Meeting of the Parliament 25 January 2023
I apologise for that.
I will start off where Mark Griffin finished. I agree with much of what Miles Briggs said in his opening speech, but he cannot ignore the direct impact on people’s mortgages of Liz Truss’s budget. A 10 per cent increase in payments has blown a hole in many people’s finances. For those on a typical budget, that could mean paying an extra £1,800 a year. That is the context in which we are now living. It is right for Miles Briggs to reflect on that. I know that he was embarrassed by the budget, as many Conservatives were, but that is the current context and environment.
Young people in particular face a real challenge in raising enough money to put down a deposit to buy their own home. We have a massive intergenerational problem in housing. Many older people have access to property, but younger people cannot even think about that. I bought my first home when I was 25, but many people now do not see themselves ever getting their own home. Again, that is the context.
The cabinet secretary is right to identify the huge challenges relating to inflation and cost increases. However, other issues include a lack of skills in the sector and access to land—some house builders are finding it very difficult to access land. That ties into the debate on NPF4 that we had before Christmas. There is an emphasis on trying to utilise brownfield sites and properties above shops, but it is not cheap to do that. It is costly—otherwise they would have been developed by now—so the Government needs to look at incentives to make that happen. The more we put into that, the more challenging it will be to meet our other overall targets, so we need to get the balance right between brownfield sites and greenfield sites. There is great pressure to build more houses, so the Government needs to provide the right incentives.
However, I am concerned about the wider policy environment. We are in a state of massive flux. We have had a range of pieces of legislation in recent years with regard to short-term lets—the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, the coronavirus acts, the emergency rent cap before Christmas. We have supported all those measures and, although we did not support the short-term let licensing, we supported the control areas.
On top of that, landlords have seen the UK Government’s landlord tax relief changes have a direct impact on their investments. We are in a state of flux and we have many reports of landlords evacuating the sector.
Before we move to the next stage of proposed changes—perhaps around rent controls—I would like us to see the evidence of the impact of the current legislation on the housing sector. If young people cannot get into a property of their own, we need to ensure that there is a healthy private rented sector. However, all the jungle drums are saying that it is not healthy just now and that good landlords, who are providing good homes for people, are finding it difficult to sustain their private properties and are leaving the sector.
We might be at a tipping point, and I want to ensure that the Government is listening, watching and reading all the evidence before we go further with any proposed rent controls. I have heard and seen the evidence from other countries about the impact that rent controls can have on investment in—and disinvestment from—the private rented sector. I want to ensure that we have the evidence before we take the next step.
My final plea is for the Government to put more emphasis on the Communities Housing Trust and the rural housing burden opportunity, which would be particularly beneficial to areas such as the east neuk of Fife, where working people find it very hard to have their own home close to their place of work. Although that might not be the whole answer, it might be part of it, so I hope that the Government can put greater emphasis on that in the future.