The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-14167, in the name of Ken Macintosh, on housing and wellbeing in Scotland. I invite Mr Macintosh, when he is ready, to speak for 14 minutes or thereby.
14:42
Over the summer, I was asked for help by a young family with three children who are aged from two to eight. They had chosen to give up their council house as it was becoming increasingly cramped and, in the absence of any other options, they reluctantly moved into a private let to find room for their growing family. No sooner had they moved into the new property, however, than they were served with an eviction notice because circumstances had changed and the landlord needed the house back.
The family were given two months to find a new home. They had no legal grounds on which to challenge the landlord and, despite holding down a steady and secure job, they had no chance of affording to buy a house anywhere nearby. When I asked the local authority about the situation, I was told that it had only 14 suitable properties in the area and that there was very little chance of one of them becoming vacant in the next year, never mind in the immediate future. School was about to start back and the family did not know whether the children would even have a home, let alone one near their community, relatives and friends.
How familiar is that story to members throughout the chamber? More than 150,000 people are waiting to find a social rented house in Scotland. The number of new homes that are being built has fallen by 40 per cent since 2007 and the percentage of families who own their homes is also declining, with affordability being a huge problem for young people in particular.
The net effect has been to drive people into an ever-expanding private sector with, in many areas, ever-increasing rent levels to match. In some cases, private renting is exactly what is required to address local need, but for others it is unaffordable and insecure, with rents rising at double or treble the rate of any increases in income and with no guarantees—as in the case that I described—that the tenants will not be chucked out at short notice.
We need to offer those in private lets some of the protection that is available to those in social rented accommodation. A quarter of those who rent privately are families with children. They need to know that they are safe and secure and that their children can stay at the same school with the same friends and community around them.
The Scottish Government has yet to spell out what will be in its private tenancies bill, but I hope that it will take as its starting point the five asks of Shelter’s make renting right campaign, which are stability, flexibility and security of tenure for tenants and landlords, accompanied by predictable rents and a fair system for sorting out problems when they occur.
The bill should not be seen as an anti-landlord measure. Landlords need to know that they can get rid of bad tenants or get their property if they need to sell it. If the main problem that we face is housing supply, a potential solution is to attract large institutional investors into the sector to build substantial numbers of properties for private rent, much as we have seen recently with the expansion of purpose-built student accommodation to rent. In a world where investment capital is highly mobile, I do not underestimate the difficulty of getting the legislative or regulatory balance right.
I will shortly return to the private rented sector—or the PRS, as it is more commonly referred to. Before I do, it is important that we recognise that neither the difficulties that my constituents face nor the sheer scale of the housing challenge will be resolved through regulating private tenancies. We are quite simply facing a housing crisis, which will be resolved only by building tens of thousands of homes. Those are not my observations but the conclusions of the independent Commission on Housing and Wellbeing.
It is easy for our debates on housing to become a battle of numbers. The Government’s amendment proudly highlights the commitment to 30,000 new affordable homes, which it clearly expects to deliver by next year. The difficulty is that that figure does not reflect housing need. That point was made yet again in today’s press by the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, Shelter Scotland and Homes for Scotland. Rather than letting the debate degenerate into an overpartisan exchange that compares different Administrations’ records, a purpose of our motion is to see whether we can find agreement on the work and the findings of the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing.
I want to say how much I welcome the report and the contribution that I hope that it will make to developing housing policy. Set up in 2013 by Shelter Scotland and chaired by the former Auditor General, Robert Black, the commission’s principal goal was to look at how housing impacts on the wider wellbeing of the people of Scotland. This non-partisan and unbiased independent commission has examined the impact of poor housing on people’s health, education, employability and life chances. It has highlighted the links between housing and the problems of poverty and inequality and it has pointed to the wider gains in educational attainment, care for older people and improved mental health that are secured by having a decent home.
Following a lengthy consultation with the public and housing experts, and drawing on the expertise of organisations such as the Poverty Alliance, the commission has published a report that paints an accurate but worrying picture of housing need. It also provides a series of specific but practical recommendations for the Scottish Government to adopt.
Robert Black described the central focus as being about the importance of having a
“suitable home which allows each and every one of us to live fulfilling lives and achieve our potential.”
However, he added:
“We are a long way short of this. There are about 150,500 households on waiting lists for social housing, 940,000 in fuel poverty and over 60,000 are overcrowded. With an averagely priced house now costing about five times the average annual income, owning your own home is becoming an unachievable pipedream for many people in Scotland, especially young adults and families.”
The commission’s key recommendation is that the Scottish Government needs to oversee a radical increase in house building. The report calls on ministers to set an interim target of at least 23,000 new homes a year, of which at least 9,000 should be affordable homes. Given that we are building only around 15,000 homes a year, which is the lowest level of house building since 1947, that will require strong and decisive political leadership.
In a prosperous country such as ours, is it asking so much to expect every Scot to have a safe, warm and affordable place that they call home? That is Labour’s vision, but I hope that we could share that vision with members from every political party.
The member seems to suggest that we should have more housing, which I would welcome. Is he suggesting that the Government should spend more money on housing? If so, where should that money come from?
The point of the motion, which highlights the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing’s report, is to see whether we can reach agreement across the chamber on the scale of the crisis that we face. I assure John Mason that the Labour Party is willing to work with and support any Government initiatives that recognise the scale of the problem and the scale of the social rented housing, as well as private housing and housing across all other tenures, that needs to be built. I hope that the member will be willing to work with Labour and others on the issue.
Many housing and anti-poverty organisations would go much further than the commission’s interim target, both on overall housing and on housing for social rent. An area that does not get much attention in the report is how we improve housing for disabled people. It has been estimated that 70,000 households in Scotland need adaptations for wheelchair users. There is simply not enough suitable or accessible housing being built. It is up to the Scottish Government to increase that availability by insisting that at least 10 per cent of housing across all tenures is built to wheelchair-accessible standards.
The commission’s report spells out a series of further actions that need to be taken, and it does not shirk from identifying the major challenges that face us over the next decade: freeing up the supply of land for new housing; recognising and supporting the growing role of the private rented sector; tackling fuel poverty; and stepping up the pace in reducing residential greenhouse gas emissions. Those are all areas in which I am confident that there is at least the possibility that we can find agreement, if not consensus, across the Parliament, but what worries me—this is why we have posed the question in our motion—is that it is not clear that the programme for government matches the ambitions and the call to action that the commission has set out.
For example, one of the housing announcements in last week’s programme for government was on the continuation of the help to buy scheme. I think that we are all pleased that the Government has listened to our criticisms of the scheme and has announced a three-year budget as opposed to annual budgets but, as Homes for Scotland has pointed out, the £195 million that the First Minister outlined is to be provided over the next three years is significantly less than the £305 million that was allocated over the previous three years. That sum was immediately oversubscribed and resulted in a stop-start situation for the industry, which caused frustration and confusion for home buyers and builders alike.
Homes for Scotland has also pointed out that, earlier this year, the United Kingdom Government committed £6 billion to extend help to buy to at least 2020. On the basis of rough calculations, the consequentials for the Scottish Government would be expected to amount to some £150 million per year, as opposed to the £65 million per year that was announced. I invite the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights to explain to Homes for Scotland how he intends to use the remaining balance.
Another of the housing announcements in the programme for government was on planning. The First Minister surprised many of us—she surprised me, anyway—when she unveiled plans for a root-and-branch review of the planning system. As the cabinet secretary will know, I whole-heartedly support that, as I do not believe that the planning system is working as well as it should be. It neither addresses our need to deliver new housing nor gives communities the accountability, the control or the protection that they wish to have. It is too slow and too unpredictable in outcome.
I was pleasantly surprised because I lobbied the cabinet secretary as recently as March this year, when I asked what the Scottish Government’s position was on holding an independent review of the planning system from a community perspective. The reply that I received from Mr Neil did not encourage me. In it, he said:
“Scotland’s planning system has undergone the most significant modernisation in over 60 years. The overall aim was delivery of a planning service that is efficient, inclusive, fit for purpose and sustainable. The Scottish Government has no current plans to undertake a further review.”—[Written Answers, 3 March 2015; S4W-24530.]
I am intrigued. Perhaps the cabinet secretary will tell us what has changed in a mere six months to make this most significantly modernised planning system—this efficient, inclusive, fit-for-purpose and sustainable system—now apparently so antiquated.
In the absence of a reply, I will return to the private rented sector. The Commission on Housing and Wellbeing has flagged up the need for reform. That is another reason why my Labour colleagues and I were pleased to finally see the Government outline proposals for a private tenancies bill. Since devolution and the formation of this Parliament, the proportion of Scots who rent in the private sector has almost trebled, from 5 per cent to more than 13 per cent. As things stand, more than 312,000 households are privately renting, including some 80,000 families with children.
By itself, that might not be a cause for worry, but research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that
“The number of households in poverty in the Private Rented Sector has doubled in the last decade to 120,000”.
It reported that the gap between social and private rents in Scotland is higher than it is in every English region except London. Scottish National Party members often say that, instead of criticising the Scottish Government, Labour should come forward with solutions. It would not be untoward of me to remind the chamber that Scottish Labour has been calling for quite some time for action to be taken to improve security of tenure and to limit rent rises in the private sector. In fact, I point out to my SNP colleagues that if, instead of voting with the Scottish Conservatives, they had voted with Scottish Labour to introduce rent controls in the Housing (Scotland) Bill last year, they could have saved Scots in private lets a considerable amount of money.
Over the past few years, private tenants in Scotland have seen their rents rise on average by £200 per year and at above the rate of inflation—and by a lot more in the hot spots of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fife and Aberdeen. That is why, although we await the detail, we hope that the private tenancies bill will be a positive step towards creating more stable and secure tenancies.
As I have outlined, we support some Government announcements on housing, but I am not convinced that they merit the label “bold” that the First Minister used to describe them last week. The Commission on Housing and Wellbeing has provided us with a call for action, and one of the strengths of its report is the constant link that it makes between a satisfactory home on the one hand and our individual wellbeing and a fair society on the other. The cabinet secretary has made much of the impact of welfare reform and is working on a new social justice action plan; this area impacts directly on our welfare, our quality of life and the prospects for our children’s success, and it is entirely devolved. We all know that families and individuals can prove remarkably resilient in the face of adversity if they have a safe and warm home to return to.
For example, on fuel poverty, the commission’s report highlights that
“a cold home is neither conducive to good health nor a satisfactory learning environment for children nor young people.”
Lang Banks, the director of WWF in Scotland, put it this way:
“It makes no sense that hard-pressed households spend scarce money on energy to simply heat the air outside of their cold, draughty and leaky homes.”
Nevertheless, the Scottish Government has yet to set a long-term goal for the national infrastructure project to bring homes up to an acceptable energy performance standard.
I am conscious of the time, Presiding Officer, but I want to say that, although we need to build many more homes, this is more than a numbers game. What is the Scottish Government doing about the report’s specific neighbourhood recommendations and to recognise the greater role that wellbeing and community have to play in future housing policy?
Scottish Labour has deliberately decided to focus on housing in its first debate following the programme for government. Ensuring that everyone has access to a decent home should be the starting block in our mission to build a more equitable and happier society, and Labour’s ambitions for our country’s future are matched by our absolute determination to ensure that everyone in Scotland has the comfort and assurance of a safe, secure, affordable and warm home. That is not an impossible dream or an unrealistic goal—what is required is the political will.
I move,
That the Parliament welcomes the report of the independent Commission on Housing and Wellbeing, A blueprint for Scotland’s future, and the crucial importance that it places on securing a decent home for each and every Scot to ensure individual and social wellbeing; notes the findings of the commission, which concluded that “there is very clearly a homes crisis” in Scotland, with 150,000 households on waiting lists and 940,000 in fuel poverty; further notes the findings that more than 40% of social housing in Scotland falls short of official quality standards but that buying your own home is increasingly unaffordable, especially for young adults; further welcomes Shelter Scotland’s campaign, Make Renting Right, and the work of the many groups and individuals behind the Living Rent Campaign in highlighting the need to regulate the private renting sector in Scotland; looks forward to the Scottish Government’s Private Tenancies Bill, and asks the Scottish Government whether it believes that its Programme for Government matches the ambitions and “call to action” set out by the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing.
14:57
I am sure that we all agree with a lot of what Ken Macintosh has just said, and that everyone in Scotland should have access to a warm, safe, secure and affordable home. That is the aim of this Scottish Government, as we laid out in our “Homes Fit for the 21st Century” strategy document.
I also very much welcome the work that the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing has done on exploring and explaining the links between housing and wellbeing and drawing them to everyone’s attention. The commission is a good example of the type of cross-sector working that I believe is important, and it shows a vibrant sector in which everyone is looking to work with each other and with the Government to find positive policies for Scotland.
Housing—in particular, social housing—remains one of this Government’s highest priorities, which is why we have committed more than £1.7 billion of investment in affordable housing over the lifetime of this Parliament. According to the official statistics that were published yesterday, we are going to exceed our target of delivering 30,000 affordable homes across the country. More than 28,000 affordable homes—or 93 per cent of the five-year target—have already been delivered. That is a significant achievement at a time of United Kingdom Government-imposed capital cuts of 26 per cent.
Ken Macintosh mentioned levels of house building since 1947, but what he left out was the recession and the fact that he was talking about private house building. We are building more affordable homes and more homes in the social sector than any previous Administration in Scotland. However, this Scottish Government wants to do more.
I was trying to avoid playing the numbers game, but does the minister accept that whatever number of houses the current Government is building or whatever number are being built in Scotland by the private sector, it does not meet the needs of Scotland’s people and communities?
I was about to say that we want to do more: we want to increase and accelerate our ambitions for Scotland’s housing and to continue to do so in an integrated and collaborative way. Our current target of 6,000 affordable homes a year is absolutely not the limit of our ambition.
We will continue to support local authorities to deliver their affordable housing priorities with quality homes that fit local needs in mixed communities. We have delivered 4,956 council homes, which is 99 per cent of our 5,000 council homes target. I am going to get into the numbers game here, because that is thousands more—in fact, it is 4,950 more—than were built under the previous Labour-Liberal coalition. We have built more social housing in seven years of this Administration than the previous Labour-Liberal Administration built. I will come to those figures shortly. We have built more social housing, which includes registered social landlord and council housing, and we will continue to work with a wide range of partners across the public and private sectors to invest in and deliver a significant supply of housing that harnesses increased levels of private finance and offers value for money for public resources.
Given the seriousness of the housing crisis in Scotland, should we not try to move beyond who did what and blaming each other, and get on with building the council houses for rent that people and families in Scotland desperately need?
That is precisely what the Government is doing. We set ourselves a target, we have met it and we are now exceeding it. We are continuing to build houses for those who need them across all tenures, despite the challenges that we face in our budget. We are determined to do that. We have already worked closely with our partners to produce a joint housing delivery plan that addresses the wide range of housing issues in Scotland and captures a crucial set of delivery actions that we collectively agree are vital at this time.
New housing supply is one aspect of what is important, but—as Ken Macintosh said—we also need to ensure that people can afford to heat their homes, and that their homes provide a safe and positive environment and are flexible to households’ changing needs.
The past few years, with high and rising energy prices on top of the UK Government’s continued austerity, have made things very difficult for many households across Scotland, which is why the Government has sought to help those households by investing more than half a billion pounds since 2009 in our fuel poverty and energy efficiency programmes. Our efforts are paying off. Since 2008, nearly one in three households has benefited from energy efficiency measures, and now more than a third of all Scottish dwellings have a good energy performance certificate rating of band B or C, which is an increase of 56 per cent since 2010.
However, housing is about much more than roofs over people’s heads. The Commission on Housing and Wellbeing referred to that, as did Ken Macintosh, and I certainly agree. Good housing can assist in creating vibrant communities and can allow them to flourish and be empowered. It can create the right environment to allow children to grow, learn and reach their full potential, and it can ensure that the health and wellbeing of its occupants are maintained or improved. Good housing goes right to the heart of the fairer and stronger Scotland that the Government is working to deliver.
The housing market has changed since the global recession, and the Government has responded positively and creatively in order to provide a wider range of funding mechanisms than ever, and to squeeze the maximum value from our austerity-hit reduced budgets. That response has seen us support the construction sector and home buyers through our help-to-buy schemes. Our considerable investment of more than half a billion pounds over the past three years and in the three years ahead will help about 14,000 households to buy new homes. It will also provide the construction industry with a huge economic boost that can ensure employment in the sector. We will work with Homes for Scotland and the sector to develop how the new scheme will proceed.
The Scottish Government continues to lead the way in innovation. The contribution to new housing supply from innovative financing approaches is substantial and growing, with nearly 3,000 new affordable homes being approved and around £400 million of housing investment being unlocked. Those new approaches have seen us develop products for mid-market rent and shared equity, and have seen us, through our homeowner support fund, support homeowners who are facing difficulties.
The availability of suitable good-quality housing and housing services also makes a vital contribution to the success of the integration of healthcare and social care. We are working closely with the housing sector to deliver appropriate housing support and services.
We also recognise the need to plan for the future and to ensure that we have the land and infrastructure that are required in order that we can deliver the supply of new housing at the pace that we would like. The objective of the planning review that was announced in the programme for government is to ensure that planning does all that it can to enable the delivery of high-quality developments across the country. In particular, the review will seek to identify where further targeted improvements to the planning system can be made, with particular emphasis on increasing high-quality housing developments. We also recognise that the housing system works differently in rural Scotland. We have listened to rural stakeholders, so we will put in place in 2016 for three years a rural housing fund to suit the particular needs of rural areas.
All that requires us to work closely with partners, which we have done effectively, as can be seen in our delivery. We have in the past seven financial years delivered 20 per cent more affordable homes than the previous Administration delivered. We have outperformed England and Wales in new-build social sector completions and in private sector completions per 100,000 of population. We have worked with local authorities to deliver a substantial council house new-build programme, with 99 per cent of our five-year target to March 2015 having been met.
We have provided affordable mid-market rent options for those who seek them. We have put owner occupation within the reach of many people who were struggling to raise large deposits or to access full borrowing in the current climate. We have helped people to insulate their homes and to save money on energy bills. We have created additional funding options and routes to private finance, and we have ensured that housing investment is targeted locally where it is needed most through local authority strategic housing investment plans.
The Scottish Government has achieved much, but let there be no doubt whatsoever that our appetite and drive remain to build and improve on the good progress to date. We will do so within the powers that are vested in us, although we remain constrained by Westminster. We are committed to building on our substantial progress in tackling housing issues and, in doing that, to working in a constructive collaborative way with partners across the public and private sectors in order to deliver a fairer and stronger Scotland.
I move amendment S4M-14167.2, to leave out from first “the findings” to end and insert:
“that the commission is a good example of the type of cross-sector working that is so important to ensuring that civic Scotland and government work together to find positive policies for Scotland; welcomes the Scottish Government’s £1.7 billion investment and commitment to deliver 30,000 new affordable homes by next year; welcomes and commends the hard work of many stakeholders that seek to ensure, as the Scottish Government does, a modern private rented sector that is fit for the needs of today’s tenants and landlords, and looks forward to the Scottish Government’s Private Tenancies Bill, which will ensure stability, security and predictability in the private rented sector.”
I inform members that there is a modest amount of time in hand for the debate.
15:07
It is always good to have Ken Mackintosh speaking to a motion in Parliament. He is an experienced politician who manages to mix traditional good common sense with some good old-fashioned left-wing prejudices when it comes to policies such as housing. In fact, what he did in his speech earlier was, in my view, an attempt to redefine the crisis in order to fit existing Labour policy. For that reason, I suggest that much of the motion is an attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Nevertheless, the motion sets out a very clear problem that we are right to be debating at some length today.
The issue of housing and wellbeing was dealt with extensively in the report that is mentioned in the motion, and it will serve to educate us, to inform us and to define many of the arguments that we have about housing and wellbeing as we go forward. Wellbeing, in fact, is a very interesting area of policy and one that I am sure we will return to, but in the short time that is available to me in this debate, housing will be my key priority.
The problem that we face is, of course, that there is not enough money go round—which can often be difficult during the course of a recession. However, money is not the only problem. In fact, when we look at housing and housing issues, it is surprising to see the amount of money that is available—or, at least, that would be available for investment in affordable housing if the correct conditions were created. That is why we should prioritise the building of confidence in the marketplace as much as anything else.
The Government’s amendment sets out its achievements so far. A brief look at the statistics indicates that in spite of the fact that many housing figures are well below their pre-recession levels, positive progress is being made. The problem is that that progress is not big enough or being made fast enough.
When I perused the statistics I found that one of the strangest ones—which I predicted—was that the sale of public authority dwellings, including those in local authorities that have had total stock transfer, rose by 20 per cent in 2014-15, from 1,527 to 1,835. That is the second annual increase, after years of declining sales numbers. In my view, the increases are likely due to the announcement in 2013 that the right to buy was to be ended for all tenants.
When we look at what is happening in our housing market, we see that there is less construction in both the private sector and the public sector across the board—although the Government will insist that it is building more council houses than any of its recent predecessors built. Nonetheless, the private rented sector has taken on provision of a great deal of the necessary capacity that this Government has, for whatever reason, been unable to provide. The growth in the private rented sector has become the central pillar of our social housing policy.
That is why it concerns me that last week and, to some extent, today we have heard talk of rent capping as a primary tool to take us forward. However, Margaret Burgess’s amendment seems to make it clear that the Government still intends to develop a modern private-rented sector that is fit for the needs of today’s tenants and landlords. I ask Margaret Burgess or whoever will reply to the debate whether that is meant to be an olive branch to the private rented sector. It is necessary to deliver something. I assure the Government that there is a deep-seated fear that the wrong action at this stage will result in a move towards disinvestment in the sector. At a time when we are not in a position to replace homes with new-build homes for rent one for one, we may lose a large section of our rented capacity if we do not treat people correctly.
Will Alex Johnstone give way?
Excuse me, but I will not. I will come to a conclusion very soon.
We must search for ambitious solutions to Scotland’s housing needs, and we must find ways to increase capacity and construction across the board. We will achieve that by building confidence. Confidence in the market gave us the growth in all sectors that we had prior to the recession, and a return to that confidence will result in investment returning. It is the job of Government and all politicians—even those in opposition—to ensure that what we do is designed to make it easier, safer and more practical for people at every level to invest in housing.
That return in confidence is the key to success, and it must take place across all tenures and sectors. If we work together to build confidence, the capacity will exist for our housing problems to be solved by funding that is not exclusively dependent on the Government or public sector investment, but which also comes from private sector solutions. If we treat private investors and private renters right they can continue to solve our problems and deal with many issues in this crisis, by which others are confused and to which they cannot find a solution.
I move amendment S4M-14167.1, to leave out from first “notes” to end and insert:
“encourages the search for ambitious solutions to Scotland’s future housing needs; observes the importance of a mix of property types and continuing flexibility of tenures in the housing market; recognises that such a mix will require a vibrant private rental sector that balances the need for affordability with securing supply in light of a growing population; acknowledges that a focus on building and investment is required to ensure that properties are available to meet the demand for homes, and considers that the needs of tenants and homebuyers are best served by ensuring that the Scottish property market remains competitive.”
15:14
I want to spend a little time looking at the words that Labour used in its motion. It is probably good to start with something on which we can agree: I completely agree that “securing a decent home” is very much linked to “individual and social wellbeing”, and I hope that all members agree that investing in housing has huge benefits, because investment can take people out of fuel poverty, help youngsters to study better and improve the health of families.
Whether there is a “homes crisis” in Scotland is open to debate, as has been touched on. The word “crisis” tends to be used very loosely in the Parliament and we would do better to think a little more carefully before using it so frequently. A definition that I found included:
“a crucial or decisive point or situation, a turning point”.
We accept that housing is a key challenge, but I wonder whether we are really saying that we are at some turning point in history. Housing has been a challenge and a problem all my life, in Scotland and in the UK, and if we are realistic we will acknowledge that it will continue to be so for some time, whichever party is in power. However, it is a mistake to use the word “crisis” too loosely.
I recognise the point that Mr Mason makes, but does he accept that in this context the word “crisis” was used not by the Labour Party but by the commission, by Shelter Scotland and by Sir Robert Black?
I accept that. My general point is that we use the word too loosely in this place and more widely. If we were talking about the refugee and immigrant situation, I would accept that “crisis” is the correct word.
Let me be positive. In greater Easterhouse, where I live, the state of housing is generally much better than it was 25 years ago, when I moved in—and 25 years ago it was much better than it was in the period after the war, when tenements had shared toilets and were hugely overcrowded. Let us be realistic. Huge progress has been made—before and since this Government came to power. At the same time, I accept that housing is still the main issue about which constituents come to my office to see me. There is no question but that we face an on-going challenge.
We should give credit to the housing associations for the work that they have done and continue to do, in doing their best to find and create suitable homes for tenants. However, housing associations and this Parliament are limited in what we can do by the available resources—that primarily means the money that is available to us. There are certain inescapable facts, including Westminster’s mismanagement of the economy, which has led to a reduced Scottish budget. The situation has been made worse by the Tories cutting harder than they needed to.
We therefore do not have as much money for housing as we want or need. As I said to Mr Macintosh during his speech, if the Opposition is saying that it wants more money for housing, it must be honest and tell us where it wants to take money from. Would it mean less money for health and hospitals, for schools and colleges or for transport? Surely the money would have to come from one of those areas.
Does Mr Mason accept that one of the reasons why I did not mention money in the motion was that I was trying to get recognition that there is a crisis—a problem that is facing us? If we cannot reach agreement on the scale of the problem, we will not agree on the solutions. Does the member agree that there is a crisis in housing, and that we all need to address it?
I think that the member knows that I agree, as does the housing minister, that there is a problem and a challenge. I do not accept that “crisis” is the right word to use at this time, although I accept that individual families are facing a crisis.
If we are not to cut expenditure from somewhere, can we raise money, for example through taxation? Next April we will have power over income tax, and I would be delighted to tax high earners more and use the proceeds for investment in housing. However, we have to remember that 1p more tax from the richest would also mean 1p more from the lowest earners. We need to think long and hard before we go down that route.
As I am speaking about housing, members will not be surprised to hear me mention my constituency and one of the huge housing issues there, which is that of the Commonwealth games village, with its 400 social rented houses and 300 owner-occupied houses, most of which are now occupied, although the care home has not yet opened. My first point would be to emphasise the tremendous enthusiasm with which the development has been greeted. We have disabled people now having a suitable home for the first time, larger families who are no longer overcrowded and even folk moving into the area from areas such as the west end, which some people used to believe was more desirable. Alex Johnstone made a point about building confidence, and that is exactly what the village has done and is doing. We hope to see more private developers coming into the area shortly.
Do I have a little bit of extra time, Presiding Officer?
Yes, a moment or so.
Of course, new housing developments of this size have teething problems. Some residents are already not looking after their gardens, and the council has refused to install litter bins because the roads are not yet adopted. However, those are relatively minor issues in the scheme of things and, overall, it has been great to hear from new residents how pleased they are with their homes.
The motion states that
“buying your own home is increasingly unaffordable”
Sadly, that seems to be the case. I see that as very much linked to the wide gap between the richest and the poorest in our society. If we had a more even distribution of income and wealth, more people would be able to afford an ordinary home. However, if some people are so rich that they can afford a huge mansion or even several properties, the corollary is that others are squeezed right out of owning at all. Therefore, helping people at the bottom end of the scale is linked to redistributing the income and wealth of those at the top.
Other issues that are raised in the motion include quality standards and rent levels. I suggest that quality standards are more of a challenge in the owner-occupier and private rented sectors, where some of the worst conditions prevail. By all means let us have rent controls if that is what is necessary to give more security to tenants, but improving the standard and safety of private rented properties must be a high priority as well. Linked to that, we need to go further with factoring, perhaps even considering compulsory factoring and, potentially, compulsory maintenance funds as well.
By historical standards, huge progress has been made. I very much welcome the progress that has been made by this Government. In the words of some of my local housing associations, let us complete the good work that has been done so far.
15:22
I start by declaring an interest, as I am a private sector landlord in Fife.
In recent years, we have seen a vast increase in the number of people who rent privately in Scotland. Since the formation of the Scottish Parliament, the proportion of people who rent in the private sector in Scotland has almost trebled, from 5 to 13 per cent. However, 100,000 of the households in the private rented sector live in poverty. Private renters in Scotland spend nearly a quarter of their income on housing, which is far more than is acceptable.
A recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that:
“The number of households in poverty in the PRS (Private Rented Sector) has doubled in the last decade to 120,000, while the number in social housing has almost halved to 190,000.
At the start of the 2000s, poverty in Scotland was predominantly in the social rented sector but this is no longer the case. Two fifths of households in poverty live in social housing, compared to three fifths a decade ago. Meanwhile a quarter live in the private rented sector, up from 1 in 10”.
Many people have little choice but to rent privately. They cannot afford to save for a deposit to buy a house, and the options for social housing might be limited in their locality.
Scotland is facing a social housing crisis. We need massive investment in the supply side of housing, which would see construction of social housing to boost our economy, access to safe and secure homes for thousands of families and all the improvements in health, wellbeing and increased community cohesion and safety in communities across Scotland that would come with those new houses. An affordable, safe home is a fundamental component of building a fairer Scotland.
Since coming to power, the SNP has cut the capital housing budget. I am proud to say that Labour is committed to building at least 20,000 homes a year between now and 2020.
Can the member give an indication of how much it would cost to build those 20,000 homes a year and what proportion of the Scottish budget that would be?
I am not in a position to do that today. I echo Ken Macintosh’s comments that these are things that we have to work on together.
An example of how these things can be funded can be seen in Fife, where the council has committed to building 2,700 houses by May 2017 and is on track to do that. It raised the necessary funds by consulting tenants and raising the rents, so there are ways of financing increased house building.
In Fife, there has been collaboration between housing providers, housing associations, private developers and a number of Scottish Government initiatives, and the target is on track. Together, they are delivering modern, fit-for-purpose and energy-efficient homes. Where possible, the council’s new-build properties are allocated to existing tenants whose current homes are not suitable. Their existing homes are then freed up to be allocated to someone else on the housing list. That chain of lets means that 2.4 households’ housing needs are being met for every new council house let. That approach is making serious inroads into Fife’s housing problems.
On top of that, innovative and fast solutions are necessary if we are to deal with our housing crisis. Again, I refer to Fife, where an innovative project has been rebuilding on existing foundations. Sharp Construction, with support from Fife Council and Ore Valley Housing Association, has speedily and safely built new homes on the foundations that were originally laid for houses that are no longer fit for purpose. It demolished those unfit-for-purpose houses and built on the foonds. That process was hugely collaborative with local people and has broad local support. It is just one of many new approaches that could be used to tackle Scotland’s housing crisis now.
However, for those who cannot or do not want to live in social housing, we need to reform the private rented sector to make it work for everyone. In the worst-case scenarios, the sector is at risk of acting as a cash cow for landlords—not this landlord—but the priority for us all must be to meet the needs of families that are unable to get a foot on the property ladder or access to social housing.
Shelter’s make renting right campaign has cross-party support. It makes bold calls for action on rent levels and security of tenure. It calls for stability for people who want to make rented housing their home; flexibility for people to stay in their homes as long as they need to; a modern tenancy that gives security and flexibility for tenants and landlords; a fair system for sorting out renting problems when they occur; and predictable rents for tenants and landlords.
It is clear that tenure options in Scotland are in desperate need of reform. It is a positive step that the Scottish Government has committed to making changes, but we must wait to see the detail of the proposals. The various tenures that are currently available must be rationalised and made to work for everyone in Scotland.
Another area in which there is little doubt that Scotland’s private rented sector does not work is in rent levels. Scotland has a larger gap between private and social rents than any region of England bar London. The Scottish Government’s expert working group on welfare recommended in June 2014 that mandatory rent caps be written into all leases.
The Scottish Labour Party welcomes in principle the proposed private tenancies bill that the Scottish Government set out in its programme for government. One section of that bill will include reference to some rent controls. Scottish Labour has been arguing for action to control rent rises for months. Indeed, we tried to amend the Scottish Government’s last Housing (Scotland) Bill to that end but were voted down several times. Since that bill was passed, rents have again risen. Had the SNP Government acted in 2013, when its last private rented sector review took place, the average Scottish renter in the private sector would already have saved more than £150 per year.
The SNP voted against proper rent controls three times and now proposes only the far narrower provision of
“more predictable rents and protection for tenants against excessive rent increases, including the ability to introduce local rent controls for rent pressure areas”,
to quote the First Minister. It rejected Scottish Labour’s proposals for real rent controls in the last Housing (Scotland) Bill and has now made watered-down proposals. In its 2011 manifesto, the SNP provided a
“guarantee to retain secured tenancies at affordable rents”,
but private rents have increased by more than 3 per cent year on year in Scotland. It remains to be seen to what extent its proposals will achieve that goal, because the housing crisis in Scotland needs radical and innovative solutions.
The Scottish Parliament will be given sweeping and wide-ranging new powers that could be put to use to tackle the housing crisis. Housing benefit reform, the building of tens of thousands of new houses and radical action on rents must be top of the agenda to ensure that people throughout Scotland are able to live in decent homes.
15:29
It is most gracious of the Labour Party to bring to the Scottish Parliament a debate on housing and wellbeing using its own time. That came as a bit of a surprise to many of us, particularly as, while it was in government, it had such a woeful record, building only six council houses in the time that it was in power. That is six council houses in a staggering eight years.
I am sure that the public would be exceedingly impressed if Labour were to say that it intended to double its record—yes, a 100 per cent increase. The public would be bound to be wowed by that promise to build 12 council houses over eight years—actually, I do not think so. Of course I must labour the point—six houses in eight years only added to the shortage in quality council housing, a disaster created by the failed Tory plot to bribe voters to support their cause by bringing in the right to buy, which Labour did absolutely nothing about. No—wait—it gets even worse: Labour actually continued the Tory master plan to rid Scotland of available, quality council housing. If members want to witness the effect of the dual impact of reduced numbers of quality council houses and the almost criminal lack of new-build council houses, I invite them to my constituency—evidence lies there aplenty.
Contrast Labour’s record with that of the SNP. We need to remember that up until eight years ago, Labour owned Scotland—or, at least, it thought that it did. There have been eight short years of an SNP Government that had no experience whatsoever in these matters. The Government has gone from a standing start, and since 2009-10 the SNP has built more than 5,350 new council houses. Over and above that, 34,500 social rented houses have been completed—nearly a fifth more than Labour completed over the same number of years.
We do not need to measure this Government’s record on social housing only against previous devolved Governments in Scotland. If we look further afield, the positive message on delivery for Scotland continues. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has highlighted that the Scottish Government spends a whopping 85 per cent more per head on social housing than is spent in England and Wales. That investment has seen a significantly higher rate of social sector completions per 100,000 population in Scotland, at 65.3 for the year to the end of September 2014, than in Conservative-run England, where the rate was only 44.7. If that was not bad enough, the rate in Labour-run Wales was 24.6.
However, there is always a catch when we do good work in Scotland. London has yet again put in the usual penalty clause, like some rogue insurance company. We are being penalised by Westminster for investing more in social housing because the benefits of that spending accrue to the UK Government in the form of lower housing benefit payments. That has not deterred this Scottish Government for one second from doing the right thing by doing all that it can to assist our people to get the housing that they deserve and need.
The announcement in the programme for government that £195 million will be provided over the next three years to help more people buy new-build homes will see at least 6,500 families being supported to buy a new-build home that meets their needs and, most crucially, is at a price that they can afford.
The help-to-buy scheme has already helped 7,500 households in Scotland to buy a new home over the past three years. I am sure that I do not need to say that we need to do more. It is quite clear that we need to do more—much, much more. However, it is equally clear from the actions that this Government has already taken, and from its record, that it will not sit on its laurels. I am confident that it will do all that it can, with the powers and the budget available to it, to remedy our quality housing shortage. I thank the Government for its efforts and for what it has delivered through its work.
15:34
Ken Macintosh and Jayne Baxter both reminded us that the number of people who are living in private rented accommodation has almost tripled during the years of the Scottish Parliament. I will speak mainly about that subject, and will illustrate it with an example that has been a major issue in my constituency over the summer.
Before I do so, I will make three points about social rented housing in the City of Edinburgh Council area. First, on average, 200 people apply for every social rented house that becomes available in the council area. I do not think that any other local authority in Scotland can match that shocking statistic.
Secondly, I hope that the minister will take more account of that reality in the funding formula for distributing housing money and that she will not be misled by the great success of Edinburgh in relation to mid-market housing. Such housing is important and counts as affordable housing, but it is not suitable for the very many people who need social rented accommodation.
Thirdly, there is a long-standing issue with the housing association grant. I attended Port of Leith Housing Association’s 40th anniversary event last week, when that issue was highlighted to me once again. The level of the housing association grant—the grant for each new social rented house—plummeted two or three years ago, and although it was partially restored a year or so later, it is still significantly below what it was in 2007. A group that reported recently recommended that the level of the grant should be further restored, and I hope that the Government will act on that recommendation as soon as possible.
I move on to speak about the private rented sector. I strongly agree with and support Shelter’s make renting right campaign. The first problem is the short-term nature of private rented tenancies. I welcome the proposals—as far as they go—for the new private rented housing bill, and I will look at them in detail. However, I have concerns that they may not go far enough, and that the six-month short assured tenancy may still be the norm in Scotland. I preferred—and was disappointed not to see in the proposals for the bill—the proposal made by UK Labour before the general election for three-year private rented tenancy agreements as the norm. I hope that the Scottish Government will consider that idea.
In a recent email to me, a constituent said:
“The PRS is not geared up to provide long term stable accommodation that folks and families can make their homes, and the insecurity of the tenure makes stable life impossible and results in much disruption for tenants.”
Of course rents compound the problem, and many people need to move constantly because rents increase beyond what they can afford. Again, we have seen some proposals for the bill in that area, based on the pressured area model, but as a minimum there should be no rent increases in any year that go beyond inflation, and I would like that to be included among the proposals.
The repairing standard in the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 represented some progress for the private rented sector, but we now need to move to a common housing quality standard. I am glad to see that the Scottish Government is committed at least to consulting on a minimum energy efficiency standard for the private sector, and I hope that the minister can tell us when the consultation will be launched.
The Scottish Government is also consulting on a letting agent code of practice. It is very important that we make clear that up-front letting fees that are charged to tenants are unlawful. Regulations must be strong enough to ensure that agents who do not meet the required standards are struck off the register, and we need a strong register for letting agents.
We have such a register for landlords, but I urge the minister to look at it again and make it stronger. There are still many areas in which private landlords are not meeting their responsibilities—for example, making common repairs or keeping gardens tidy. There are many issues, and it seems that there is no power under the landlord registration legislation for action to be taken in that respect.
Many of those problems are illustrated by the case of a landlord in my constituency, which happens to be a charitable trust. It has decided to evict in due course more than 200 tenants, whose rents have paid for the trust’s charitable purposes over many decades. The tenants have asked for a 12-month moratorium on sales so that they can pursue a co-op option or another suitable solution, but only four months have been granted, which is not enough time in such a complex situation.
Crucially, the trust is determined to sell only in a way that realises the highest possible receipts, thereby disregarding its obligations to the tenants, many of whom have invested their own money in their homes over decades.
There is surely a certain irony in a trust making people homeless in order to give more grants to homeless charities and other charities. I cannot believe that that is what was intended in the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005. It will break up a highly successful community in the Lorne area that has many families and older people and rich social networks.
There are also major issues about the state of the properties and the failure over a long period to repair and upgrade them adequately. Moreover, there are big questions about the behaviour of the letting agency in question, which assured several tenants about the security of their accommodation, attempted to move some elderly and vulnerable tenants from assured to short assured tenancies and has recently stepped up its inspections in preparation for sales, which has increased stress for tenants.
Supporting those tenants in every way that I can has been one of my top priorities over the summer months, and it will continue to be so. There is an amazing tenants group in Lorne with some wonderful and determined campaigners. More than anything, I hope that they will be able to continue living in their great Lorne community.
I point out to members that we have a little time in hand, so if you wish your remarks to run over a little, I will try to accommodate you. Of course, if you wish to take interventions, I will add time at the end.
15:40
This debate on housing does not take place in a vacuum; it takes place in the context of an austerity onslaught that has devastated public funds for capital investment in the past few years. In the face of a collapsing budget, quite simply, having less cash to build means that it is challenging, to say the least, to build more homes. That is not being defensive on behalf of the Scottish Government; it is surely just plain common sense.
Mr Macintosh said on behalf of Labour that he does not want the debate to descend into a partisan one involving the exchange of statistics, and neither do I. However, it is reasonable to put on record the significant achievements of the Scottish Government, despite capital cuts. Housing waiting lists have fallen every year for the past six years, and they are down 10 per cent since 2007. That is an achievement. More homes have been built in the past seven years than were built in the seven years before that; surely that is an achievement. In the face of the cuts that I mentioned, we have found £1.7 billion to invest in affordable housing, and it looks as though we are shortly going to meet our target of building 30,000 affordable homes. That is an achievement.
Let us recognise success where it has happened, but let us face up to the challenges that we have going forward. I say honestly to Labour that I want to look forward to future success and progress, but we cannot close our eyes to what happened in the past—the good and the bad, the successes and the failures—because we have to learn about what worked and what did not work so that we know what our options are. SNP members sometimes chastise Labour for what we feel are its failures and lack of success, but we have to identify what went wrong and show what we are doing right, and then we can build on that together. That is not partisan. We cannot close our eyes and pretend that history did not happen.
I thank Bob Doris for making that point. Does he therefore agree that when his colleagues refer to Labour building only six council houses, they are really stretching the argument beyond any recognition? The fact is that Labour built a substantial amount of social rented housing and the comparison between the number of social houses built under the Government and the number built when Labour was in power is less significant than his colleagues try to pretend it is.
Somewhere in that intervention, there was a concession that far more social and affordable housing has been built under the current Scottish Government, in the face of significant capital cuts, than was built under the previous Labour Executive. Surely that is a success. It is just a fact that six council houses were built in four years under Labour, compared with more than 5,000 under the current Administration. Clearly, we are doing something right in driving forward the expansion of council housing in Scotland. I suspect that the axing of the right to buy is a significant driver in that. We have to put that on the record and learn from our successes and from the failures of other people whose ill-considered ideas we have rectified.
Does the member accept that one reason why Labour-controlled local authorities and other local authorities could not build houses was because of the right to buy, which was revoked only when Labour reformed the right to buy in an earlier session of the Parliament? We put the money into social housing in other ways, through housing associations. That is the fact of the matter.
The member says that that is the fact of the matter, but I strongly disagree. However, like Mr Macintosh, I do not wish to get into the partisan argument. The record quite simply shows that more than 5,000 council houses came from this Government and six came from Labour. Frankly, people can do the maths themselves.
Let me consider where there have been successes and challenges and how we can go forward in future. I think that Stewart Maxwell was housing minister when the Scottish Government took a decision to consistently cut the housing association grant budget. Quite simply, in the face of cuts, we could get more houses for a smaller subsidy, and the budget fell quite dramatically. That was successful, but we then amended the housing association grant and gave it a small uplift to get optimal efficiency in the delivery of social rented homes. I hear some laughter from Labour members but this Scottish Government will make the best use of taxpayers’ money in the face of Tory cuts and challenge austerity to deliver for tenants in Scotland.
Will the member give way?
I do not have time.
I want to talk about housing churn and how we can better address housing need through local authority allocations policies. Let me give members two examples.
A constituent of mine in the Balgrayhill high flats in Springburn, who was in a dire housing position, was offered a house that would have met their housing needs. However, they were worried that, once they were moved to that house, they would be stuck there for ever. Quite often in the social rented sector, allocations policies do not meet housing aspirations. That must be addressed somewhere down the line.
We were able to identify a possible house for another constituent who lived at Saracen Cross in Possil that would have improved their housing situation but would not have met all their housing needs, and the housing association did not want to move them to a house that did not meet all their housing needs.
Those are just two examples that show how housing allocation policies could be used more effectively. There should be churn to improve everyone’s housing situations a bit without closing the door to meeting housing aspirations in the social rented sector.
In the time I have left, I want to talk about how this is not just about building houses but about where we build them; it is about building communities. I have to declare an interest: I will be affected by Glasgow City Council’s plans for the Blackhill Road area, across Summerston, through to East Dunbartonshire and up to Lambhill. The council has decided to rezone all the green belt and move it over to housing development. It had decided not to do that until the landowners appealed the decision, but the rezoning now forms part of the local authority’s plans. I have objected to that decision and I very much hope that it will be overturned at reporter stage. We are not just talking about building houses; we are talking about building communities, and local authorities have to play their part in that. They do not always get it right.
15:48
I will not be alone among my parliamentary colleagues in handling more casework about housing problems than about any other issue. A sadly familiar litany of problems crop up over and over again—inadequate housing, overcrowding, high house prices, exorbitant private rents, long waiting lists for social housing, families stuck in temporary accommodation, damp homes, neighbourhood problems and fuel poverty.
However familiar those problems are, I am never in any doubt about how damaging and wearing they can be for each individual constituent whom I see, and my anger and frustration at our collective failure to tackle those problems grow. Housing problems wear people down, the stress affects their health, debt grows and creates more problems, and families are pushed to breaking point.
Councils that are struggling with growing waiting lists force families to make invidious choices. A mother who is in temporary accommodation having fled an abusive relationship comes to me distraught because the council has told her to widen her search for social housing. She explains to me that, if she does so, she will need to move the children away from a school that they are settled in and family support in the village. A homeless family has been offered a council house 30 miles away in a small town with no public transport links to where they work. A single parent in private rented accommodation who spent years fighting to get the educational and social support that her disabled son needed finds herself facing eviction, and the only homeless accommodation that is offered by the local council means that she must uproot her son from that support network.
Week in, week out, my surgeries underline that housing and wellbeing are inextricably linked. We know that, yet it still seems that housing policy is dealt with in a silo. It is therefore welcome that the Labour Party has chosen to use its debating time today to consider the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing’s report. The focus on wellbeing and the emphasis on considering in the round a range of interrelated issues such as housing, neighbourhood, economic activity, health and environmental sustainability is a profoundly different and, indeed, welcome approach.
The commission has stressed the central importance of people having a safe, secure and suitable home that allows them to fulfil their potential, and of that home being embedded in and linked to a strong, vibrant local community where people can live good lives. That chimes well with the Liberal Democrats’ aim of enabling every citizen to achieve their full potential and contribute fully to their community.
The commission concludes starkly that
“there is very clearly a homes crisis”,
and it goes on to make a series of worthwhile recommendations, yet both the Government amendment and the Conservative amendment choose to delete all reference to a homes crisis. Deleting words in a parliamentary motion will not solve the problem or take away from the fact that this Government has failed to provide housing for the 10,000 households who are currently in temporary accommodation.
People are in temporary housing not for weeks or months but for years. Just last year, local authorities gave us the grim numbers for people who waited for more than five and more than 10 years after they applied for social housing. As of May last year, more than 13,000 households had been on the waiting list for more than an entire decade. What clearer indication is there of the Scottish Government’s failure to adequately respond to the housing shortage crisis, leaving children to spend Christmas after Christmas in houses that they cannot call home?
The Scottish Government claims that, in the current five-year session of Parliament, it will have built more than 30,000 units, but housing completions remain 40 per cent lower than before the economic downturn.
In talking about completions, the member will recognise that more affordable housing is being built under this Administration than under previous Administrations. She is referring to the private sector and the recession.
One of the things that concern me is the constant conflation of affordable housing and social housing. Affordable housing does not mean social housing, and social housing is where we really need to start making a difference.
Will the member take an intervention?
I ask the minister to let me make some progress.
Some 16,000 new-build houses were completed in the year ending March 2015, compared with 25,000 in the same period of time before the SNP took power. The Government can continue to blame the economic downturn or it can figure out a way to help those who need a place to live. I think that that is the spirit of Ken Macintosh’s motion, and I would prefer us to discuss how we can collectively solve the problem rather than bandying figures back and forth. However, the facts speak for themselves. Of the 30,000 completions over five years, only two thirds are intended for social housing, which falls short of the recommendation from both the commission and Shelter Scotland that at least 10,000 new homes for social rent be built each year to start to meaningfully tackle Scotland’s housing crisis. That means that, so far, 30,000 social housing units that have been identified as needed have not been built.
I welcome the announcement of a successor to the help-to-buy scheme, but I urge the Scottish Government to provide details as soon as possible. Although we have seen the positive 9 per cent rise in the number of new-build houses, we must recognise that that is largely due to the predecessor to the scheme and the private build sector driving progress. The fact that the right-to-buy scheme is being brought to an end in April next year and its expiration date is nearing makes the release of information on the help-to-buy scheme even more urgent.
In the north-east, the housing shortage affects not only individuals but whole communities. Teacher and healthcare worker shortages are exacerbated by the lack of affordable housing, which is putting a strain on public services. We also need to consider innovative solutions to provide for the growing number of households that are headed by persons aged 65 and over, which is projected in the report to increase by 50 per cent between 2010 and 2035.
In addressing the housing shortage in Scotland, we need to heed the findings of the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing. A house, an education and respectable healthcare—these are the issues that we need to tie together. However, guaranteeing that each person has an appropriate, safe, warm house is the foundation stone for giving each individual a chance to experience the best standards of living.
15:55
I thank the Labour Party for bringing the debate to the chamber. One of the most important things that anyone can have is a decent, warm, dry home. Many years ago, when I was the SNP’s deputy convener for housing—it was even before I came to this place—I spoke at a conference in Europe, where countries dealt with rented accommodation entirely differently from how it is dealt with here. That was particularly the case on funding, and for many years I pushed for such funding here.
It is apt that we are debating the issue today, and I thank the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing for its report. The fact that the commission’s members come from a wide range of backgrounds—the report states that only one member comes from a housing background, and I know that they are a very good spokesperson for the housing movement—is excellent and has ensured a broad sweep. The minister’s amendment refers to the commission’s good example of cross-sector working, which I am sure all of us welcome.
I commend the work that the Scottish Government has carried out in reaching 96 per cent of its target for building homes for social rent. As has been mentioned, a total of 54,186 affordable homes have been completed since 2007. However, we all recognise that we need more social rented accommodation and changes in the law, particularly in relation to the private rented sector. We need to work with various agencies including housing associations, councils and private landlords to achieve that.
A number of members have mentioned the planning process and the need for land release to enable houses to be built. That must be looked at, as must the release of brownfield sites. The Scottish Government has mentioned the release of brownfield sites for building in my constituency, as has Glasgow City Council, but the problem in my constituency—and perhaps throughout Glasgow—is that, although there could be building on brownfield sites to bring people into the city, there are not many brownfield sites to build houses on. I will elaborate on that later. If that plan comes to fruition—I hope that it does—and we get more houses, they will not be in a city centre setting. We must take that on board.
In my constituency, brownfield sites are being used to bring folk into the area but, as people who live in Glasgow—including Patricia Ferguson and other members—will know, the only properties that are being built there are private student accommodation. Bob Doris will be aware of that as well. Absolutely no land is being made available in my constituency for social housing, which is a big issue that the minister is probably fed up of me writing to her about, as is Glasgow City Council.
I note what the commission’s report says about the importance of neighbourhood and community—I think that it is on page 19. As Bob Doris mentioned, building communities is an important aspect for sustaining them. The problem that we have in Glasgow Kelvin is that thousands of units of student accommodation have been built where no social housing can be built, which means that, outside semester time, such places become ghost areas. I am not talking about places outwith my constituency; I am talking about Dumbarton Road, Bath Street and the city centre. It is not cheap student accommodation, either. It is not on campus; it is off campus.
I do not understand why Glasgow City Council continues—against the wishes of local residents, who the council is supposed to consult—to give permission for such accommodation to be built. An accommodation pod can be bought for £160,000. That is not the cost of student accommodation; it is simply someone trying to make money.
I have nothing whatsoever against students. I have met them, along with the universities. They are not using the accommodation. I met the developers to ask why they are not building social housing or any other type of housing and was told that the banks will not lend on anything other than student accommodation. The banks’ interest rates are so low and the returns so great that people are buying into the student market.
The situation is partly to do with the recession, as has been mentioned; it is also partly about people speculating for money. The approach does nothing to enhance the areas where people live.
I thank Vivienne Nicoll of the Evening Times, who wrote an article on the amount of student accommodation, particularly in the west end in my constituency. She suggested that it is about time that Glasgow City Council consulted the residents. Believe you me—the situation has become so bad that, when it comes to summer, there will be no communities in the areas affected. We desperately need to look at the matter. Perhaps we do not have the powers here in that respect, but we must encourage developers to build social rented housing.
We have some crackin—I am sorry; that is a very Glasgow phrase—
Will the member take an intervention?
I am sorry, but I am in my last seconds.
We have some very good housing associations. Partick Housing Association wanted to buy land that it could move its offices to and build rented accommodation on, but the council sold the land to a private developer, and it was used to build another 1,000 student flats. I do not know how we overcome the situation, but we need to look at it from the perspective of those who live in the area and to make sure that the communities flourish.
16:02
My postbag, like those of most elected members, is dominated by housing issues. In my 16 years as an MSP, that pattern has not changed. However, what has changed over time is the housing problems that I hear about. I will not rehearse all the issues that are brought to me, because we are all aware of them; I am sure that they are the same or similar to those that members across the chamber deal with.
As the commission’s report recognised, access to a decent home is essential to an individual’s social wellbeing. The lack of decent housing can have far-reaching consequences not just for social wellbeing but for all aspects of an individual’s life.
For almost all my life, I have lived in the constituency that I am privileged to represent. I have witnessed at first hand the changes—good and bad—that have occurred in housing over the years: the slum clearance of the 1960s, when high-rise living and new towns replaced insanitary Victorian tenements; the growth in the housing association movement, which helped to give local people a greater say; and the radical move to stock transfer, to relieve Glasgow of historical debt that had stifled investment.
In 2015, my constituency is embarking on another period of great change. The lessons of the past must inform our actions in order to improve the housing situation for all our citizens. Housing provision must match aspiration and need if it is to work. Local people are being consulted about what they want and need in their communities, through consultation events and planning charrettes. The Scottish Government has been involved in much of that work, too. Housing is no longer planned in isolation, which must be a good thing.
As the local member for Maryhill and Springburn, does Patricia Ferguson feel that the people of Summerston were consulted adequately on the changes to the city plan that will redesignate the entire green-belt area for housing use but without putting anything in place to support the amenities or the environment there?
I will come to that later, if Mr Doris will bear with me. I plan to say a little about that issue.
Glasgow City Council’s imaginative approach is outlined in its new residential development report. The council plans to build 25,000 new homes over 10 years and, with Glasgow Credit Union, it will introduce a mortgage guarantee scheme to help those who wish to own their own home. Working with the Wheatley Group, the council will deliver 1,700 new homes by 2022.
The Wheatley Group has been involved in building new homes in Royston, Sighthill and Maryhill in my constituency as part of the reprovisioning programme, and it has plans for a further 125 new homes in the Milton area of my constituency, which will be a good first step in regenerating that area. Over the past 16 years, I have consistently made the point that Milton has a number of brownfield sites that should be the focus of attention for developers. Unfortunately, developers are more attracted to greenfield sites, so we need to find a way to incentivise the use of brownfield sites over the use of green-belt land.
Over the past 16 years, I have consistently been against and have opposed every proposal that Glasgow City Council has made to build on the green belt in my constituency. That is not always popular, because people go on to live in the houses that are built on that green-belt land, but that has been my position and I have stuck with it over time.
The Maryhill and Sighthill areas in my constituency have been designated as transformational regeneration areas, and new housing in both areas is now being let to tenants, which is extremely welcome. In addition, it is planned that a memorandum of understanding will be signed with Scottish Canals that will increase regeneration around the Forth and Clyde canal area in north Glasgow, which will include a third phase at the Botany in Maryhill. Work will be done with the Bigg partnership to provide new private sector housing at the site of the former Diageo factory at Port Dundas. Again, that is very welcome.
From the city deal, the sum of £898,000 will be released for the canal and north gateway, which will allow sites to be prepared and made ready for development. I spoke to two of the minister’s predecessors about the possibility of finding a way forward for the site of the old Ruchill hospital, which is owned by a Government agency, that allows Scottish Enterprise to take advantage of the new road that the local authority has built for the new school in the area and to use that as part of the remediation and reuse of that land. I very much hope that the minister will agree with me on that.
Consultation has begun on the future of the Red Road site once the iconic flats there are demolished in October. My community consultation exercise in the area indicates that, although people want new housing to be built, they also want job opportunities and community facilities that will serve the people who will live there in the years to come. At its height, the Red Road estate housed around 4,000 people. For those of us who lived there then, a school and some shops seemed to be an afterthought. We were provided with state-of-the-art housing, but there were no community facilities until some years later. In my view, that is one of the reasons why the estate did not succeed in the way that it might have done.
It is clear to me that Glasgow City Council is leading the way by making dynamic partnerships with the Scottish Government, with the housing associations, with the credit unions in the city and with Scottish Canals. It is using its access to the city deal to make sure that the north of Glasgow is at the heart of its regeneration policy in the next five to 10 years. That is welcome, but it demonstrates that it is not just a question of providing good, decent accommodation. If the process is to succeed, it must provide all the other things that must accompany that—good community facilities, good infrastructure and a mix of housing that means that people have the houses that they need and those that they aspire to live in. Too often, we find that people cannot be housed in the size of accommodation that they need in the location that they need, and that is one of the areas that we must focus on in the years ahead.
16:09
I have listened with great interest to this afternoon’s debate and have come to recognise that this is not a new housing problem that we are discussing. However, I hope to demonstrate that the Government not only has at its heart the need to make housing available but has done a considerable amount of work to improve housing standards in order to meet its ambitions set out in “Scotland’s Sustainable Housing Strategy” of 2013 with regard to the types of houses that we should be building in Scotland. During the period of house building that happened after the war, Nye Bevan said:
“While we shall be judged for a year ... by the number of houses we build ... we shall be judged in 10 years’ time by the type of houses we build.”
The quality and type of housing that we build are as important as the number of houses we build if we are to get this right for Scotland’s communities.
As a Central Scotland MSP, I have in my region the former Ravenscraig steelworks site, where the Building Research Establishment has developed its centre of excellence. This innovation park showcases sustainable housing for the future, with energy sustainability, affordability and community at its heart. That is very relevant, given that 3,500 houses are potentially going to be built on the Ravenscraig site.
The park, which was opened by Alex Neil in 2012, contains a house by AppleGreen Homes that is designed to reduce the input of energy, water and other resources while minimising the generation of waste and other environmental disturbances. Technologies from around the world are used to assist communities in achieving sustainable builds as well as on-going sustainable living. AppleGreen’s houses are built outwith the sites, usually with the help of local factories and small to medium-sized enterprises, and are then put up on the sites, and the jobs that are generated as a result of these AppleGreen developments put money back into local housing and communities.
Plot 5 in the BRE innovation park hosts the Zero Waste Scotland resource efficient house, which the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Food and Environment, Richard Lochhead, launched in September 2013. It is one of the first projects to be delivered by the Scottish Government’s resource efficient Scotland programme, which is managed by Zero Waste Scotland, and it has been built in partnership with Tigh Grian Ltd. This net zero carbon house will meet at least gold performance levels in fuel efficiency, and every element has been created with the need to lessen the impact of house building on the environment. Built to meet the 2016 Scottish building standards gold performance requirements and working to the waste regulations that came into force in 2014, this modular house shows the principles of resource efficiency, with the aim of bringing sustainable, affordable and repeatable family housing models to the construction market.
The site also hosts a refurbished house, which is a demonstration house involving Edinburgh Napier University and Historic Scotland and employing certain retrofit techniques. As we replace our housing and develop existing sites, it is imperative that we improve the performance of existing housing stock in order to meet our carbon dioxide reduction targets. This demonstration house will feed into the building industry and show best practice on retrofitting and retrofit solutions that work in the long term.
There is also a curriculum house that has been designed and developed by our country’s future designers and builders in conjunction with New College Lanarkshire’s computer-aided design, architectural design and construction courses, and, in partnership with the Forestry Commission, a timber house to showcase innovative use of home-grown timber products and other local products to ensure low-embodied-energy, healthy and thermally efficient dwellings in Scotland.
The reason why I have highlighted the BRE and the importance of the work that it is doing is that I know that the Scottish Government is absolutely committed to reducing fuel poverty. Since 2009, the Scottish Government has spent over £500 million on a range of fuel poverty and energy efficiency programmes to help more than a third of all Scottish homes to meet performance criteria.
Scotland’s energy efficiency programme—SEEP—will aim to provide multi-year funding to improve the energy efficiency of all Scottish buildings, both domestic and non-domestic. The Scottish Government has also committed an unprecedented £119 million to the fuel poverty and energy efficiency budget. That will be split between home advice and a variety of home energy efficiency programmes in Scotland.
The Government is not only delivering on its capital build in delivering new-build housing; it is looking at how we can create sustainable, fuel-efficient and effective homes for Scotland in the future.
I will touch on some issues that have been raised in the debate. Alex Johnstone talked about his concerns about how the socially rented sector might react to rent controls. I hope that he will also pay attention to the effect of the Department for Work and Pensions welfare reforms on that sector.
The Welfare Reform Committee visited Inverness to see the universal credit pilot being rolled out there. There were concerns that the average rent arrears for non-universal credit tenants was around £200 in the area, but that figure rose to £1,000 for universal credit claimants, and the average was £2,100 for those in temporary accommodation, particularly that serviced by the private rented sector. The reason for that was the inability to pay directly to the landlords any more.
There were also concerns about the time limits. If somebody moves tenancy between their universal credit payments, one landlord could end up receiving the full amount. I hope that Alex Johnstone will pay attention to those concerns about the DWP that are being raised.
Do I have any more time, Presiding Officer?
You have about another 30 seconds.
Okay.
Bob Doris was right to say that we cannot take the issue out of the context of austerity. The Government not only has to deal with slashes in its capital build budget and the austerity agenda; it has to mitigate problems from council tax benefits and the bedroom tax and the other problems that come its way.
I will not do a comparison with what was done in the past, but if we look at the rate of social sector completions in Scotland per 100,000 of the population, we see that Scotland’s figure sits at 65.3 per 100,000 of the population, whereas in Wales, where Labour is in power, the figure is only 24.6 per 100,000 of the population.
The Government is doing everything it can in the current climate to meet the housing needs of Scotland.
I call Paul Martin, to be followed by Jim Eadie. I will be equally generous with time.
16:17
First, I will touch on John Mason’s contribution. He said that we should be concerned about using the term “housing crisis”. I remind him that if a person is one of the 140,000 applicants who are waiting to be rehoused—I am sure that he has heard representations from many of them at his surgery—they will see it as a crisis. If a person finds themselves homeless and not able to access the housing that they require, that is a crisis. I am less concerned about the word “crisis” being used in the comfort zone of the debating chamber and the words that we have used, and more concerned about the action that is taken to follow on from that.
Bob Doris asked for a period of reflection on what Labour got wrong and what it got right. He advised that that is the case, but I did not hear from him what the SNP got wrong. Perhaps he wants to intervene to tell us what he got wrong.
Will the member take an intervention?
I will bring in Bob Doris in a second; I want to clarify my point. What Labour got right was writing off the housing debt in Glasgow and ensuring that people who lived in Glasgow were able to access good-quality housing as a result of the housing debt write-off.
Will the member take an intervention?
Give me a second.
What we also got right was investing in communities via the community-based housing association model—that has a proven record—and ensuring that we moved from a municipal system that was in place in Glasgow City Council to the community-based housing association model. I make no apologies for that and I am very proud of Labour’s record in that respect.
I will allow Bob Doris to intervene and confirm what the SNP has got wrong.
I am happy to describe two things that the SNP got wrong and one thing that Labour got wrong. First, we revised our housing association grant figure a bit too low, so we then adjusted it and made it higher, as I said earlier in my speech. Secondly, we did not take forward everything in “Firm Foundations: the Future of Housing in Scotland” following further consultation.
That is my reflection of what the SNP has got wrong. What Labour got wrong was insisting that housing stock transfer in Glasgow must be done en masse and bypass local community housing associations, and Labour should be ashamed of that fact.
I think that housing should be in the democratic control of local people, which is the decision that local people took in Glasgow by a large majority. I have to say that, despite the artificial divisions that have been created by Bob Doris, the community-based housing associations across Glasgow want to work with the GHA and Martin Armstrong. That partnership approach is the way forward; it should be encouraged by the Government and not discouraged.
I pay tribute to those housing associations that have stepped up to the plate despite the challenges that they have faced, which include Milnbank Housing Association; NG Homes; the housing associations in Easterhouse that John Mason referred to: Blairtummock, Easthall Park, Provanhall and Wellhouse; the GHA; and the Wheatley Group. Since the 1970s, those organisations have been ensuring that regeneration takes place in their local communities, and they have to be commended for their role in that. In many cases, the regeneration would not have happened without them.
I defy anybody to visit housing association properties in Glasgow and identify that they are housing association stock—many people have recognised that fact. In addition, many interventions have taken place via housing associations and local regeneration bodies to ensure that social enterprises are in place in communities. The associations have done all that despite the challenges that they have faced.
I welcome the apology from Bob Doris in respect of the reduction in the housing association grant level, because the SNP should apologise for that. Since 2007, there has been a significant decrease in the number of new builds via the community housing association model. I am pleased that Bob Doris has apologised for that today; he should be apologising for it because the community-based housing model actually works.
I invite anybody to visit new-build properties with me and see their quality; for example, Millennium Grove in Easterhouse looks as if it was built yesterday but it is called Millennium Grove because it was built in 2000. Such properties have been sustained and well managed because local people are in control. However, they have been discouraged by the Scottish Government’s current approach to managing housing and ensuring that housing organisations are provided with the appropriate resources.
On a positive note, I welcome the help-to-buy scheme, which I think has been a success. I recognise that there are a number of challenges in ensuring that the qualifying criteria are addressed, but we should ensure that those with lower earnings should be able to access the scheme. I inform the minister that correspondence that we have received from Homes for Scotland indicates that it is still waiting, halfway through the new financial year, for information on what the help-to-buy criteria will be. Six months on from what should have been a new launch for the programme, with £185 million confirmed for it, can the minister not tell us what the qualifying criteria will be?
The lack of information is having an impact on local housing sales across Scotland. I do not often make a case in the chamber for housing developers and I do not have great sympathy with many of the challenges that they face, but I recognise that the help-to-buy scheme has been a success and that it should continue to be encouraged. Will the minister confirm in her closing remarks what action will be taken to ensure that the issue of the qualifying criteria is taken forward?
I always welcome a housing debate in the chamber, but we need to ensure that it is one that will address many of the challenges that face us on housing, including the 140,000 people who are waiting to be rehoused. I inform Bob Doris that that is no laughing matter for those individuals but a serious matter. For those on that housing list, who are waiting for the Government to intervene to ensure that they can get a decent home, it is no laughing matter. Members in this chamber should ensure that the Government takes action on the issue.
16:24
I, too, welcome the opportunity to take part in the debate. Like other members who have taken part, I commend the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing’s invaluable work.
The commission’s chair, Sir Robert Black, has said that the commission’s work is about
“the central importance of having a safe, secure and suitable home that allows people to fulfil their potential, and a home that is embedded in and linked to a strong, vibrant local community”—
such as those described by Paul Martin and other members—
“where people can live good lives.”
That aspiration—that vision for the role of housing in our society—is one that I share and which lies at the heart of the Scottish Government’s own approach. In fairness, that aspiration lay at the heart of Ken Macintosh’s speech, in which he set a consensual tone. He has clearly learned the truth of the old adage that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar—although I suspect that that lesson is still to be learned by other members across the chamber.
As the commission’s report outlines, investment in housing is critical to enable individuals to achieve good health, access educational opportunity and provide care for older people, and to ensure economic wellbeing through employment and income. Investment in housing will also allow society to achieve its ambitions in the areas of environmental sustainability and building strong and cohesive communities.
The Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee, which I have the privilege of convening, will next month host a session in which we will invite representatives of the commission and other stakeholders within the housing sector to engage in a round-table discussion on the commission’s findings. All members are welcome to attend that.
The Scottish Government’s record is a good one. The evidence for that can be seen in the £1.7 billion that has been committed to be spent over the lifetime of this parliamentary session; in the house-building programme, which over the lifetime of this parliamentary session will build 30,000 affordable homes, 20,000 of which are for social rent; and in the fact that council house building is at record levels—in fact, it is at a 25-year high. As someone who grew up and spent the first 21 years of their life in a council house, I believe that council housing should be at the heart of a mix of housing tenures, rather than be seen only as a safety net for those who cannot afford to rent or buy.
The commission pointed to the fact that almost half a million homes in Scotland have been sold under the right to buy. That massive diminution in council housing stock and the fact that councils were unable to spend capital receipts on modernising existing housing stock or building new council houses to replace those that were sold illustrate why the right-to-buy policy was not sustainable and why the Scottish Government was right to end it.
Among the commission’s key findings are the facts that in 2013-14 50 per cent of all households renting in Scotland received financial support to help pay their rent and in 2011-12 housing benefit spending in Scotland was in the region of £1.8 billion, which was a 29 per cent increase on the 1996-97 figure. Housing benefit has become the main mechanism with which to help low-income households meet their housing costs. The commission highlighted that housing policy has shifted over the past 30 years from predominantly subsidising social house building to providing income-related subsidies to poorer tenants in rented accommodation. The ratio has moved from 4:1 in favour of housing supply subsidies in the 1970s to the same ratio in favour of income-related subsidies today.
How we bring about a shift back to subsidising bricks and mortar rather than means-tested personal housing subsidies is a challenge that we must address. Such a shift can only come about if we continue to expand subsidised housing supply and therefore help to make rents more affordable and reduce the need for personal subsidies.
In an excellent contribution, Sandra White highlighted the fact that financial institutions are willing to lend to property speculators who are investing in student accommodation but are unwilling to lend to the social housing sector—an issue that needs further exploration.
The commission highlighted a number of areas that we would do well to reflect on. One of them is temporary accommodation. I was pleased that, during the passage of the Housing (Scotland) Bill, the Minister for Housing and Welfare, following representations from Shelter Scotland, Alex Rowley and me, laid the Homeless Persons (Unsuitable Accommodation) (Scotland) Order 2014, which states:
“In all circumstances, accommodation is unsuitable if it is—
(a) not wind and watertight; or
(b) not suitable for occupation by children.”
That was done to ensure that all temporary accommodation is fit for human habitation. In that context, I welcome the commission’s recommendation:
“There should be a significant reduction in the length of time any one household spends in temporary accommodation. Minimum standards for temporary housing ... should also be implemented.”
I look forward to further work on the matter.
The key issue is to maintain existing levels of investment and build on them in the years ahead. If we as a society invest more, we will achieve more. The commission has made a number of recommendations in that regard:
“The Scottish Government should increase the level of new building funded by the Affordable Housing Investment Programme to 9,000 houses each year over the period up to 2020. The social rented new build programme should be increased to 7,000 houses each year (an increase of 3,000 over the current level) and there should be a doubling of the mid-market rental new build programme which, together with the existing level of grants for new owner occupied houses, would provide 2,000 new houses each year.”
It will be for the Scottish Government and all the parties in the Parliament to reflect on those recommendations. It is open to any party, through the budget process, to make proposals to increase investment in the way that has been suggested. There is also a clear responsibility to set out how the investment will be paid for and what other funding commitments will have to be cut if that is to happen. John Mason made that point effectively.
In due course, parties will publish their manifestos for next year’s election. The commission’s report could be regarded as an opening bid for what should be in them. The commission said:
“The Commission recognises that public finances are likely to be under severe pressure for some time, with difficult choices required.”
We should not shirk those difficult choices. We should heed the call to action that the commission has made, so that we continue to deliver high-quality affordable homes for the people of Scotland.
16:32
I, too, welcome this opportunity to discuss the importance of quality, affordable housing and to clarify the intentions behind a private tenancies bill and the consequences that such a bill could have.
I support the principle of providing security for tenants and safeguards for landlords, but I would not endorse some of the intrusive measures that are under consideration. A provision to remove the no-fault ground for repossession would severely deter investment in the private rental market, as it would be too sweeping, as would be any provision for rent control. Furthermore, the quality of housing in the private rented sector could be severely damaged, which plainly would not be in tenants’ interests. That is what we must focus on: the genuine best interests of tenants and the long-term sustainability of the sector.
Does the member accept that the quality of housing can be more substandard in the private sector, albeit not in every case? There needs to be more rather than less intrusive regulation.
Yes, I accept that that is right. There is an argument for that.
We all wish for tenants to receive a fair deal. We should use robust evidence to determine the context and the most effective way to ensure that the market is affordable and fair to all participants. On that note, it is worth bearing in mind that evidence shows that only in two of Scotland’s broad rental market areas did rent increases exceed consumer prices index inflation between September 2010 and September 2014, which in effect means that rents fell in real terms over the period. In three areas, rents fell even in cash terms.
It is important that access to affordable housing is available, but the approach should ensure that the supply of properties matches rental demand. If that is to happen, it is clear that Scotland needs more homes to be built, but that must be done through a clear planning process, which strikes the correct balance between meeting housing needs and respecting local priorities.
All parties want access to quality, affordable housing throughout Scotland. That should be the target, without predetermined intrusions, and I would welcome more clarity from the Scottish Government on its intentions.
Where homes fall short of official quality standards, action should be taken, but it is important that consequences are analysed extensively before any damaging measures are enforced. Therefore, although tenant security is important, it would be wrong and highly counterproductive to remove the no-fault ground for repossession. Not only would that be highly unfair and worryingly dismissive of landlords’ rights, it would damage confidence in the sector and, more important, make landlords increasingly reluctant to let out properties, which is vital. Take the example of a retired couple who depend on income from a property to fund their retirement. They might rent it out in the knowledge that they could sell should they wish to at the end of a contract. Without the no-fault ground, that couple would no longer be in control of their retirement income, which would be extremely unfair. Furthermore, it is likely that many landlords in a similar situation would choose not to rent out their property, which would mean that, with fewer properties available to rent, tenants would be noticeably worse off in their search for a home. A fairer and more workable alternative could be to introduce a more accommodating approach to tenancy agreements that would allow participants to decide for themselves the ideal balance between security and flexibility.
Similarly, any provision to introduce rent controls or caps would be against tenants’ best interests. They may notionally sound like a good deal for tenants, but the reality would be very different, and disastrously so. With rents unable to adjust to market conditions, landlords might choose to divest from the rental sector both in terms of making properties available to rent and in terms of maintaining the quality of those available. It would hardly be in tenants’ interests for fewer properties to be available—and worse-maintained ones at that. Indeed, Shelter’s chief executive has stated:
“although many have called for rent caps as the solution, we have found that this could add fuel to the fire by pushing landlords out of the market and making it even harder for renters to find a home they can afford”.
The fact is that there is more demand for homes than there is supply. The long-term solution must therefore involve increasing the supply of housing. Disincentivising investment by landlords will obviously not help with that. What we need is properly thought-through development of all types of housing. However, that is where the often contentious planning processes are crucial. Refusal of all contentious planning applications is neither a viable nor a realistic option. However, our communities and local representatives are not powerless—or, at least, they should not be. However, as we Conservatives revealed recently, the Scottish Government overrules local authorities more often than not when appeals are taken to ministers. That is not how we should strike the balance between communities’ needs and securing the quality homes that our growing population requires. There is certainly scope to improve the planning process so that developments are more likely to be welcomed by local communities, and I await the proposals arising from the Scottish Government’s review with considerable interest. What is already clear is that development that is driven by central Government appeals is not the answer.
I underline our drive to secure a rental market that is fair, competitive and in all participants’ best interests. It is in that vein that we would strongly oppose any provision within a private tenancies bill that would restrict the ability of landlords to decide for themselves when to rent out their own property and would dangerously distort rent and investment dynamics with rent controls.
The quality of rental homes should be ensured by encouraging rather than discouraging investment, and affordability must be secured by a long-term increase in the housing supply. To achieve that, it is apparent that restrictive measures on landlords should be avoided, and that the planning process must be reformed so that it encourages sustainable development while respecting local needs.
16:38
This has been a wide-ranging debate and it is clear that, across the chamber, we all agree on the importance of housing for Scotland’s people and communities. Good housing has a positive impact on people’s health and wellbeing and on neighbourhoods—Sandra White, Paul Martin and others mentioned how important the neighbourhood is.
Opposition speakers have been careful throughout the debate not to talk about how much their proposals cost and how much should be set aside for housing. However, we cannot discuss housing and house building without talking about finance. We have already said that our commitment of £1.7 billion is providing 30,000 affordable homes in the lifetime of this Parliament. That is despite cuts to our capital budget. We know that our budget will be squeezed further by Westminster, so we have to consider other ways of using the financial transaction money and of attracting finance into house building in Scotland.
However, even with those squeezed budgets, we are building more houses for social rent and affordable housing than any previous Administration. That includes houses built by RSLs. The total social housing built by this Government with squeezed budgets is 19 per cent higher than that built by the previous Administration with rising budgets. We have also increased the number of affordable homes that are being built. We have built 15,327 as opposed to the 9,000 that the previous Administration built.
We have to look at that and at how hard we are working to build more homes, given the constraints on our budget. It is not fair to talk about that without talking about the budget. I would appreciate it much more if the Opposition came to the chamber and said what it thought should be spent on housing and, as John Mason said, where it thought we should take the money from in the Scottish Government budget.
In his speech, Ken Macintosh asked the question that Homes for Scotland has asked about the help-to-buy scheme. Based on the consequentials that were calculated as coming through that scheme, there was an expectation that the figure for housing would be around £600 million, but we appear to have an allocation of £195 million over three years. Where is the rest of that money? Has it been allocated to housing?
The spending review has not yet been completed. We have said that we will allocate £195 million to help people to buy new-build houses in addition to what we are doing on social housing and affordable housing. We have already assisted more than 24,000 people to buy a house. Ken Macintosh said that it is a pipe dream for people, but we are assisting people to buy houses as well as providing houses for social and affordable rent.
Using a number of initiatives, we are making best use of that money. Through a range of innovative financing mechanisms, 3,000 affordable homes have been approved. We have the national housing trust. We are the first, and remain the only, Government in the UK and public sector body in Scotland to use charitable bonds to build affordable and social housing. We have enabled pension funds to invest in affordable housing, and we hope that that can be rolled out across the rest of Scotland.
In the private sector, we have supported Homes for Scotland’s building the rented sector project, which focuses on attracting institutional investment into Scotland’s new-build private rented sector. We continue to do that. I say to Alison McInnes that, in the Aberdeen key worker scheme, we are looking at working with local authorities to provide affordable housing for key workers who rent in pressured areas.
Local authorities determine how many homes they need. We talked about the elderly and accessible housing. We are looking at that with local authorities. We have made it clear that they must consider that when they produce their local housing strategies.
Clare Adamson mentioned the greener homes innovation scheme. Through that, we are also considering how we can provide more homes that are greener and more energy efficient and cost people less in fuel bills, which we are all keen to see.
Every member mentioned the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing. Joint working across all sectors is the template that underpins the approach to improving Scotland’s housing. Groups such as the joint housing delivery and policy group and the homelessness prevention and strategy group clearly illustrate our intent to work together. We very much appreciate the work of our partners in that—local authorities and housing associations. Paul Martin said that we were in some way trying to disassociate from housing associations. We welcome their work. They are a key partner for us and we recognise the work that they do in their local communities. They are community anchor organisations.
I clarify for the record that I did not say that the Government disassociated itself from housing associations; I said that it did not fund them. The challenge is ensuring that they get appropriate funding for the work that they do.
Paul Martin said that we do not fund housing associations, but we do. We work with them closely. We increased the subsidy to housing associations and have still built more RSL houses than the previous Administration did. We are also considering the report from the subsidy group just now. We work very closely with the housing association sector. We recognise the role of housing associations as community anchors and they also receive funding for many of their subsidiaries and projects from the people and communities fund. We very much recognise the wider role that they play.
Will the minister clarify something? She said that the Government has increased the levels of HAG funding for housing associations, but Bob Doris earlier apologised for cutting funding. Who is right?
I do not think that Bob Doris apologised—he certainly did not apologise on behalf of the Government.
With the pressure on the Scottish Government to build houses on very reduced budgets, the subsidy to housing associations was reduced. The associations still built houses with that reduced budget and we appreciate the work that they did on that. However, when the housing associations said that that budget was not going to be sustainable any longer, I set up a subsidy group. We then increased our grant in line with the recommendation from that subsidy group, which includes the housing associations and the community housing associations.
There has been a lot of talk about the private sector and what we are doing in that sector. We continue to take action to reform the private rented sector to ensure that it meets Scotland’s housing needs. We want to ensure that the private rented sector is properly regulated, with the interests of landlords and tenants being fairly balanced, so there is no olive branch—it was our intent to safeguard landlords as well because, as Ken Macintosh, Alison McInnes and others have said, we need the private sector. It is part of our housing system and we need to ensure that we can attract investment into it.
A number of speakers, particularly on the Labour benches, have suggested—or given the impression—that rents in the private rented sector are rocketing. However, there seems to be evidence that, although surveys of advertised rents for property coming to the market may show rents to be rising, in reality the rents that are being paid in the private sector in many areas of Scotland are stable or, in some areas, falling. Does the Government have figures that can inform that debate and, if so, and if the Government has information that we do not have already, can that be made available to us?
If the Government has figures on that issue, the figures will be publicly available. As Alex Johnstone has just said, there are some areas where private sector rents are stable, but we are very aware that there are hot spots where rents are increasing considerably. That is why we looked at rents in the private tenancies bill and why we have put a provision in the bill for capping rents in those areas.
We will shortly be introducing the private tenancies bill to Parliament. The bill will provide security, stability and predictability for tenants while giving landlords, lenders and investors the confidence to continue investing in the sector. I believe that that will achieve what Shelter is calling for in its making renting right campaign.
The new tenancy that we propose represents a significant transformative change and will enable tenants to better assert their rights and help them to feel part of the local community. I am sure that when Malcolm Chisholm sees our proposals, he will be happy with what we are doing, given what he has said.
As I am almost running out of time, I will finish by saying that, last week, I was speaking about the Government’s record on housing at a Chartered Institute of Housing finance conference. Many of the organisations at the conference were worried about the changes that the Conservatives plan for England and their impact on the social rent budgets. There was concern that those changes would have a knock-on effect in Scotland. I was able to assure them that we have absolutely no plans to mirror the UK Government on that. Here in Scotland, we highly value and promote social housing and social landlords in our communities.
It was clear at the conference that the value that we place on social housing is viewed very positively, especially by those outwith Scotland who are having to fight to maintain social housing. When people from outside Scotland wish that their representatives followed our lead, we can take some satisfaction that the measures that we are putting in place are the right ones.
What matters at the end of the day is that people in Scotland have a warm, safe, and affordable place to live that meets their needs. That is the ambition that this Scottish Government has for housing in Scotland.
16:50
I recently discovered statistics that show that the number of vulnerable children in Scotland who are waiting for a home has increased by 400 in the past year, and that the number of children in temporary accommodation now stands at more than 4,500. I reiterate that statistic to do no more than highlight the shocking human cost of Scotland’s current housing crisis.
The point that I want to make is that there is undeniably a crisis, regardless of the SNP’s strenuous efforts this afternoon to deny the fact. When we see hundreds more children having to live in temporary accommodation because of a social housing shortage, the situation can be called nothing but a crisis.
When we debate the housing situation it is fine for us to use statistics, to make our arguments from differing perspectives and to offer various solutions. However, we should at least come together and agree on the fact that Scotland is facing the biggest housing crisis since the second world war.
It was regrettable—although predictable—to hear the minister and back benchers talk about the “council house versus housing association” straw-man argument. There is no place for that argument when we are talking about the number of people who are on housing waiting lists.
To bandy about figures from 1999, when circumstances were different from those in which the current Government finds itself because of financial pressures, does not help to move the debate forward. We must focus on what is required now, and not use statistics as Gil Paterson did. He is entitled to his opinion, but he cannot have his own facts.
Will Michael McMahon take an intervention?
I will make some progress first.
I sincerely thank Shelter Scotland for establishing its Commission on Housing and Wellbeing. We should listen to what the commission has to say about the crisis and commit ourselves to responding positively to the findings of its recently published report. As the commission stated:
“Although many households in Scotland live in satisfactory housing, we quickly came to the conclusion that there is ... a homes crisis.”
Obviously John Mason did not hear that message. He sounded more like Jim Callaghan: “Crisis? What crisis?”
We should look at the statistics that the commission produced: 150,000 people on waiting lists, 940,000 in fuel poverty, 73,000 in overcrowded accommodation, 29,000 homeless people and 40 per cent of social housing falling short of the Scottish housing quality standard. Such statistics demand action, not platitudes or spin.
I accept what Michael McMahon says about historical statistics, but will he recognise that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has highlighted that the Scottish Government spends 85 per cent more per head on social housing than is spent in England, and more than is spent in Wales, where Labour are in power?
Again, I accept the statistic, but comparing apples with oranges hardly makes for a very good argument to bring to the debate about what is happening in Scotland.
The reality is that, more than ever, we need real honesty in discussing the issue. That has been sadly lacking, as has been the case again in this afternoon’s debate. The fact is that the Scottish Government has failed to tackle the slow rates of social and private sector house building, and we must recognise that.
However, in asking the Scottish Government to be honest, I will also be forthright and concede that no Government has ever built the number of homes that have been needed. Labour will now focus on how we can build both affordable homes and more social housing.
Historical trends in new builds showed peaks in the early 1950s and late 1960s, which resulted primarily from programmes of post-war reconstruction and slum clearances of which Labour is immensely proud. However, Labour must recognise that we did not sustain that progress when we had the opportunity to do so.
More recently, although the figure for the year to December 2014 was up by 4 per cent, that helped us to reach a total of only 15,541, which is still 40 per cent below the post-devolution peak that was left by Labour and the Liberals in 2007. That is simply not good enough. We must have answers to the questions that house builders are asking so that we can promote house building to the levels that are required. We have heard some of those answers this afternoon. Sandra White was absolutely right to talk about the difficulty of finding solutions in urban settings, especially city-centre locations, but we should not have a counsel of despair, because there are innovative ways out there that we could use to address the problem. We heard about some from Patricia Ferguson and Paul Martin.
We have to identify how many more homes can be built and explain how that can be funded—the minister was absolutely right to make that point. However, that is where a requirement for even more honesty comes in. The additional money that we require to maximise house building to address the problem that our country faces might increasingly have to come from private finance, for example, via pension funds. As the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing concluded, we will also have to consider tax changes and other measures to improve the supply of land for housing if we are genuinely to tackle the problem. I agree with Homes for Scotland, which has argued that our planning system also needs to be reviewed so that it helps, rather than hinders, house builders.
Michael McMahon talks about money perhaps coming from other sources, but that money would, essentially, still be a loan. Whether it is from a pension fund, a bank or anywhere else, it is, in effect, a loan that needs to be repaid with an interest-rate return. How will that help us to build more houses? We would still need grant, would we not?
Mr Mason has completely missed the point. I am talking about investment by private institutions in house building. That is not a grant to anyone; it is investment by the private sector. That is what we have to talk about—it is the kind of initiative that we have to discuss.
I see that the cabinet secretary wants to come in. He is probably going to talk to us about Falkirk, but that is the type of thing that we need to investigate.
We have been at this for five years with the pension funds. The problem with pension funds is that the rate of return from the current level of rents would not be enough for them to fund the entirety of the houses that are being built by housing associations. That is partly why they are not investing to the level that I agree we should try to attract. In order to do it all through pension funds, we would need to increase rents substantially—to well above their current levels.
The cabinet secretary has missed the point. I did not say that all the funding has to come from pension funds. They are just an example.
The commission also reported:
“a cold home is neither conducive to good health nor a satisfactory learning environment for children nor young people. There is a particular problem of potential hypothermia for older people who are unable—or unwilling—to pay to heat their homes to an adequate level.”
That highlights the need to make improving the energy efficiency of homes a key part of the Scottish Government’s approach to improving wellbeing through housing policy. I totally agree with Clare Adamson on that and I commend the excellent work that is being done by Building Research Establishment Ltd at Ravenscraig.
As the campaign existing homes alliance Scotland has done, I welcome the Scottish Government’s recent commitment to make energy efficiency a national infrastructure priority. The Scottish Labour Party manifesto for the 2015 UK general election had a similar policy, so we are glad that the Scottish Government is following our lead yet again. However, the Scottish Government has not yet set a long-term goal for the national infrastructure project.
The Commission on Housing and Wellbeing recommended:
“Regulations requiring owners to insulate their homes should have a part to play in securing the necessary improvement in insulation standards.”
The existing homes alliance has for some time supported the use of regulation in that regard, and I have to admit that I see a lot of merit in its argument.
However well we construct our homes or improve existing stock, we must first and foremost build the number of homes that are needed. I ask the minister again to explain why the Government has announced only £195 million over three years for the help-to-buy fund when, based on the consequential funding that we expected to receive from the UK Government, the Scottish Government will have received £600 million overall for the fund. Can the minister explain how it intends to use the balance and say whether it is still in the housing budget? Shelter has suggested that £200 million would be required from the Scottish budget to meet its target.
You should draw to a close, please.
Will the Government commit to that type of funding? That is a vital question, and the minister cannot duck it any longer. [Interruption.]
The minister cannot intervene either; I am afraid that you are in your final 20 seconds.
I conclude by returning to the commission. I cannot find a better way of drawing the debate to a close than by endorsing the conclusion of Robert Black and his team on the Commission on Housing and Wellbeing. They state that they have delivered a
“call to action on one of the most serious and challenging issues facing Scotland now and throughout the next decade.”
The commission does not want its report to sit on a shelf. Faced with the current crisis in housing, I assure the Government that we in the Labour party will not allow that to happen.
Previous
Portfolio Question Time