Meeting of the Parliament 25 January 2023
The need for affordable energy-efficient homes continues to be a central topic in the Highlands and Islands, so I welcome this opportunity to highlight the progress that is being made.
Across Scotland, people struggle to find a home where they want to live and often face unaffordable rents and inadequate accommodation. That is why the Bute house agreement commits the Scottish Government to building, as we have heard, 110,000 further homes by 2032, with 11,000 in rural areas.
However, there is no point trying to fill the bath with the plug out. In 2016, Scotland was right to end the right to buy, which had led to the loss of 500,000 social homes—many of which are now being let out by private landlords, at two or three times the previous rent. The Tories would have us continue with the right to buy. In rural areas especially, we lose homes to the holiday and second homes market. The Scottish Government has been right to regulate and introduce stricter planning rules on short-term lets—again, opposed by the Tories. It is right to discuss with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities the reforms to council tax on second and empty homes, and to make changes to the additional dwelling supplement, both of which have been—you guessed it—opposed by the Tories.
There are a range of practical challenges to the delivery of rural homes, including the lack of skilled tradespeople, a shortage of planning staff and the rising cost of materials. Last week, I visited Merchant house in Inverness, which is an example of what can be done to repurpose and retrofit older buildings to make them energy efficient and sustainable for the future. The renovation, which was supported by Scottish Government funding, has created high-quality affordable homes. The approach that was taken—making the most of the embodied energy in our existing housing stock—would be helped immensely if the Conservative UK Government revised its position on VAT in relation to retrofitting buildings.
We need to consider where well-placed affordable homes could create an opening for young people and families to stay or settle in our rural communities. To that end, I am working to ensure that there is support from the Scottish Government for rural housing enablers such as the Communities Housing Trust, which helps rural communities to build the housing that they desperately need. The trust is currently working on 600 projects across approximately 150 communities, predominantly in rural Scotland. However, a lack of certainty about funding for the Communities Housing Trust’s early-stage work to build confidence and capacity in communities—and for the work of other rural housing enablers—is hampering project development and putting much-needed new rural homes at risk.
Enabling our housing ambitions requires resources. Over this parliamentary session, we will deliver a mechanism for capturing, for public benefit, a share of the increase in land value that occurs when a development is supported through the planning system. It will take time for us to see the benefit of such actions, but all of them will increase the number of homes of the right type, in the right place, while making best use of the homes that we have.
It is vital that homes are affordable. That is why the Bute house agreement commits us to rent controls and it is why we consulted on that in the new deal—far ahead of anywhere else in the UK. In the short term, we have taken emergency action to limit rent rises during the cost of living crisis—again, far ahead of anywhere in the UK.
I challenge the assertion that regulation means declining supply and reduced investment. Neither is true in Germany, which has the largest rented sector in Europe but also one of the most regulated.
What Scotland’s housing sector needs is long-term solutions and a culture change away from housing being seen as an investment to its being seen as a means of creating homes for people.
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