Meeting of the Parliament 06 October 2022
I start by thanking all the organisations that have provided useful briefings during the passage of the emergency bill, and I thank the Parliament’s bill team for the work that it has done.
As I said during the stage 1 debate, the Scottish housing market is complex, especially here in the capital. We rely on the mixed-housing model to provide the homes that Scotland needs now and in the future.
The Scottish Conservatives continue to be concerned about the impact that the bill will have. I will use my time to speak about those whom the bill will not impact on and whom it will not support, who are already being failed by this Scottish National Party and Scottish Green Party Government. They are the 26,000 homeless households in Scotland.
The cabinet secretary said that everyone should have a safe and warm place to live. I agree. However, under the SNP Government, homelessness applications have increased by 3 per cent. There has been a 4 per cent increase in households in temporary accommodation. In Scotland today, 32,592 adults and 14,372 children are registered as homeless. The number of homeless adults has increased by 6 per cent, and the number of homeless children has increased by 17 per cent.
Households with children spend more time in temporary accommodation. Households with children are 4 per cent more likely to spend seven to 12 months in temporary accommodation than households without children are, and they are 6 per cent more likely to spend more than a year in temporary accommodation.
Homelessness applications are taking longer, on average, to process. It now takes an average of 19 days for a homelessness application to be assessed. That is up by three days on the previous year.
Those are shocking statistics. The people whom they concern are those who are furthest from the housing market—and who are now likely to be even further away, thanks to the impact of the bill.
As Crisis said to the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee on Tuesday,
“the homelessness system is bursting at the seams. It has, as I am sure that members see in their constituencies all the time, been pushed to breaking point.”—[Official Report, Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, 4 October 2022; c 9.]
Crisis also expressed concern about the knock-on impacts that there might be on the market. It stated:
“From our perspective, when there is a reduction in the supply of private rented housing, those who are most likely to be squeezed out of the market are those at the lowest end of the income distribution and those at the highest risk of homelessness ... There is a worry that it will become more difficult to support people who are experiencing homelessness into tenancies.”—[Official Report, Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, 4 October 2022; c 15.]
The loss of significant numbers of private rented properties is likely to be a consequence of the legislation, if it is not lifted as soon as possible. That impact will be even greater in rural communities. There is international evidence that demonstrates the impact of the sort of intervention that we are seeing SNP and Green ministers make in the housing market.