By Bill Heaney
Sofa surfers, street sleepers and families without a house of their own have been targeted to benefit from a £42 million investment in housing by the SNP government, First Minister John Swinney told the Holyrood Parliament this week.
Answering questions from MSPs, he said: “This has been targeted at the local authorities in the central belt with sustained temporary accommodation pressures.
“That funding is to increase the supply of social and affordable homes, including properties that are suitable for larger families, through acquisitions and, where appropriate, to bring long-term-empty social homes back into use.
“We are providing record funding of more than £14 billion to local authorities in this financial year to deliver a range of services, including homelessness services, and we are introducing new homelessness prevention duties.
“We are investing more than £90 million in discretionary housing payments to help families to meet their housing costs and to sustain tenancies, and we recently announced measures on rent controls to help to protect tenants and keep people in their homes.”
Scottish Labour Housing spokesman Mark Griffin replied: “A key pillar of your agenda is—rightly—to focus on eradicating child poverty, but how can we do that when 10,000 children are in temporary accommodation and there is a tenfold increase in kids living in bed and breakfasts?
Labour’s Mark Griffin, First Minister John Swinney and Tory MSP Meghan Gallacher.
“The finance secretary [Shona Robison] promised that, if the Government received additional funding, its number one priority would be to reverse the cuts to the affordable housing supply programme.
“Now that the incoming Labour Government has delivered that additional funding—£1.5 billion this year and £3.4 billion next year—is that still your Government’s top priority, given that the best way of getting those 10,000 children out of poverty is to give them the homes that they desperately need?”
“I am happy to confirm housing remains a priority for the Government I will be working with the finance secretary during the budget preparation to address that very issue. It was a matter of great regret to the Government that we had to reduce funding for housing because of a very abrupt reduction in spending on financial transactions by the previous Conservative Government.
“We now have more options available and I give Mr Griffin the assurance that that will be uppermost in our thinking.”
He added however that if that money is to be spent, there will have to be more people voting for the [Scottish] budget than just the SNP.
“So I invite Mr Griffin to encourage some constructive discussion in the Labour Party about how we might make progress on the budget so that we can address the legitimate points that he puts to me.”
Tory MSP Meghan Gallacher chimed in: “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?”