Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2024
That is welcome, and I hope that the cabinet secretary will update MSPs from across the parties very soon on that. We know that there is concern about a loss of bed space and the fact that the council is now routinely struggling to find accommodation. That has seen not only other councils across Scotland but councils in England being asked to take individual families during the housing emergency.
There should be no prospect of suspending those protections—they need to remain in place for households, including the 25 families with children that are affected. Instead, I hope that ministers will urgently look at what support they can provide the City of Edinburgh Council. We need to see action, because ministers cannot sit idly by while hundreds of households do not know where they will be come 1 December. If we do not see action from the Government and the council, it will completely undermine any remaining pretence that Scotland is leading the world on housing rights and tackling homelessness, as the cabinet secretary said earlier.
In its briefing, Crisis says that
“The Scottish Government should set out a clear vision of what homelessness prevention will look like in practice”
and put in place measures that will get us there.
Local authorities are at breaking point, and the prevention duties that will be introduced, which we all agree should be put in place, will add to the burden that local authorities face. Therefore, we need ministers to urgently outline to Parliament what will change across all Government portfolios and what fresh leadership will be brought to the housing emergency.
For some time, charities and experts in the homelessness sector have warned ministers that the bill will not fix the housing emergency, but all the energy of the Scottish Government and its officials is going into it. The Scottish Government should pause and redraft the bill as a homelessness emergency bill, so that we can focus on what we agree on and get the emergency action that we need across our country.
We need a bespoke approach for Edinburgh and the crisis that my constituents in the capital face. We are not seeing that, and ministers saying that they are having meetings on meetings on meetings is an example of the failure to address the housing emergency and the homelessness crisis. The Scottish Conservatives call on ministers to redraft the housing bill, because it fails to address the factors that are creating the housing emergency. I support the motion in Meghan Gallacher’s name.
16:30