As summer holidays draw to a close, Scottish politicians’ attentions are turning towards next year’s Holyrood elections and the process of drafting party manifestos.
Housing is one battleground where we’ve already seen early skirmishes between the parties as they seek to outbid one another on the boldness of their ambitions for Scotland’s housing future.
Scottish housing undoubtedly faces a combination of critical challenges. An ageing population. An increase in single person households. Continuing budget constraints. House prices persistently rising, a shortage of housing supply and the housing ladder beyond reach for many young people. All these issues are bound to concentrate political minds as they ponder next year’s Scottish election campaign.
The scale of Scotland’s housing challenge is illustrated by the number of people on housing waiting lists. Despite all efforts to increase housing supply, this has remained stubbornly north of 150,000 since the last Scottish elections.
Traditionally, we’ve seen a bidding war between the two main Scottish parties on the number of new affordable homes they aspire to build.
In 2011, the SNP pledged to deliver 30,000 affordable homes in the lifetime of this Parliament, a target they now expect to surpass with 26,972 affordable homes delivered in the first four years.
During the 2015 General Election campaign, Scottish Labour pledged to deliver 20,000 new homes per year by 2020. During his recent unsuccessful bid to become Scottish Labour leader, Ken Macintosh (now appointed the party’s housing spokesman at Holyrood) raised the stakes with a commitment to build up to 30,000 new homes per year, including up to 15,000 units of social sector housing. This would certainly be a major step change in Scottish housing, representing a doubling of current output – and substantially more than treble current social sector output. Where the funds would be found to deliver it remains less clear.
With the transfer of significant new welfare powers to Holyrood, the introduction of new top-up benefits in Scotland to offset cuts and restrictions to housing and other benefits at Westminster is more than likely to feature in next year’s campaign. Scottish Labour and the Scottish Greens have also floated the idea of introducing an entirely new system of housing benefit in Scotland.
A large scale retrofit programme to improve energy efficiency in Scotland’s housing stock has been a major plank of Scottish Green Party policy in past elections and is likely to feature again in 2016.
Elsewhere, the ideological battle over Right to Buy continues to rage with the SNP-led Scottish Government having legislated to abolish it in Scotland from August 2016, a move challenged by the Scottish Conservatives. The two parties also came to blows over the newly devolved replacement for Stamp Duty in Scotland with the Conservatives characterising the Scottish Government’s initial proposals as a “tax on aspiration”. Depending on how its introduction affects tax revenues and house sales, proposals to review and revise the tax could also feature in the 2016 campaign.
Meanwhile, concerted industry pressure to prolong Scotland’s hugely successful Help to Buy shared equity scheme beyond its initial March 2016 expiry has prompted the Scottish Government to commit £195 million to prolong the scheme for a further three years. With the UK Chancellor having already committed to extend the equivalent scheme in England until 2020, Help to Buy could be another political pressure point in Scotland’s future housing debate.
Few would dispute the significant and growing challenges Scotland faces in meeting its housing needs. But as in many areas of policy, the political impetus to do more will have to be reconciled with shrinking budgets and still modest economic growth. Nonetheless, expect housing to be a key policy battleground in the lead-up to Holyrood 2016.
This article first featured in the Autumn Edition of Scottish Housing Matters 2015.