Chamber and committees

We have brought forward proposals that, amazingly, the Government has adopted as its own a month or two later. After two months of attacking my colleague Mercedes Villalba for her detailed proposals to protect tenants during the cost of living crisis, all of a sudden, those proposals are great and the Government has adopted them as its own.

The Government has continued with its grievances over powers and its spin. It rolled out all the excuses under the sun. At a COVID-19 Recovery Committee meeting, I heard that the proposal to implement a rent freeze was not competent, that it would be subject to legal and human rights challenges and that the Government had not consulted on it. Those were all excuses that members of the Green Party advanced but now seem to accept were nonsense.

Why did the Government not use the month of June to work with Mercedes Villalba? Instead, it scaremongered, saying that the plan would increase rents. It did not say that it would work on any of the European convention on human rights claims over the summer; it just said that the plans would force evictions. It just said no.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I apologise to you and to those in the chamber for not declaring at the start of my speech in the previous debate that I am the owner of rented property in the North Lanarkshire Council area.

The UK Government is consulting on a rent cap in the social rented sector. Does Miles Briggs support the UK Government’s intervention in that market?

I hope that, in her closing speech, the cabinet secretary will say when the rent freeze legislation will be published and outline the legislative timeline. As of this morning, it had not been published and it does not feature in the proposed business for next week that we will vote on. However, we know that the matter is urgent. The minister set out in his opening speech that it is not beyond anyone’s imagination that, regardless of the First Minister making a commitment yesterday to freeze rents, some landlords will go out and hike rents as we speak. Tenants who do not know their rights might well accept that hike without challenge or awareness of the looming freeze. It is important that the proposed legislation be published and that it increases people’s awareness of their rights as of yesterday.

That freeze was the centrepiece of yesterday’s announcement, along with the introduction of a winter evictions ban and the expansion of the eligibility for the tenant grant fund. We welcome the Government’s support for our proposals, but why wait? Why the delay? Why did it take the summer for the Government to realise that keeping our homes running, warm and safe was at the heart of the cost of living crisis?

The growing pressure over the summer has put people at breaking point. Energy, housing and food bills just keep going up. Research by YouGov for the Trussell Trust found that more than 2 million people who receive universal credit have skipped a meal since the spring. Citizens Advice Scotland reports soaring numbers of online inquiries for advice. Views on its website for “grants and benefits to help pay energy bills” and “struggling to pay energy bills” are up more than 120 per cent. By March, the number of children in temporary accommodation climbed by 1,000 to 8,835. That came before the Bank of England increased interest rates to 1.75 per cent.

The cost of living crisis is clearly a national emergency, but the Government has found no urgency. It spent the summer grandstanding, jetsetting and showboating when, instead, it could have come back to the Parliament and shown the people of Scotland that it was ready to go and ready to act. The Government has had the whole summer, yet it has said nothing. The summer culminated in the national bin strikes—strikes and an industrial dispute that the SNP banked on wriggling out of. It took the city that we are in smelling like a landfill site during the Edinburgh festival for the Government to finally accept its role in making sure that vital workers are paid a fair wage.

Yesterday, the First Minister said:

“We will put as much money as possible into people’s pockets through decent pay rises”.—[Official Report, 6 September 2022; c 13.]

However, for years, council workers have campaigned and rallied outside the Parliament, protesting that the Government and successive finance secretaries have washed their hands of any role in local government pay. Paying waste collectors, school cleansing and catering staff and other low-paid local government staff has always been in the gift of the Scottish Government; it has just chosen to ignore that.

However, there is a pattern of behaviour through the Government’s actions. When Opposition parties bring forward policy suggestions and proposals, the Government just attacks.

Mr Harvie is a seasoned parliamentarian. He knows the parliamentary process and he knows full well that, if the Government had said in June that it accepted the principle of a rent freeze that my colleague Mercedes Villalba was proposing, it could have worked on the detail as the bill made its way through the Parliament. It is not good enough to say at the very end of stage 3 proceedings that the proposal was not competent. There was no effort made to work with my colleague to make sure that there were workable proposals to protect tenants. We could have had those in place months ago, which would have protected tenants for far longer than by only implementing the proposals now.

Many thousands of people will struggle to heat their homes this winter or keep a roof over their head. The issue is urgent and it should have been dealt with in June. However we expect to see the emergency legislation being lodged in the Parliament this week.

Will the member give way?

I will not do so at the moment because I still have a lot of progress to make. I apologise to Mr Balfour.

I hope that, when the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth stands up, we can get a cast-iron assurance that the Government will not hang about on the matter. The powers are already in play. Councils already remove discounts on second homes and charge a 100 per cent surcharge on homes that are left empty, raising £45 million a year for local house building.

The work has to be done, with money being with councils by the autumn. We cannot accept the matter being kicked into the long grass, which is what the Government has done with issues such as the transient visitor levy. We also cannot accept quibbling over issues such as patchy collection of council tax on empty homes. We cannot play politics on the matter. We need to recover funds and get them to those who need them most.

There is a wider moral argument for taxing second homes more. Until today, Scotland was the outlier across Great Britain in that it lacked plans for a surcharge on second homes. Even Michael Gove is introducing a surcharge on second homes, which seems to have passed by the Conservative amendment.

Even before the pandemic, tens of thousands of Scots were unable to find a place that they could afford to call home. They have been stuck on waiting lists, unable to get their foot on the property ladder, and have been struggling to make ends meet to pay private rents. They do not have a warm, affordable and safe home.

Broadly, second homes are left empty for much of the year—they are furnished holiday homes or, for some, crash pads. They are a luxury that communities that are crying out for family homes cannot afford. With inflation set to reach double figures by the end of the year, and with 100 days until the cap is increased, the Government must use the summer to prove its willingness to act.

I move,

That the Parliament notes that, under the UK Government’s Energy Bills Support Scheme, second home owners across Scotland will receive a double payment of the £400 credit for their energy bills; considers that this funding would be better used to support low-income households struggling with the cost of living crisis, and calls on the Scottish Government to allow local authorities to recover this money through a one-off increase to the council tax levied on second homes in order to support local cost of living responses.

On the day on which inflation has broken a 40-year record, Labour members are using our debating time to call on the Scottish Government to unlock a further £10 million for local cost of living support for families on low incomes. Clawing back additional payments of the £400 October energy bill discount from people with second homes, which the Scottish Government amendment appears to accept the principle of, would close a loophole that allows those who are best off to get a double or, potentially, treble payment from the cost of living measures that the United Kingdom Government announced.

The cost of keeping our homes running, safe and warm is at the heart of the crisis. It is summer, but there are already hundreds of thousands of families that dread winter and desperately wonder how they will survive. Mortgages are up £90 a month. Rent increases now surpass those in England and Wales, as the Office for National Statistics confirmed this morning. Water bills are up 4.2 per cent and, as of Monday, the energy cap is estimated to go up by £1,000 in only 100 days.

We often talk about people having to choose between heating and eating, but that is a polite way of putting it. The reality is that thousands will choose between starving or freezing. People will die this winter. The crisis will only get worse, so the Government must respond with action.

The people who are best off—those who are able to afford to run not one but two homes—are set to pocket a windfall of almost £10 million between them simply because they have another home that is not their main residence. The irony of that will be lost on no one.

Homes are for living in. A cost of living support package should benefit the people who need help most. That is what we have demanded agreement on and I believe that we have secured it. Allowing a select few to pocket a £400 bung because collectively they own or rent 24,000 second homes, which is 1 per cent of all stock in Scotland, will not deliver the fairness that we expect.

We welcome the fact that Rishi Sunak and the Scottish National Party finally listened to Labour’s calls for a windfall tax on oil and gas companies that were making bumper profits.

No, we will not support the Conservative amendment because it deletes large swathes of what we are trying to do. We are trying to focus acutely on the £10 million that is going to second home owners, who should not receive it.

We welcome the fact that the chancellor has introduced the payment but he took too long to accept that it was necessary and his support package rewards people with second homes with their own windfall, thereby wasting £10 million of taxpayers’ cash. That was Rishi Sunak’s error but, following pressure from Labour, the Scottish Government appears to be willing to act.

Local authorities, which are required to be consulted under the amended Local Government in Scotland Act 2003, will be desperate for the powers to unlock a further £10 million to help the most vulnerable in their communities. I am delighted that the Government has chosen to change course on that because, only two weeks ago, the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Islands told me that we would have to wait for the remote, rural and islands housing action plan and, as the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government had previously done, indicated that the additional dwelling supplement was enough to tackle second homes.

The Accounts Commission and, to be fair, other organisations have highlighted issues relating to the lack of multiyear financial settlements, including issues that that has caused for long-term planning and financial management. Putting aside the impact of some of the drastic cuts in the resource spending review, does the five-year plan give local authorities the certainty that they need to plan services over the next five years? I will go to Bill Moyes first on that.