The budget for the Scottish Office which was announced last week included a 25% cut in thehousing budget. The Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth also announced that £15 million wouldbe available for a 'rough sleeping initiative' over the next three years but it won't startuntil April when our cold winter may have already claimed a few lives.

This blatant hypocrisy is unbelievable. Forsyth announces that money is to be spent ontackling homelessness when it is the anti-Scottish Tories ruthless policies that are at theroot of Scotland's housing and homelessness crisis. It is the seventeen years of changes andcuts that the Tories have continually made to Scotland's housing and social welfare systemthat have forced so many people on to the streets in the first place. The fact that thismoney is so badly needed, is a deathbed confession of past failures from a government onit's last legs.

But it will take more than a public relations sticking plaster from Forsyth to mend thenational scandal which is Scotland's housing situation. The statistics are a damningindictment on the anti-Scottish Tory government: 88,000 Scottish homes are below tolerablestandard; 150,000 Scottish children live in damp housing and 21,000 have been homeless inScotland each year since 1990; between 1985 and 1994, there was a 75% increase in the numberof homeless applications; and Shelter estimates that between 500 and 1,000 people sleeprough every night in Scotland.

Trends indicate that the housing crisis is deepening. Scotland lacks good-quality,affordable rented accommodation yet we are not a poor nation and we do not lack materials orlabour. But successive Tory governments have forced Scotland to endure policies whichprevent much-needed investment in housing.

New local authority legislation will reduce investment by a further 36% and the housingbudget has been slashed by 39% in real terms since 1990. By 1998, public sector investmentin housing will be less than half of what it was nine years ago and Right to Buy legislationhas reduced public sector stock by over 300,000. Tory policy means that over half of localauthority rental income is tied up servicing housing debt.

The Unionist parties have made it clear that housing problems are not even on the agenda farless suggested proposals to improve the situation. Labour's housing policy has been underreview for four years - proving that the homeless and those in bad housing cannot trustLabour.

The SNP's proposals for tackling our housing crisis is to transfer three-quarters ofcouncils' housing capital debt to central government over four years, which would free-up£945 million of new resources which would otherwise be spent servicing that debt. Thistransferral process is not new - the government dealt with the debt overhang in watercompanies in exactly the same way. This fully-costed policy would free up revenues whichcould be used to provide an additional 20,000 low-cost rented homes through a variety ofroutes.

Our housing policy recognises that a home is not a luxury, but a basic human right. Toneglect this right now is to incur the penalty of grave social problems for the nextgeneration.

Andrew Welsh MP


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Andrew Welsh is the Member of Parliament for Angus East and Vice-President of the Scottish National Party.

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If you would like to know more about the SNP and HELP SCOTLAND contact snp.hq@snp.org.uk or visit the official the Scottish National Party web site.

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