Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2024
The Housing (Scotland) Bill was a golden opportunity to address Scotland’s housing emergency, yet the bill that the Government introduced does not even mention the building of homes. There is a severe lack of spades in the ground at a time when communities right across the country are in desperate need of new housing developments.
The Scottish National Party promised that it would deliver 110,000 affordable homes by 2032, but it is miles off meeting its target. Its anti-house-building agenda has undoubtedly caused the market to stagnate. The SNP has exacerbated the problem through rent controls and by cutting £200 million from the housing budget. It is no wonder that half of Scotland’s population now lives in a local authority area that has declared a housing emergency, including the Minister for Housing’s backyard.
We are in the midst of a deepening housing crisis. More than 15,000 children are homeless; the number of applications from households that are assessed as homeless is at its highest level since 2012; hundreds of thousands of people are stranded on local authority waiting lists; and more than 10,000 children are in temporary accommodation.
The solution to the housing emergency is to build more mixed-tenure homes, but we have a bill that is fundamentally flawed. Parliament is due to debate the bill at stage 1 by the end of November, but given the serious concerns that stakeholders and developers have raised, we are calling for the bill to be rewritten. We do not take that decision lightly, as there are sections of the bill that we support in principle—those around homelessness prevention and the duty to act. However, given the issues that I have just outlined and the number of people, especially children, who are without a safe and secure home, why did the SNP not introduce a stand-alone bill on homelessness? That would have shown that the SNP is serious about ending homelessness for good, instead of attaching the issue to other housing-related matters.
The main reason for my party’s opposition to the bill relates to rent controls. Studies going back decades, from those on New York in the 1980s to more recent ones on Berlin, show that rent controls have serious unintended consequences with reduced supply and increased costs. Rent controls in Scotland have been described as “ruinous” and likely to damage a part of our economy that has suffered at the hands of the Government’s meddling in recent years. They will do much more harm than good.
Recent figures show that around 70 private housing providers are leaving the property market every single month, according to data from the Scottish Landlord Register. That is no coincidence—it is a direct consequence of the SNP’s policy on rent controls.