Meeting of the Parliament 26 April 2023
If the member is suggesting a meeting to discuss how we can use public investment to generate wealth for the whole of society, I would be very happy to take that meeting.
In the private sector, tenants are repeatedly faced with landlords who are reluctant to make improvements to the quality of housing, despite continuing to charge excessively high rents. That leaves tenants bearing the costs of rising energy bills and living with damp and mouldy housing and the stress of choosing whether to heat or eat.
However, it is not just tenants who pay. The housing emergency impacts us all, and our cash-strapped local authorities are having to pay the private sector to house people in temporary accommodation for years at a time while they and the Scottish Government provide grants to pay private energy bills to try to prevent people having to leave their homes in the first place. We are looking at the widespread use of public funds to enrich the private sector, every penny of which could be better spent on upgrading and expanding our council housing stock.
As my colleague Mark Griffin has detailed, local authorities would benefit hugely from being able to provide more affordable council housing, and an industrial strategy for housing could see the creation of many well-paid, secure, unionised jobs to build and maintain the homes that we so desperately need.
Therefore, if the First Minister truly aims to deliver a green wellbeing economy that reduces poverty, that must start by ensuring that every person in Scotland has a warm and secure home that they can afford to live in. However, the current pace of retrofitting old housing stock and building new homes is not meeting Government targets or public demand, and local authorities are struggling to provide homelessness support while their resources are stretched so thinly. Therefore, the Government must work with councils, and, crucially, it must provide fair funding to fulfil these ambitions.
That is why Labour welcomes the Scottish Government’s move to increase council tax on second homes. However, the Government has had that power since April 2013, and it has taken a decade to decide to consult on that once again. It cannot be another decade before we actually see the measure implemented.
We are faced with an emergency in housing, the scale of which can be addressed only with a response of the same magnitude. That means a co-ordinated mass roll-out of council house buy-back, retrofitting and building. It is the only way to ensure that public money, which is our money, is spent on what people need most: warm, secure, affordable homes—not subsidised private profits for a select few.
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