Meeting of the Parliament 02 October 2024
Scotland is in the midst of a housing crisis the likes of which we have never seen before. After repeated calls, for months, for a housing emergency to be declared, the Government was finally shamed into declaring one on 15 May, in a debate that was brought to the chamber by Scottish Labour.
The declaration of a housing emergency after 17 years of the Scottish National Party Government was a significant moment, and it signalled our collective understanding of the need to act to tackle the crisis. However, the simple fact is that words are cheap. What really matters is what the Government does to tackle the housing crisis, not what it says in the chamber.
The sad reality is that the Government’s track record on tackling the housing emergency is woeful. This afternoon, people on the Labour and Government benches will trade numbers and statistics, but we should never forget in the heat of the debate what those numbers represent. They are young mothers raising their families in temporary accommodation without a promise of a home. They are Scotland’s most vulnerable people, who have nothing but a sleeping bag to their name and who are exposed to the cold nights of winter and the dangers of life on the street. They are young children who have no home to call their own and who are spending their childhood moving from hostel to bed and breakfast. We should never forget that.
Let us look at the facts of the Government’s record on housing and homelessness. On the Government’s watch, we have had more than 40,000 applications for homelessness support made in the past year; that is the highest number in a decade. Shamefully, we now have record numbers of children in temporary accommodation, without a home to call their own. That is more than 10,000 children who are left homeless on the Scottish National Party Government’s watch.
At the same time, the number of young people living in bed and breakfasts has soared by more than 900 per cent in only the past three years. That is shameful. There have been 704,000 breaches of the Homeless Persons (Unsuitable Accommodation) (Scotland) Order in 2023-24. That number has almost doubled during the past year. There have been 7,915 instances where households requiring temporary accommodation have not been offered temporary accommodation by local authorities. That is 17 times higher than last year—17 times higher in a single year.
The SNP’s record on house building is arguably even worse. House building has fallen off a cliff, with the worst yearly number of starts on record. There were 19,293 homes completed in the year to end June 2024, which is a decrease of 4,003—or 17 per cent—compared with the previous year. In the year to the end of June 2024, the number of completions and starts as part of the affordable housing supply programme was down by 14 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively, compared with the year before.