered by 2026. It is just not credible to say that it will do it by 2032—when it might be long out of office. That is just kicking the can down the road.
Regardless, the Government proposes to undercut rural communities, which could in itself accelerate the depopulation that the action plan is meant to tackle. As Rachael Hamilton and Finlay Carson pointed out, rural, remote and island communities comprise 17 per cent of Scotland’s population. In 2021-22, a sixth—that is, 16 per cent—of the affordable homes that the Government supported were built in rural communities. Given that the Government said that it has delivered 10,000 rural homes since 2016, why will it take almost a decade to deliver almost the same number? To judge from the minister’s contribution, it seems that the 10 per cent target is just a figure plucked out of the air so that the Government can say, “We hit our target” when, in fact, it has performed better than that in 2021-22 and in the past seven years. It seems that it is just an easy target to hit—paying lip service to our rural communities rather than delivering the real ambition that they deserve and need.
More can be done to raise funds directly for rural housing and give those communities a chance to grow and succeed. I recently met Salmon Scotland, not to talk about salmon but to hear about how badly wrong the basics of the housing market are. The lack of affordable housing is stopping the Highlands and Islands from becoming a northern economic powerhouse. Workers are unable to live near their work and their families, which causes depopulation.
If ever we needed an example of how bad something is for business, jobs, growth and the economy, it is the housing crisis that we are experiencing in rural Scotland.