Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2025
In closing the debate for the Scottish Greens, I reiterate my thanks to Shelter and to the researchers, children and families who made the report such a valuable, challenging and human testament. It shows us not only what is wrong, but the paths to making it right—to making the rights of children real.
There are immediate provisions to be made on support and services and access to amenities and facilities, as well as to better—much better—temporary accommodation, while that is still needed. There are policies to be changed. Standards for temporary accommodation need to be set at the same level as those for permanent housing. Primary health services need to be included in prevention strategies. Families with children and those children who are most in need must be prioritised.
There is a wider picture, too, which is a desperately urgent one. We again call on the Scottish Government to build more high-quality permanent homes for social rent, including homes that are large enough for families. We reiterate our commitment to ending homelessness and to a housing first approach as its central pillar. We call on the Parliament to show courage and commitment in making the Housing (Scotland) Bill an opportunity for transformational change. The amendments that we and others have lodged will go some way in helping with that.
No child should face eviction over the winter months. No woman who faces domestic abuse should have to make the choice between staying in an abusive home and making herself and her children homeless. No family should have their physical and mental health jeopardised by mould and damp.
I welcome the opportunities to engage with the minister and others on those and many other issues over the coming months, as the Housing (Scotland) Bill makes its way through Parliament, but I echo Willie Rennie’s call for the minister to tell us how he intends to address the recommendations in the report, because we need action now.
We also need to see compassion and justice at every level of government. Poisonous rhetoric about social security, suspicion and scorn for those who are in need, and an obsession with work, when parents are already working their fingers to the bone and still cannot afford to eat, will not help. It seems that the workhouse mentality—the idea that the very worst thing that a Government can do is to provide food and shelter for someone who does not deserve them, whatever “deserve” means in that context—has not gone away. In truth, the worst thing that a Government can do in this context is deny children the basics of a happy childhood as a way of punishing their parents.
When we, as a Parliament and as a nation, passed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill we were not just taking on a legal responsibility; we were taking on a moral one. We in the Scottish Greens take that moral responsibility seriously and I know that colleagues across the chamber do too. We also need the conviction to act. We must act, and we must do it now—for all our children’s sake.
16:50