Chamber and committees

The Housing (Scotland) Bill was a golden opportunity to address Scotland’s housing emergency, yet the bill that the Government introduced does not even mention the building of homes. There is a severe lack of spades in the ground at a time when communities right across the country are in desperate need of new housing developments.

The Scottish National Party promised that it would deliver 110,000 affordable homes by 2032, but it is miles off meeting its target. Its anti-house-building agenda has undoubtedly caused the market to stagnate. The SNP has exacerbated the problem through rent controls and by cutting £200 million from the housing budget. It is no wonder that half of Scotland’s population now lives in a local authority area that has declared a housing emergency, including the Minister for Housing’s backyard.

We are in the midst of a deepening housing crisis. More than 15,000 children are homeless; the number of applications from households that are assessed as homeless is at its highest level since 2012; hundreds of thousands of people are stranded on local authority waiting lists; and more than 10,000 children are in temporary accommodation.

The solution to the housing emergency is to build more mixed-tenure homes, but we have a bill that is fundamentally flawed. Parliament is due to debate the bill at stage 1 by the end of November, but given the serious concerns that stakeholders and developers have raised, we are calling for the bill to be rewritten. We do not take that decision lightly, as there are sections of the bill that we support in principle—those around homelessness prevention and the duty to act. However, given the issues that I have just outlined and the number of people, especially children, who are without a safe and secure home, why did the SNP not introduce a stand-alone bill on homelessness? That would have shown that the SNP is serious about ending homelessness for good, instead of attaching the issue to other housing-related matters.

The main reason for my party’s opposition to the bill relates to rent controls. Studies going back decades, from those on New York in the 1980s to more recent ones on Berlin, show that rent controls have serious unintended consequences with reduced supply and increased costs. Rent controls in Scotland have been described as “ruinous” and likely to damage a part of our economy that has suffered at the hands of the Government’s meddling in recent years. They will do much more harm than good.

Recent figures show that around 70 private housing providers are leaving the property market every single month, according to data from the Scottish Landlord Register. That is no coincidence—it is a direct consequence of the SNP’s policy on rent controls.

Does the cabinet secretary understand that the policies that her Government is trying to push through the Parliament have stalled roughly £3.2 billion-worth of housing developments in Scotland? How does she reconcile that with the housing emergency that we are trying to tackle?

What we need is mixed-tenure housing to fix the housing emergency that we are currently in, and rent controls will not fix the situation.

Rent controls will result in a shrinkage of available property and a lack of coherence between the supply of and the demand for rental properties. Homes for Scotland has warned that the SNP’s proposed changes to housing legislation will increase the cost of a new home by £30,000 through changes to rent controls. That is an eye-watering amount that will only make it harder for first-time buyers to get on the housing ladder. It makes no sense whatsoever to prevent people—especially young people—from becoming proud home owners.

Regretfully, that will not be the only problem, should the bill continue through stage 1. We have already seen the loss of potential investment in the build-to-rent sector. Hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of potential development has not proceeded due to uncertainty around the Scottish Government’s lack of strategy. The result is that investors will take their money elsewhere, which means less growth in our economy. With the lack of council housing, there is a dependence on the private sector to provide more homes and affordable housing. We simply cannot afford for more private housing providers to leave the market.

I will be fair to the minister. He inherited this disastrous bill and the ideas behind it from a former Green minister. However, he must have known that whatever he would inherit would be economically incoherent.

Despite a year of consultations and significant engagement with the housing industry—particularly the much-referenced housing investment task force—the Government has continued to ignore practical suggestions such as the creation of a balanced framework to protect tenants while offering greater predictability for investors. When we combine that with a lack of common sense and the Government’s obsession with ideologically driven policies, we can see that the bill was always a recipe for disaster.

We have heard a lot of outrage directed at the bill recently from the Greens, no less, who have a question to the First Minister tomorrow on the topic. That is why I cannot understand why they will not support our motion at decision time. Both we and they disagree with the Scottish Government’s approach and how it has taken forward its policy on rent controls, albeit for different reasons. Surely there is common ground to send the Government back to the drawing board to listen to the housing sector and stakeholders and bring back a bill that will not harm the housing sector but will tackle the housing emergency.

The SNP may wish to swing a wrecking ball at the private sector, but in doing so, it is harming our economy and preventing young people from climbing the housing ladder. That is why the bill should be demolished, with rent controls reduced to the pile of rubble that they deserve to be.

I move,

That the Parliament believes that the Scottish Government should redraft the Housing (Scotland) Bill, as it fails to address the key factors that created the housing emergency.

I thank the minister for advance sight of his statement; however, it was an admission of defeat. I was hoping for some ground-breaking planning legislation to build more homes, and a plan to fix the challenges that we face right across our housing sector, yet we have been left with another hub and an increase in planning application costs that will deter future housing developments.

The minister has the brass neck to turn up today to say that he needs to be crystal clear about the issues that are stalling development. It is his Government that is standing in the way of building more homes. How does the Government reconcile the aim of delivering more quality homes with the decision to propose rent controls both during and between tenancies, when the minister perfectly understands that that will restrict rental income flexibility and deter vital investment?

The burning question is, if the hub is designed to be the saviour of our planning system, why was it not included in the initial drafting of the Housing (Scotland) Bill? Is it the Government’s last-ditch attempt to save that failing housing legislation?

This Government has had 17 years to fix the problem, but it has failed. A quarter of all households with children have spent a year or more in temporary accommodation and almost 8,000 households in need were not offered temporary accommodation. It is time for action, not words.

The Scottish National Party has failed to turbo boost housebuilding and families are now stuck on accommodation waiting lists. Will the SNP finally tackle the housing emergency, or will that continue to be another ball dropped by the SNP Government?

I thank the minister for giving way, and I promise that I will not take too long.

These are just words. It would be helpful if, today, the Government were to agree to a review or to consider a review. That would benefit not only parents, but children and their safety, which is what we are talking about today.

Will the member take an intervention?

Will the minister give way?

I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate, albeit that MSPs have no jurisdiction to reverse the decision to cut school buses in North Lanarkshire. It is an important debate all the same.

In the interests of being open and transparent, I say that I was a councillor between 2017 and 2021, and I also led the Conservative group on North Lanarkshire Council.

Regrettably, it comes as no surprise to me that North Lanarkshire Council eventually took the difficult decision to reduce bus services to the levels required by statutory guidance. That guidance, as was rightly pointed out by Gillian Mackay, was created in Parliament. This particular cut was on the table when I, as a councillor, was leading my group through budget processes, and it has been on the table year on year. That does not make the decision right, but I am hoping to use my time today to present a timeline of events that puts the decision into context.

We can all agree that cuts have consequences and that budget-setting processes in councils are becoming near impossible. If we look at council budgets in the round, we see that council tax payments from taxpayers make up roughly 14 per cent of the full core budget. The rest of the budget relies on funding from the Scottish Government, and that comes at a heavy cost. Ring fencing is restricting choice for councillors, who face impossible decisions while searching through a menu of cuts that are outlined by council officers in order to pass a balanced and legal budget. When education takes up roughly 50 per cent of the budget in North Lanarkshire, there is little to no wiggle room to fund any service that is non-statutory.

That is why North Lanarkshire has lost services such as club 365 and the Kilbowie outdoor centre. It will now charge for brown bins, it has removed librarians and it will reduce the number of classroom assistants. We are considering closing swimming pools and community centres. I do not think that any politician in their right mind would reduce or close services unless they absolutely had to in order to get a balanced budget.

The forecast of cuts over the next three years for North Lanarkshire Council—this is a really important point, and it is why I asked the question of Gillian Mackay earlier—is about £60 million, and that will come on top of the £0.25 billion that has already been cut since 2013. The communities that Gillian Mackay, Fulton MacGregor, Mark Griffin and I represent will need to brace themselves for more pain and suffering this year. That could have been reflected in the motion. Like many of us, I am completely fed up with the state of local government, and I am completely scunnered that communities bear the brunt of poor political choices.

I move on to the buses. When I was a councillor, I fought hard not to cut school buses at a time when the council was skint. Councils are not skint now—they are at the brink of bankruptcy. We have completely surpassed the point of councils being skint. I do not think that I would want to be an elected member of a local council now, having to face communities knowing that any decision that the council takes will impact the poorest, the disabled, the elderly and our children.

North Lanarkshire Council has agreed to review walking routes to schools that are deemed as not safe by a member-officer working group. Given that they were not safe when the matter was reviewed back in 2019, I do not know why the situation would have changed and why we are now having a repeat of the discussions that took place back then.

When we look at this issue in the round, we see that it all comes down to children and their safety. I am disappointed that parents’ groups have been excluded from the decision-making process; after all, it is their children who will be directly impacted. Therefore, I ask the council in my contribution to apply some common sense and ensure that the UNCRC is adhered to and that parents can be actively involved. They do not want to cause trouble; they just want to make sure that their children are safe getting to school and getting back home. As a parent, I understand the fear of having children walk dangerous routes, because the council has supplied no buses to get them to school. I would not tolerate my daughter being placed in such a dangerous situation, and the same goes for any child in North Lanarkshire.

The decision to reverse the cuts to school buses is ultimately one for councillors, because this Government will not step in. I applaud the parents who are taking a stand today and who are with us in the public gallery, but I am fearful that this is only the beginning of many unpalatable and difficult decisions that will need to be taken over the next three years. It is incumbent on us, as MSPs, to continue to fight for local government so that we do not have to debate more motions in this place on cuts to local government funding.

I do not disagree with anything that Gillian Mackay is saying, but does she know how much the council is forecast to cut over the next three years? Does she agree that we will be discussing a lot of those sorts of issues in relation to what services will need to be cut because of the budget settlements that will be delivered to local government?