Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2024
What we need is mixed-tenure housing to fix the housing emergency that we are currently in, and rent controls will not fix the situation.
Rent controls will result in a shrinkage of available property and a lack of coherence between the supply of and the demand for rental properties. Homes for Scotland has warned that the SNP’s proposed changes to housing legislation will increase the cost of a new home by £30,000 through changes to rent controls. That is an eye-watering amount that will only make it harder for first-time buyers to get on the housing ladder. It makes no sense whatsoever to prevent people—especially young people—from becoming proud home owners.
Regretfully, that will not be the only problem, should the bill continue through stage 1. We have already seen the loss of potential investment in the build-to-rent sector. Hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of potential development has not proceeded due to uncertainty around the Scottish Government’s lack of strategy. The result is that investors will take their money elsewhere, which means less growth in our economy. With the lack of council housing, there is a dependence on the private sector to provide more homes and affordable housing. We simply cannot afford for more private housing providers to leave the market.
I will be fair to the minister. He inherited this disastrous bill and the ideas behind it from a former Green minister. However, he must have known that whatever he would inherit would be economically incoherent.
Despite a year of consultations and significant engagement with the housing industry—particularly the much-referenced housing investment task force—the Government has continued to ignore practical suggestions such as the creation of a balanced framework to protect tenants while offering greater predictability for investors. When we combine that with a lack of common sense and the Government’s obsession with ideologically driven policies, we can see that the bill was always a recipe for disaster.
We have heard a lot of outrage directed at the bill recently from the Greens, no less, who have a question to the First Minister tomorrow on the topic. That is why I cannot understand why they will not support our motion at decision time. Both we and they disagree with the Scottish Government’s approach and how it has taken forward its policy on rent controls, albeit for different reasons. Surely there is common ground to send the Government back to the drawing board to listen to the housing sector and stakeholders and bring back a bill that will not harm the housing sector but will tackle the housing emergency.
The SNP may wish to swing a wrecking ball at the private sector, but in doing so, it is harming our economy and preventing young people from climbing the housing ladder. That is why the bill should be demolished, with rent controls reduced to the pile of rubble that they deserve to be.
I move,
That the Parliament believes that the Scottish Government should redraft the Housing (Scotland) Bill, as it fails to address the key factors that created the housing emergency.
16:06