Meeting of the Parliament 13 September 2016
The debate has been positive. I believe that there is consensus in the Parliament that we need to take action to address the housing crisis in Scotland. Without getting into who is to blame for what, the statistics speak for themselves and show that we have a housing crisis in Scotland that needs to be tackled.
I welcome the tone of the minister’s opening speech. Labour is absolutely committed to working with the Government in the Parliament to deliver 50,000 affordable homes, with 35,000 of them for social rent, but I hope that we can go further.
I know from experience in Fife Council that delivering that level of housing is not without its challenges. That is why Labour has said that we need a national housing strategy—a plan—for Scotland. Sitting alongside that, councils need to be empowered to establish local housing partnerships that can deliver.
Back in 2011-12, when I was the leader of the Labour group in Fife, we proposed in our manifesto to build 2,700 houses for rent in Fife over a five-year period. I am happy to say that Fife Council is on target and will deliver those 2,700 houses by April next year. That experience led me to write a paper about the housing crisis and why we must build more public sector houses in Scotland. The paper sets out that experience and the facts on why we need to drive forward.
I highlight in the paper that, when I was in Paisley last year, I met a family who had moved from a cold, damp house into a new housing association house. The family explained to me that the daughter had suffered continually from asthma attacks and had very often been taken to hospital, but since the family had moved into their new house, with its fuel efficiency and everything else, the little girl had not had to go back to the hospital once. James Kelly’s point about housing being among the most important issues that we will debate in the Parliament because of its impact on all other social policies that we will have responsibility for is absolutely correct.
The family also told me about their monthly income. In their old damp, cold house, they paid 25 per cent of that monthly income on heating and fuel. When they moved into the new house, that figure shifted to less than 5 per cent of their total household income. If we are serious about tackling inequality and poverty, we absolutely have to tackle Scotland’s housing crisis.
We should not forget homelessness. I started to become concerned this year when I read different things from charities about the number of rough sleepers there are. When I tried to find the statistics, I found it very difficult to find out how many rough sleepers there actually are. I welcome the launch of Shelter Scotland’s homelessness: far from fixed campaign, which Richard Leonard and Alex Cole-Hamilton mentioned, because homelessness is far from fixed. I hope that we recognise across the chamber that homelessness is far from fixed and that more must be done to eradicate the unacceptable situation in which far too many people in Scotland still, in 2016, find themselves. We need to give a commitment to tackle that.
Alex Johnstone for the Conservatives gave a critique of the SNP’s record to date and talked about looking at other ways to secure funding. I draw attention to Unison Scotland’s proposals, which I hope the minister has read, looking at the pension funds. We can certainly start to look at more investment through the pension funds.
Establishing the local partnerships is about getting it right. Homes for Scotland quite rightly says that we need to look at not only homes for rent, but homes to buy. We need to encourage that process. I am sure that, in the coming months, we will see a lot more about the planning processes in Scotland.
I will talk about the capacity to deliver the 50,000 affordable houses. Fife had the capacity to do what it did because there was such a dip in the private market. If we got private housing moving tomorrow and we started to build the 50,000 houses in the private sector that Alex Johnstone talked about, we would have a major problem with capacity because we have a skills gap in the building trade in Scotland. By setting out a clear and strategic plan through a national house-building programme for Scotland, we can start to plan. We can work with all our partners, such as the colleges, the builders, and the private sector. If we do that we can—as the experience in Fife showed—create apprenticeships and local jobs and support local companies. It is about that type of partnership. Emma Harper talked about the need to involve more local housing associations and gave examples from her area. Creating a local housing partnership in every area is not about creating bureaucracy—that is already there. It is about bringing together the housing associations with the local authorities and getting people like planners and those who own the land sitting around the same table and starting to move the agenda forward.
I give credit to Fife, which has built 2,700 houses in the past five years. Let us look at that example and go forward, working together to tackle the housing crisis in Scotland.
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