Meeting of the Parliament 25 January 2023
Many will know that I have a personal interest in the topic of homelessness and a lived understanding of it and how important it is that we tackle it.
I know that people lose a lot when they are homeless—that could be possessions, security or even their sense of self—but homelessness is not a given; it is a symptom of something else and evidence that someone has fallen through a net. Maybe they had to wait six weeks to get their first universal credit payment. Maybe they lost their job due to shameful UK employment rights, or maybe they were failed by insecure housing. Despite what the Tories will try to tell us later today, that cannot be addressed solely by building more homes.
Nonetheless, the Scottish Government is building more homes. It has delivered nearly 113,000 affordable homes since 2007, and it has committed to £3.5 billion of spending on the affordable housing supply programme. However, all that is made harder when our Conservative colleagues insist on propping up a UK Government that has just cut our capital spend on housing by 3.4 per cent in real terms.
More important, the SNP Government is taking a progressive approach to tackling homelessness by looking at the drivers and preventative measures; increasing affordable housing availability by tackling the loss of residential properties to holiday lets and second homes; keeping people in the homes that they already have; and supporting people who are in poverty or are at risk of ending up in poverty.
We have recently seen some great steps forward being taken in the Parliament. There was licensing for short-term lets, which are eating up housing in communities across my region, such as many of those on Skye. Conservatives voted against that. There was the rent freeze, which Conservatives voted against, and there was a moratorium on evictions, which the Conservatives voted against.