ON May 15, the Scottish Parliament, and the Scottish Government, declared a housing emergency. Unfortunately, neither indicated what actions equal to that description of the crisis facing many thousands of Scottish families were now to be undertaken.
A declaration of emergency with no emergency response, so homeless families might ask why did they bother? I will outline here what needs to be done to tackle Scotland’s national housing emergency.
The existing Scottish Government target for new housebuilding in Scotland, set in 2021, is to build a total of 110,000 new houses for rent over a 10-year period, ie, an average of just 11,000 new houses per year.
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This target comes nowhere near meeting Scotland’s housing needs. We need to build at least 200,000 new houses over the next five years to break the back of Scotland’s housing crisis. The proposals below show how we can do that.
The Scottish Government should immediately reverse its recent £275 million cuts to the housing budget by re-allocating resources from lower priority budgets and restore its annual housing budget back to £800m a year.
This level of government funding is essential to build a minimum of 5000-6000 new social houses per year. If another 15,000 or so houses are built by the private sector for sale or rent, that would bring the annual total of new houses being built to 20,000 – still well short of the numbers needed.
We can only solve the mismatch between the supply of and demand for rented housing in Scotland by accessing the billions of pounds needed from institutional funders such as pension funds. There is no shortage of such funds, which are already being used in other parts of the UK to provide much-needed housing for rent.
It’s time for Scotland to follow suit. Our aim should be to deliver an additional 100,000 new houses for rent to be funded by the pension funds over the next five years.
On May 17, the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) in Scotland published a report highlighting the “persistent gap between what Scotland needs to keep up with demand and the workforce available to meet the challenge”.
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A commitment to build an additional 100,000 new houses in Scotland over the next five years would drastically increase the skills shortage identified by the CITB.
It therefore must become a top priority of the Scottish Government to take the urgent measures needed to deal with the staffing crisis in Scotland’s construction industry.
Failure to do so would destroy any chance of reaching the existing targets for new housebuilding, let alone a new target of 200,000 houses over the next five years. At present the Housing Minister is not a member of the Scottish Cabinet. His boss is the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, who has a wide range of portfolio responsibilities including social security.
Given that both the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament have declared a national housing emergency in Scotland, it is essential that a dedicated Cabinet Secretary for Housing be appointed to turbo charge the action needed to solve this crisis at the highest level of government.
Tackling the housing emergency is a full-time task. We need a full-time Housing Secretary to make sure the job is done and done well.
Other measures the Scottish Government needs to take include rewriting its proposed new Housing Bill so that it incentivises, not penalises, investment in new housebuilding while protecting tenants from unwarranted increases in rents; speeding up and simplifying the compulsory purchase system for acquiring land needed for new housing developments; speeding up and simplifying the planning system to facilitate new housebuilding projects; and taking urgent steps to stop landowners charging grossly over-inflated prices for land needed for new housing developments.
Implementing a massively expanded housebuilding programme is the most effective policy lever the devolved government has available to increase the rate of economic growth in Scotland.
According to research conducted by Centre for Economics and Business Research for Shelter and the National Housing Federation for England published in March, entitled The Economic Impact of Building Social Housing, £51.2 billion could be added to the UK economy by building 90,000 social homes a year.
From these figures, it is reasonable to assume that if Scotland builds an extra 20,000 new homes for rent every year that will add more than £11bn to the Scottish economy and create more than 30,000 new jobs.
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