Meeting of the Parliament 30 September 2025
I praise the clerks and officials for their talent, their tolerance of this Parliament and their stamina. Their stamina has been outstanding throughout what felt like months at stage 2 and years at stage 3. I want members to show their appreciation. [Applause.]
The Liberal Democrats will vote for the bill. It is not the bill that we would have introduced, nor would we have gone through this process, which has knocked confidence within the sector at various stages. However, it is now a better bill and it is a bill worth voting for.
We are in a housing emergency. It is disappointing that it has taken a housing emergency for housing to get the priority that it has deserved for a long time. However, it has that priority now, and there should start to be some changes so that we can deal with the housing emergency.
This very day, Homes for Scotland told us that the number of new starts across all sectors is the lowest since 1996. We have a long way to go to build confidence within the sector. We need every part of the housing sector—it should be seen as one sector—to play its part in dealing with the housing emergency. Those who seek to demonise parts of it are undermining the very objectives that we are trying to achieve. We need the private sector—all those house builders who battle away through the various barriers at different times to build houses in communities that they care about. They want to deal with the housing emergency and to be partners, and we should welcome them as partners just like the public sector and charities. They will help us through this difficulty, and we should welcome their help.
There is a delicate balance to be struck in making sure that tenants have the rights that they deserve and the homes that they need, including family homes. However, we also need to do everything that we can to incentivise investment, and we have been pretty poor at that in recent years. There is still quite a bit of work to be done. I hope that the exemptions will be as generous as we can make them, in order to incentivise investment in mid-market rent and build-to-rent, but also significant investment by landlords. There should be measures to exempt them so that they can get a return on the investment; otherwise, we will find that we are not getting the appropriate investment in all properties, which is the thing that we desperately need.
We need to do an awful lot of work on planning, which is still seen as a barrier in many areas. I know that Ivan McKee is working hard to overcome that. We also need to work very carefully on heat in buildings and on accessibility measures. I am in favour of them, but we need to get them right so that we incentivise that investment and get the best possible homes. Most of all, we have to build confidence, and for that we need stability and certainty—sometimes boring certainty—to make sure that house builders can invest for the longer term.
We will vote for the bill because it contains some really good measures on domestic abuse, homelessness and Awaab’s law, and we will continue to work constructively with the Government, as we have done throughout the bill’s passage, to make improvements. I commend the bill to the Parliament.