First Minister’s Question Time – in the Scottish Parliament at on 7 November 2024.
To ask the First Minister what plans the Scottish Government has to end the reported increase in families in the central belt living in temporary accommodation, in light of reports of almost 2,000 children in Glasgow living in unsuitable bed-and-breakfast accommodation in 2024 and more than 4,600 households in Edinburgh projected to be living in temporary accommodation by 2040. (S6F-03507)
Additional investment of £42 million in affordable housing this year 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.
First Minister, 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? Some are telling heartbreaking stories about how they are having to boil eggs in toilet water for their dinner.
The finance secretary promised that, if the Government received additional funding, its number 1 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?
Always through the chair, please, Mr Griffin.
Mr Griffin raises a number of very significant and serious issues. I would be the first to accept that the position on homelessness and temporary accommodation is not where I would want it to be at this moment. Mr Griffin and I can probably agree that that is a product of the financial constraints that we have had over the past 14 years from Conservative-led austerity. I welcome, as I did last week, the investment that has been announced by the United Kingdom Government, which will provide us with more scope to address the issues that Mr Griffin puts to me.
My answer to Mr Griffin’s direct question about whether the improvement of the housing situation remains a priority for the Government is yes, it does. I am happy to confirm that. 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.
However, I come back to the point that I made to Mr Sarwar. If that money is to be spent, there will have to be more people voting for the budget than just my colleagues, 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.
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?
My goodness, Conservative members of this Parliament have brass necks. [Interruption.]
Let us hear one another.
For 14 of the past 17 years, this Government has railed against the austerity that was inflicted on us by Meghan Gallacher’s Conservative Government. After all the damage that was done in what we all agree was a disastrous period of austerity, and despite that austerity, this Government has built more affordable housing per head of population than in England or Wales. Despite that Conservative Government austerity, we have invested in housing.
Do we have a housing emergency? Yes, we do. Have we built more houses per head of population than in the rest of the United Kingdom? Yes, we have. Are we glad to see the back of the Conservatives and the impediments that they put in our way? Yes, we are, and we will focus on delivering for the people of Scotland.
As the First Minister is aware, temporary accommodation is a problem not only across the central belt. In South Scotland, 354 households are in temporary accommodation in East Lothian and 50 of those include children. Is temporary accommodation adequate housing in line with article 27 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and our own United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024?
That is a slightly more definitive question than I can answer in the chamber today.
However, I can say to Mr Whitfield that there is good evidence of progress in tackling the temporary accommodation issue through some of the action that has been taken on voids. For example, the City of Edinburgh Council has reduced the overall number of voids in its properties by 500—500—to 970. I pay tribute to the City of Edinburgh Council for what it has done.
The Government wants to work constructively with local authorities to ensure that we make as much progress as we can in the short term on reducing the number of voids. We will be happy to discuss those issues with East Lothian Council, Scottish Borders Council or Dumfries and Galloway Council in Mr Whitfield’s region. If we all use the resources, flexibilities and powers that are available to us, we can make an impact on those issues, as the City of Edinburgh Council has demonstrated, and improve the quality of life for families in our country.
We move to general and constituency questions.