Housing Emergency

Housing or the lack of housing remains a big issue for constituents. My office works with local councillors and the housing services within councils who do a good job but the fact remains there is just not enough houses and the idea that the private market was going to plug the gap has proven to be nothing more than wishful thinking and a failure of successive governments.

Constituents contact me about housing more than any other issue. Whether this is concerning unsuitable housing, homelessness, overcrowding, or poor-quality housing, these messages are heart-breaking and show that people are being failed by a broken housing system.

This is why I was fully supportive of my colleague Mark Griffin MSP’s motion on declaring a housing emergency in Scottish Labour’s debate on 22 November. This was an opportunity for the Scottish Parliament to come together and recognise the dire state of housing in this country and look for ways to fix this. An opportunity to recognise and name the issue, and by doing so, begin dealing with housing the way it has not been dealt with for years – by prioritising this as a crisis for the country.

With this intention, Scottish Labour proposed a simple motion – that the Parliament agrees that Scotland is experiencing a housing emergency.

Unfortunately, rather than taking this opportunity to reach a consensus and recognise this clear and obvious problem, the Scottish Government instead opted to amend the entire motion, watering down the call for a housing emergency to a recognition “that Scotland is facing significant pressures with homelessness and temporary accommodation” and a call to build on its own track record in building houses. The issue I have with this is that it is this track record that has led us to the situation we are in now, so I struggle to understand why doing more of the same will suddenly resolve this issue.

With 15,000 Scots now homeless or in temporary accommodation, and the latest reports showing that 244 people in Scotland died last year while living on the streets, it is essential that the Scottish Government get a hold on this situation and do more to end the housing issues that are clear to us all. In my opinion, this begins by acknowledging the scale of the problem and admitting that Scotland is facing a housing emergency.

Below you can find briefings from Shelter and Crisis on the subject: