Members, that concludes portfolio questions. The next item of business is a debate on housing, on motion 7.613 in the name of Adam Tomkins, and I would invite all members who wish to speak in this debate to press their request to speak buttons now. I call on Adam Tomkins to speak to and move the motion. Thank you. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Scotland faces a housing crisis on a scale that is not seen since the second world war. We urgently mae gweithio'r diwethaf i hynny i ddim Scorpio a'r trafodaeth, a gweithio'r ysgrifendig iawn iawn. Fwy hwnnw i ddim am y gweithio'r gwaith oedd eggplantau gwirioneddau. Fy gen i'n iawn i'r hefyd, mae ein bod i'n gweithio'r diwethaf i gweithio oherwydd chi'n gweithio education i hefyd i ddim yn ôl o'r pwylu! Rwyf Davidson wedi cyflogion yn gwneud cyfrifiad y Piau 750 ar ysa month ac rwyf wedi Da not to seik, to give the Government a bloody nose. To inflict upon it another parliamentary defeat, which it can then proceed to ignore. To start a national debate, which I hope politicians in all parties will want to engage in. We have got to act to solve Scotland's housing crisis, and if the Government won't use its time to lead debate on how we do this, Presiding Officer, we will. Y digwydd gyda'r gwerthach o gwaith rwyf ar supportu honi, ymhwy, rwyf i ddweud wych ond ychwanegwys ar ddweud ar hyn o'r cyfnod y D ollaus. them o'r cyfnod ddweud wych o'r cyfnod ar y ddweud wych ar cyfnod ar y ddweud sy'n gwaith y ddweud yn ei ddweud i ddweud sy'n gyffredinol llefynnol arllig fel cerdd iawn. Rwyf i ddweud y rhaid o'r 5-year y parodyd wedi gael 2007 ac 2012, of new homes built by the private sector dropped by a staggering 54%. We know that there are up to 150,000 families in Scotland on local authority waiting lists, and we know, based on an analysis by Audit Scotland, that it could be more than 20 years before there are enough new homes to meet the projected increase in households in Scotland—20 years, Presiding Officer. Those statistics paint a stark picture of the crisis before us and the immense challenges that lie ahead. It's little wonder that the Governor of the Bank of England has emphasised that problems with housing are the biggest risk to the UK economy or that the CBI has warned of a perfect storm brewing in the housing market. But what often gets overlooked is the human cost of this crisis. A house, after all, isn't just four walls and a roof. It's where memories are made and where families are formed. It's part of a wider community. For many, it's the very essence of aspiration. Our belief on those benches is as fervent as it ever has been, that everyone should have the chance to own their own home. In her recent report—let me make a little progress, and I'll take it away—on the life chances of young people in Scotland, Naomi Eisenstadt observed that setting up home is one of the major challenges of successful young adulthood. For nearly all of us, she said, a sense of home of community and of a network of family, friends and colleagues all helped to find our lives, she wrote. This, Presiding Officer, is what good housing policy is really all about. Young people, however, are having to defer their futures because they can't afford to get on the housing ladder. The charity Shelter has said that almost a quarter of 18 to 40-year-olds across the UK are delaying starting a family because of a lack of affordable housing, some by up to six years. Relationship choices are also being constrained and ties to communities are being severed. I'll give way to Elaine Smith. Elaine Smith, I thank the member for giving way. I do hope that the member isn't implying that the only house worth having is a bought house and that actually there is a very good place for public rented housing in our housing debate. Of course, which is why we think that half of the houses that should be built in Scotland are affordable housing. I'm not going to make any apology for a policy that enabled half a million Scots to own their own home. Relationship choices, Presiding Officer, are also being constrained and ties to communities are being severed, with half of renters believing that they will not be able to afford a home in their local area in their lifetime. That's not to mention the difficulties of saving enough for a decent deposit. Those are the issues that we face, Presiding Officer. There is no mystery as to what is driving them. The same issues come up in any review or evidence session, the availability of land at reasonable prices, the lack of infrastructure or delays in delivering it, planning system delays and conditions disconnect between agencies, nimbyism and housing not being seen as a priority by government. That is the background against which we should view the housing shortage, but the Scottish National Party's response to this crisis has been poor. In 2007, a full decade ago, Nicola Sturgeon conceded that far too many people in Scotland were unable to satisfy what she called the basic aspiration of home ownership. In the intervening years, the SNP's commitment to building 35,000 new homes a year has dwindled to less than half of that. Homes for Scotland have argued that the single most effective way to address concerns about housing need and affordability is to increase the supply of new homes. Indeed, in order to make our country a better place in which to live, work and invest, it is essential that Scotland has enough homes of the right types in the right locations to meet the diverse housing needs and aspirations of its growing population. The SNP's manifesto pledged to build at least 50,000 new affordable homes over the course of this Parliament, but the latest statistics show that last year only 7,300 such homes were built and at this rate only 36,000—not 50,000—homes will be completed by the end of this Parliament and the SNP's target will not be achieved until well into 2023. Now, the Scottish Government cannot shoulder the blame entirely for this crisis. The economic downturn had its part to play, but it is the Scottish Government's responsibility to create the right conditions for improving housing outcomes. We have not seen anything like the leadership on the issue that we need. Perhaps it is unsurprising that RICS, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveys, has questioned the adequacy of the policy systems in place to address the housing crisis in Scotland. As it pointed out in 2014, patterns of housing needs and demands are changing, but policy responses are failing to adapt at the necessary pace. Here is what we would do to change that. Presently, housing sits alongside local government as a ministerial portfolio under the cabinet secretary for communities, social security and equalities. However, if we really want housing to be recognised as one of the key priorities of government, we believe that it should be elevated to a cabinet secretary position, thereby increasing levels of co-ordination and accountability. Apart from the availability of land, the lack of appropriate infrastructure is the biggest barrier for house builders and one of the primary concerns for existing residents, both in terms of road capacity and public services. Key development decisions are increasingly caught in the congestion of a labyrinthine planning system. Government statistics suggest that it takes 64 weeks for a major development to get planning permission in Scotland. The Scottish Government's 2016 review of the planning system called for a national infrastructure agency or working group with statutory powers to be established, involving all infrastructure providers as well as planning representatives. However, the Scottish Government's subsequent consultation on the future of the Scottish planning system has not acted on that recommendation and, indeed, appears to have rejected it. I will. Mike Rumbles So far in his contribution, he has not mentioned social housing and a genuine question. I am just asking, is that delivered by design or by accident? Do you want to see more social housing as well as private housing? Perhaps Mr Rumbles is not paying attention, but I was asked the same question earlier on. Of course we do. Our view is clear. Scotland needs a new housing and infrastructure agency to lead on the medium and long-term infrastructure development that our economy needs, placing housing at the centre of its considerations. Homes for Scotland agree that they were damming of the Scottish Government's recent consultation on planning reform, reflecting what they called great disappointment and frustration at ministers' refusal to confront the main planning barriers to delivery. We can only hope that Mr Stewart has been listening as he prepares his long-awaited planning bill. Among other matters, the new agency would herald a new relationship between the Scottish Government and local authorities when it comes to housing and infrastructure. Our motion calls for a new deal on housing. One option for delivering this would be a whole series of housing deals. The first generation of city and growth deals is still being negotiated and rolled out across Scotland, but already we should be thinking hard about a second generation of bespoke deals, including on finance, tailored specifically to the housing needs of Scotland's cities, towns and rural communities. I thank the member for taking that intervention. I want to give a comment on this. Since the Tories took office at Westminster, levels of house building in England are at the lowest level since Baldwin was Prime Minister in 1923. Why is it that Tory action and rhetoric in this area does not match up? Why is it that the Scottish National Party wants to talk about English history and the Scottish Conservatives want to talk about housing policy for Scotland now and in the future? Like the first generation of city and growth deals, housing deals need to be focused on regions, allowing clusters of local authorities to work together to bid for the package of support that they think best fits their need. That is already happening in England, that Ash Denham so much wants to talk about, notably in the corridor between Oxford and Cambridge, and it needs to be happening here in Scotland, too. If delays in putting infrastructure in place are one of the main barriers to development, the new housing and infrastructure agency could also take the lead in designing innovative funding mechanisms to unlock this, such as developer infrastructure loans, and such loans need not be confined to road and transport infrastructure, digital infrastructure as well as necessary public services such as primary schools, GP practices and health clinics could also fall within the agency's remit. Finally, let me turn to new towns and garden villages. Ricks proposed reviving the concept of new towns in its 2014 report. We encouraged the Scottish Government to endorse effective provision in growing areas by enabling the delivery of six to eight major new communities. Those could be formed as new towns, strategic regeneration within existing towns or as extensions to current locations of growth, to which we say, let's get on with it. Again, that is already happening elsewhere in the UK, and it needs to happen here, too. A new wave of garden cities and towns is being supported by the UK Government from Northamptonshire to Oxfordshire to Essex, with quality design, cutting-edge technology creating local job opportunities, accessible green space and a high-quality public realm. Those are, I've given away three times already, ambitious, locally led proposals, supported by central government, creating new communities that work as self-sustaining places, not merely as dormitory suburbs. New cabinet position, new government agency, new housing deals and new towns, just some of the ideas that we are seeking to bring to the table. We need to talk about housing and we need to act. The housing shortage is not a looming crisis or a distant threat, we're already living in it and we need political leadership to tackle it. I move the motion in my name. I encourage both the giving and taking and receiving of interventions. I praise Mr Tomkins for taking three interventions and keeping within his time. I encourage all members to do similarly. Kevin Stewart to speak to and move amendment 7613.2 in the name of Angela Constance, or the cabinet secretary is going to move the motion in her name. It's somewhat ironic that, on the day that the Tories choose housing as the topic for their debate, that the national audit office has pointed to Tory welfare cuts as being the main driver behind a significant rise in homelessness, citing the benefit cap and local housing allowance as examples. The national audit office criticised the UK Government for failing to evaluate the impact of its benefit changes on homelessness. Will Ruth Davidson's new towns be suitable for all those families who have faced the brunt of harsh and punitive welfare cuts? We all know that good quality, warm and affordable homes are absolutely vital to securing economic growth, supporting and creating jobs, and ensuring a Scotland that is fair for this and future generations. We are determined to increase and accelerate housing supply across all tenures. That is why this Government, through times of austerity imposed by the UK Government, has invested over £4 billion to deliver over 69,000 affordable homes. We not only ended the right to buy, preventing the sale of up to 15,500 houses over a 10-year period, but we have reintroduced council house building, the first such central government to support and to do so in a generation. We have built social housing at a faster rate than any other part of the UK. We have supported more than 23,000 households to buy a home over the past 10 years, with nearly three quarters of whom are 35 years under who have benefitted. I thank the cabinet secretary for giving way. In her report this year on the life chances of young people, Naomi Eisenstadt, who supports the Government's closure of right to buy policies, said this, "...one result of right to buy was that it did allow people on lower incomes to access owner occupation and thus build up housing wealth. Now right to buy is no longer able to provide that function, government must do more to help low-income households build up housing wealth." What is the Government's response to that? The Government's response to the said Mr Tomkins has been to increase and accelerate housing supply across all 10 years. That is why our help to buy schemes has supported young people into home ownership. We have already given a commitment to implement the work of Naomi Eisenstadt because she meets very valid points about the life chances of young people. You have to recognise the results of the toxic Tory legacy of removing half a million houses in Scotland for social rent. What has that done to the life chances and the prospects of young people struggling today to get on the house and ladder or to be able to get a home that they can afford to rent? Maybe later, if you were so committed to this debate, you would have been in Mr Tomkins's shoes today as opposed to sitting on the back bench. Last week, the First Minister set out in our programme for government how we will continue to improve access to high-quality energy-efficient affordable homes. Our More Homes Scotland approach supports the increase in the supply of homes across all 10 years. That means that we work closely across the housing sector to promote the construction of new homes, supporting jobs in the construction industry and inclusive growth in the wider economy. That work includes a wide-ranging review of the planning system to improve the effectiveness of planning processes. We are investing more than £3 billion in affordable housing to deliver at least 50,000 affordable homes over the lifetime of this Parliament. That is a 76 per cent increase on our previous five-year investment. The cabinet secretary for communities is far more interested in spending time and money on building houses rather than building a new national infrastructure agency. It is also important to recognise that 35,000 of the 50,000 homes target will be for social rent. We never hear the Tories talking about targets for social rent. Our 35,000 target for social rent is a 75 per cent increase on our previous social rented target. That will ensure an average between 12,000 and 14,000 full-time equivalent jobs in construction and related sectors. Inclusively, our More Homes Scotland strategy provides certainty to Scotland's councils and housing associations. This year, for the first time, we have committed to a year-on-year increase in funding to be shared by councils over the next three years to continue that momentum. That equates to £1.75 billion allocated across Scotland. Last year, we saw a level of activity in the affordable house building sector that has not been seen since the early 1980s, with more than 10,000 affordable homes approved and an increase of nearly 30 per cent on the year before. Our approach is to increase the number of completions, starch and approvals on a year-on-year basis by investing now and giving housing associations, councils and other partners the confidence and the assurance that they need to invest. As opposed to a rather Janet and John's simple approach of determining that targets have to be broken down on a year to year basis, we have to increase the supply of housing year-on-year. Yesterday, the latest affordable housing supply statistics showed that our pace is maintaining as affordable housing continues to be approved at a higher rate than the previous year. I am conscious that time is short. In focusing on housing, we must also look at what has been done to help those who do not have a place to call home. In 2012, we introduced world-leading homelessness target, which is a nation that we can all be proud of. Last week, we announced the creation of a short-life expert group to lead change in this area, with a new £10 million a year ending homelessness together fund to support the recommendations of that short-life working group. Mr Stewart will say more about how we will redouble our efforts next week. It has been suggested that new towns are the solution to all of our needs. As someone who represents new towns, I am a big fan of new towns and the new town of Livingston in particular. It is important to recognise that it is not for Government to impose new towns on communities but to provide them with the framework to allow communities to put the right developments in the right place. Of course, planning drove forward the new towns, and planning has helped to enable the delivery of many more sustainable communities before, then and since. As part of our more home strategy, a major programme of planning reform is on-going, and we will introduce the planning reform bill at the end of this year. Of course, the reform of planning is crucial to ensure that we get better synergy between planning, development and infrastructure investment. One example of that would be the £9 million of support that we announced for Highland Council as part of the Inverness and Highland City region deal. It has established the Highland Infrastructure Loan Fund to support and accelerate the delivery of affordable housing across the region. We are committed to homes across all of Scotland, and that has to include rural Scotland. I am sure that Mr Stewart, in his closing remarks, will say more about energy efficiency and our plans in and around the warm homes bill, but just to conclude, Presiding Officer, as a Government, we are always open to debate and there is no monopoly of wisdom, but we will not be taking any lectures this afternoon or at any other time on housing from the Conservatives, because the Tories will be hoping that we all have short memories, while I can assure them that we do not have short memories. We have not forgotten their toxic legacy of removing housing benefit from young people. Current that is not history, Mr Tomkins. Your Government very recently removed housing benefit from young people under the age of 21. How that improves their life chances, God only knows. It was your Government and your party that has rendered the bedroom tax that has an impact on 70,000 Scottish homes. It is your Government that has introduced universal credit, which sees a delays in payments resulting in rent arrears. It was your party that sold off half a million Scottish homes. All that before we even begin to see the impact of Brexit. I will indeed finish my remarks there. I move the motion in my name and I won't be supporting the Conservative motion tonight. I encourage all members to refrain from overly personal attacks. I call Pauline McNeill to speak to her and move the motion in her name. If we all agree that living in a warm and affordable home is a basic right, and I hope that we do, then we are a long way from this being a reality. The social housing sector is shrinking. That is a fact. It was 32 per cent in 1999, and it is now 23 per cent. We are not building homes fast enough to grow this sector. Generation rent has become an adopted phrase as the private sector housing trebles in size. Rents are rising and there are huge barriers to home ownership, but that is only part of the story. The greater story about housing is not just about a housing shortage, as we have been hearing from the Tory benches this afternoon. It is important to realise that the increasing issue of housing is a signifier of divisions in society, of deepening inequality across the United Kingdom between the haves and the have-nots. That is the real housing story that is the challenge for this Parliament. We are in the middle of a housing crisis with a severe shortage of affordable housing. Wages have flatlined over the last decades, and there is no sign of that changing. Rough sleeping appears to be on the rise, and the shocking number of people—I am sure that we all condemn—have died on our streets only last year. The roll-out of universal credit has added to the crisis fueling rent arrears, and social landlords are genuinely worried about the impact of that. I agree with Adam Tomkins when he calls for a national debate, but it cannot simply be about ideas about new towns. I hope that we will get to discuss that. There is indeed a lot on the Tory motion that we can agree with. We agree that the housing minister should be at the heart of the Scottish Cabinet. However, we cannot support the Tory analysis of the housing problem while they continue to deny the impact of universal credit roll-out and continue to support the austerity agenda. There is also much in the Government position that we can agree with, and we will work with them, such as the commitment to mitigate housing benefit for under-21s. We believe that they should be far more ambitious on house-building targets and be more specific on the types of housing and where they should be built. Yesterday's statistics say a lot of different things. Yes, affordable housing looks as if it is going up by 3 per cent, but it is in no way going to meet the challenge of the housing crisis. We are proud of Labour's own records and government, our commitment to the principle of community-based housing, our far-reaching action on homelessness, seen as Europe's most radical legislation, and our investment in Glasgow's housing stock. It was on a scale likely not to be seen for some time to come. In fact, we are pleased to the minister and to the third sector to include the stock transfer authorities in the waiting figures, because it is important to recognise that that means that there is a greater number of people waiting on a house. We agree that there is a chronic shortage of housing supply and it is the biggest challenge, so to that extent we agree with the main motion. According to Shelter, over half a million people struggle with bad housing and homelessness. We need a step change. We need to be imaginative, too, about thinking about how to put this together to ensure that we do not waste another parliamentary term without making serious progress. It is for that reason that we believe that it is social house building that should be the national project and that it should follow on the scale of the Queensbury crossing now that that has been successfully completed and should be Scotland's major infrastructure project to allow for local delivery plans across every council. That will identify the capacity, land available and the resources that are able to deliver homes for social rent, but it is important to identify the skills that we need to build houses and to ensure that we do not lose them because our big projects have been completed. Figures this week show that there has been a 6 per cent drop in social housing completions compared to last year, so we must increase the pace. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that, in relation to wealth distribution across the generations, there has been driven by a reduction in home ownership amongst young adults. I think that Adam Tonkin and Angela Constance talked about that. The biggest barriers to that are stagnating wages and large deposits. The average deposit for a first-time buyer in Scotland is a staggering £21,500. It is important to note that first-time buyers make up virtually half of all house purchases financed by a mortgage. For many people, it is out of reach. Worrying statistics yesterday on the completion of houses in the private sector were down 9 per cent on the previous year. More must be done to remove the blockages in the system. I am sure that others will talk about that this afternoon in the planning system and the infrastructure system to make sure that that does not continue. If it does, Minister, I suspect that there is no way that you will reach the £50,000 target that you have set for this Parliament. Encouraging and supporting home ownership is vital to ensure that choice and fairness of affordable home ownership and the extension of the help to buy is an essential part of that support. I would like ministers this afternoon to clarify whether the help to buy scheme will be extended towards 2019 and indeed whether there will be any reform of the scheme to ensure that those on the lowest incomes get the most help. It is important for developers to know this because, when they are planning their house building for 2019 and beyond, it has been an extremely important scheme for them. In conclusion, we believe that the Scottish Government must up their ambitions on housing and house building if we have to reach the challenges that Scotland faces. We will work with the Government and, in fact, we will work with the ideas of all political parties. Some of the ideas, for example, of the building of new towns and I declare an interest to that, although I was born in Glasgow and I was brought up in Cumbernauld, I believe that there were five built in the 1960s. However, the Population Centre for Health said that it did have a detrimental effect on Glasgow and other cities where it took the professional classes in those new towns. I certainly would not like to see me on that basis. I move amendment 7.613.4. I thank the Conservatives for bringing this debate on housing to Parliament today. I think that much of the debate already has and may continue to be highly political in nature. I, for example, could join others in criticising the Tories for their decades in power, and they are presiding over at least one housing bubble and crash, or for their role in welfare cuts and the impact that is having, particularly on young people. Or I could cite Labour's record in government, Gordon Brown in his first budget in 1997, promising that he would not let house prices get out of control. However, when he left office a decade later, he tripled it. Or I could cite Nicola Sturgeon and the target sheet set a decade ago, which has not been realised. Let me say at the outset that my constituents, particularly the generation of young people frozen out of affordable housing, are looking for ideas and practical solutions. Those exist in the realms of planning and housing policy. Books and academic papers have been written about them. I have invited academics and architects into Parliament to talk about them. Reviews such as the land reform review group recommended a number of them and we had a few in our manifesto last year. At risk of my own political career, I want to congratulate Ruth Davidson for her recent speech. We do not agree with some of the ideas in it or some of the assumptions that lie behind it, which we want to explore further. Ruth Davidson highlighted a number of issues in her speech, many of which, in fact, are Scottish Green Party policy. She was right, for example, to draw attention to the scale of private renting, not through the choice of the tenants but through the lack of real choice in the housing market. She was right to draw attention to swathes of existing housing falling into serious disrepair. She was right to note that we need to take on vested interests. She was right to advocate direct government intervention to procure land. She is right, above all, to admit that the big question is the question of land and that we should be considering repealing legislation that ended the ability of local authorities to acquire land at existing use values. I and my party commit to continuing the conversations that we have been having with her MSPs and MSPs from other parties to use the next four years to design and enact a far better system of housing and planning than the broken system that we have now. The current housing system is broken. We need a new approach to new build, to building maintenance, to accelerating energy efficiency, to creating more nuanced use classes for domestic property, for example, to tackle the scourge of short-term lets, to reform housing taxation and to tackle homelessness. I am happy to take an intervention. Elaine Smith I am glad that Mr Wightman has taken an intervention, but I wonder, like the other intervention that I made earlier, he does not seem to have mentioned affordable public rented housing, is that part of the green approach? Andy Wightman It is indeed, and I will be saying something about that in a minute. Greens advocate the following measures, for example. We advocate a target to eliminate the speculative volume house building industry within 10 years. Unlike the Tories, we think that this model is redundant. It is time for a new model, one that reflects well-established practices in much of Europe, including, as Ruth Davidson noted, in Germany and the Netherlands. This new model will be based on public-led development with high-quality community-based planning, putting consumers in control of procurement, including housing associations, restoring the professional role of planners and architects, and boosting skills, opportunities and talents of the SME building sector. We advocate a new approach to land acquisition, based on restoring the right for local authorities to acquire land at existing use value. We advocate a new approach to housing taxation by abolishing the council tax, a tax that is described by the Scottish Government's own economic adviser, Sir James Murleys, as indefensibly regressive. We also support the abolition of land and buildings transaction tax, another tax that Sir James Murleys argues that there is no sound case for retaining. We want to see a radically different approach to housing care, repair and refurbishment, with logbooks, sinking funds and mandatory energy efficiency measures at a point of sale in the private sector. Over 80 per cent of Scotland's existing homes will still be in use in 2050, and only with serious action to improve the quality and energy efficiency of existing homes can we ensure that everyone in Scotland has a comfortable, warm and affordable home to live in. Above all, reflecting Elaine Smith's point, we advocate a substantially expanded programme of genuinely affordable housing, using co-operatives, councils, housing associations and others to provide genuine affordable homes to all who wish them, not simply those meeting defined income criteria. Along with most other parties here, we are committed to end the stigma of homelessness. The past solutions are clearly not working, and the work of the local government community's committee in its forthcoming inquiry and the indications in the programme of government reassure me that that stance is agreed, particularly schemes such as housing first that we are encouraged by and believe should be extended to support services to individuals who face a variety of very challenging circumstances in their personal lives. We are in a strange position where the previous housing minister, Margaret Burgers, stated in January 2016 that the Government expected the private housing market to operate wherever it can without government intervention. Although just over a week ago, the leader of the Scottish Conservative Party was arguing for direct Government intervention to procure land. As it happens, I see some signs that this Government is sympathetic to this as well, but if this is the case, it needs to be much, much more explicit and demonstrate a greater urgency in coming forward with ideas. As I indicated in my opening remarks, we stand ready to work with all parties in the chamber to pursue radical new measures through planning, land acquisition, fiscal and other policies to deliver a very different housing future for the people of Scotland. I move amendment 1 in my name. I would like to start by thanking the Conservative Party for raising that important issue, because we are without question in the grip of a national housing crisis. The financial crash of 2008 hit house builders, those looking to own their own homes and families seeking to rent affordable properties across the board. Since that time, year on year, the total number of newly built houses has averaged out at 18,000. Before the crash, it was 24,000. That is a remarkable 6,000 fewer properties each year, despite rising demand. Balance that reality against the fact that, on any given day in Scotland, around 170,000 people are on local authority housing lists. All too often, it is the most vulnerable of our citizens who bear the brunt of this dismal statistic. Indeed, official statistics published in January showed that a 17 per cent year-on-year rise in the number of children living in temporary accommodation is nearly 6,000, an increase of 826 on the year before. Those numbers have been rising for some time. That challenge visits with each of us as local representatives in our constituency surgeries every week, in the shape of families who are desperate to move out of substandard temporary accommodation and into a stable tendency, often facing multiple barriers and disadvantages, and each one deserving, in one way or another, to be considered for special treatment. Yet, each sadly competing against one another, and sometimes hundreds of others for the smathering of new homes that appear on the housing portal every Friday morning. That, in many ways, is a crisis of our own creation, through decades of housing policy, through seemingly well-intentioned time that has now come to reap a dreadful whirlwind. Policies such as the right to buy and the fundamental disconnect between the manifesto commitments to build homes for social rent and those that are actually delivered. For example, in May 2011, the SNP manifesto promised 30,000 homes for social rent. A mere six months later, that target was revised down to just 20,000, with the rest being private homes for sale. Increasing the stock in so-called affordable homes is desirable, but only if you can manage to scrump together the deposit to make that matter. The Tories in this debate so far have seemed to conflate the issue of socially rented homes with affordable houses to buy, but the business end of this crisis is in the lack of homes that are available for social rent. I will give way to Andy Wightman. Andy Wightman. I thank the member for giving way. Does the member agree with me that the very definition of this curious word, affordable, needs to change? Many so-called affordable homes are not affordable to a lot of people that I know. Alex Cole-Hamden. I thank Mr Wightman for the intervention. I absolutely agree with him. I am actually coming to that point later in my speech. What is important in our triangulation around the issue is that we answer the needs of those who are drift of the housing market first by recognising the yawning gulf in terms of demand for socially rented housing and its availability, recognising to that young people in particular may be facing a perfect storm in terms of low economic activity, prohibitive private rental markets and an inability to access housing benefit. While those who are in work and seeking to start a family may not hope to own a home for a considerable time longer than their parents had to wait. The chamber is invested with the powers to answer much of this challenge. We lack only the political will with which to do so, but today's debate is a start. I talk about needing political will, because if I may say so, Presiding Officer, we are talking about a fundamental redesign in our approach to housing and its development in this country. At present, my constituency of Edinburgh Westin is a microcosm for all that is wrong in terms of planning and housing growth. While huge tracts of brownfield sites lie fallow in more industrial areas of the city, the picturesque green belt surrounding areas such as Camo, South Scotland is eyeed for development, not because of the fantastic roads infrastructure or the capacity of its schools or its doctor surgeries, all of which are woeful and all of which are woefully adequate, but because developers know that they can expect to charge the highest property prices in the country for their output. That is where I address Mr Whiteman's point. Such as the ambient house price in those communities, affordable stock provision within those new developments is still crushingly out of reach for even the most well-healed first-time buyers. All too often, developers, such as AMA, who built the breakhouse park development in my constituency, will pull out of commitments to planning gain, in their promise to build a pavilion in sports fields on the old cramming campus, only to leave it as meadow and wasteland. Another example of developers throwing up houses but leaving no element whatsoever of community in their wake. We need to start thinking in this place like place makers, recognising the housing shortage but never losing sight of the community shortage. The outlook is also deteriorating in the teeth of Brexit. Economists know that inflation and job insecurity is only going to get worse as we leave the EU, but skilled house builders are already leaving this country. The exodus will continue throughout the Brexit process. Who will build our homes when they are gone? Bold and radical action is vital to tackling the housing crisis, because successive Scottish and UK Governments have been aware that they were under building but not doing anything about it. Shelter Scotland, as we have heard, says that we need 60,000 homes by the end of this Parliament, yet this Government's target is a full 10,000 homes adrift of that. We need to lift our ambitions to at least answer the call of those experts in the field. As we grow new settlements in Scotland in each of those ventures, we need to ensure that we are building communities with health services, schools, transport infrastructure and in place before residents start to take occupancy. I will conclude here. If we get the affordability right, we can build a society where young people at the margins and professionals alike can either rent or buy a home that the stability that that affords. Adequate housing is the key to social mobility, and I move the amendment in my name. Thank you very much. I am sorry that I am having to be strict, but we have no time in hand now, so in the open debate it is a tight six minutes for all the speakers. I call Maurice Golden to be followed by Ash Denham. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Let me begin by saying that I agree with the First Minister when she declared that part of creating a fairer and more prosperous society involves everyone having a safe, warm and affordable home. This should be applauded, and it is an ambition that my party will give through backing. We will also seek to hold the Scottish Government to account when they fail to achieve targets or when they fail to put in the correct mechanisms in order to deliver our common goals. Let's look at the SNP's record. Under the SNP, new homes being built have plummeted 40 per cent. Scotland has been forced to make do with less than half the 35,000 new homes a year that were promised by the SNP in 2007. Moreover, home ownership, which is one way to boost low-income households, has fallen too. The SNP's target to eradicate fuel poverty by last year has also been missed and can be added to this catalogue of failures. Setting those failures aside, there is another number that needs to be highlighted, and it points to perhaps the biggest housing challenge that we face. That is that more than 80 per cent of existing homes will still be in use in 2050. Put another way, although not the only solution, improving the current energy-inefficient housing stock will have a huge impact on fuel poverty and climate change. On that point— Minister. Mr Gordon makes good point about homes being in existence for a long period of time. Would he agree with me that it is a bit daft that there is no VAT on new-build homes, but there is VAT on dealing with the problems that currently exist in homes that are currently there? Would he support me and others in this chamber calling on the UK Government to remove VAT altogether from home repairs, to have a level playing field and to invest in existing houses? Mr Gordon, I will give you an extra 36. That was the only intervention. It certainly was. I would happily support the minister in increasing the number of new homes started, which has fallen by 40 per cent since 2006. I would support the minister in increasing the number of new homes completed, which has fallen by a third since 2006. I would also support the minister in increasing home ownership, which has fallen by almost 4 per cent as well. Another catalogue of failures that have to be added, not to mention the 150,000 on the waiting list for a new home, to be added to your copybook minister. The warm homes bill must affect real change by bringing properties across Scotland up to a higher level of energy efficiency. Doing so would be a win for all those struggling to keep warm. It is a win for our NHS with fewer health problems related to cold homes, and it is a win for the planet with reduced carbon emissions. I would like to make some progress. That sort of transformative change is exactly where the Scottish Conservatives are approaching. We want every property that is possible to be upgraded to at least an EPC banned sea by the end of the decade. Next decade, WWF Scotland has said that this would help 1.5 million households to deal with cold homes and dozens of organisations from the existing home alliance to Bernardo's to Friends of the Earth who want to see action on energy efficiency. So where is the commitment from the SNP? It certainly is not to be found in funding of energy efficiency measures, which has stagnated since 2015. We need to take the challenges in home energy efficiency seriously, and that is why the Scottish Conservatives want to increase the capital budget allocated to energy efficiency measures. Shelter Scotland estimates that almost a million Scottish households are living in fuel poverty. Alex Cole-Hamilton I am grateful for Mr Gordon for taking the intervention. I hear him talk a lot about fuel poverty in this debate. I wonder how Mr Gordon felt when Theresa May revealed in her manifesto before the SNAP general election her plans to cut cold weather payments and means to test them. To quote from the existing homes and alliance, fuel poverty is a complex problem with multiple drivers, including issues covered by both devolved and reserved powers. However, in this Parliament, in this environment, energy efficiency of homes is fully within the competence of the Scottish Government, and hence the reason why my speech is focused on that area. The environmental impact of energy inefficient housing is very serious. Heating accounts for a large percentage of Scotland's energy demand, yet renewables accounted for less than 6 per cent of non-electric heating demand in 2015. It is not good enough, and the SNP must do more if they are to meet their target of 11 per cent by 2020. I would like to help them on that. We need to increase heat pumps for individual domestic properties, as well as increase district heating for industrial and larger-scale developments. That will require the correct financial package, regulatory environment and consumer campaign in order to deliver the ideal market intervention to meet and surpass the target. The SNP Government must start to take that seriously and join us and the many others who understand the benefits of making Scottish homes more energy efficient. We must bring up every home to a minimum EPC band C, maximise solar energy capture and do more to make people aware of the benefits of smart meters and for the sake of the environment, of our economy and most of all our fellow Scots. It is time that we recognise that warm words will not heat our homes. I call Ash Denham to follow by Monica Lennon. My grandmother lived in a rented two-room flat in a tenement in a big city when my mother was young. By the time my mother was 14, she moved out to a brand new council flat in a brand new town, giving her and the rest of the family an indoor bathroom for the very first time. A month after I was born, my grandmother got the keys to her brand new council house. She loved that house and lived there till she died about 40 years later, and it was then made ready for the next council tenant to make it their home. That house, that home, represented to her and millions like her security and stability. That is the effect of policy being made into reality, but it was not to last. Indeed, as that year's right to buy policy spread throughout the country, stories like my grandmother's became less and less common. In 1979, 42 per cent of the UK population lived in council housing, but by 2014 it had plummeted to just 8 per cent. Failure to replace the council housing meant that the stock of homes was decimated. When Ruth Davidson and the Scottish Tories come to this Parliament to say that they have ambitions to build more affordable homes or to build a new generation of new towns, it is very difficult to take them seriously. How can anyone take seriously a party that says one thing and consistently does another? In her speech to IPPR earlier this month, Davidson said that the lack of housing supply in Scotland is one of the biggest challenges of our time, but what she failed to acknowledge is that that challenge was largely borne out of her own party's right to buy policy, which diminished the availability of affordable housing. She also said that property ownership in this country is akin to an oligarchy in the hands of a minority rather than the masses, but what she did not mention is that about a third of formal council homes sold off in the 1980s are now under the control of private landlords, reaping wealth from what could be a decent home for someone who needs it. Ruth Davidson called for a new housing agency to support development, to streamline planning and ensure that public services are on a par with that increased housing, yet the irony of the leader of the Scottish Tories calling for more services while simultaneously supporting tax cuts for the rich is lost on no one. It is easy to demand services when you never clarify how you will pay for them. What is worse than that is that, in all the supposedly fresh ideas that Ruth Davidson made in her speech on housing, there was only a passing reference to homelessness. I guess that this is not surprising when it is the Conservative party's woeful austerity policies that have pushed more people into poverty and escalated levels of homelessness across the UK. Like many areas of public service, the SNP Government has taken bold action on housing to mitigate the destructive effects of barbarous Tory policy emanating from Westminster. The Tory's bedroom tax policy would have negatively impacted 70,000 Scottish households, 80 per cent of which have a disabled adult. A university of Newcastle study linked this policy to higher levels of hunger, poor diet, anxiety and also depression. Since 2014, we have provided funding to ensure that no one in Scotland pays the bedroom tax and that we will abolish it completely at the first possible opportunity. The SNP also ended the right to buy policy in Scotland safeguarding the future availability of valuable social housing. On top of that, the SNP Government exceeded its five-year target of delivering 30,000 affordable homes and exceeded its target of 5,000 council homes between 2011 and 2015. More than £1.75 billion has been allocated to local councils for affordable housing development, so to put that into perspective in Edinburgh this year. That represents £30 million in investment. By the end of this Parliament, we will make good on our promise of delivering a total of 50,000 affordable homes. In the last Parliament, which I was not a member of, the SNP only delivered 70 per cent of the social rented housing that it promised at the beginning of the session. Why? Ash Denham. Just today, the NAO report has been published, which blames Tory policy for driving up homelessness. I think that it speaks to saying one thing and then the action regarding to deliver it. It also said that Tory ministers are slow to understand that link. I think that the members on the benches here seem to be a bit slow in understanding the link as well, and that there is no strategic approach. Conservative credibility on this issue is in absolute tatters. This year's programme for government announced further action on housing to bring vacant properties back into use, strengthen and simplify the planning process, and a dedicated £10 million a year for the ending homelessness together fund. All the action from the SNP comes as the UK Tory Government's budget for social housing has taken cut after cut after cut. The Conservatives are very fond of their Orwellian rhetoric, but in housing, as in elsewhere, sensible policy, matched with appropriate funding and then appropriate action, is what will work and is what is working in today's Scotland. I know that the Conservatives are very new to the concept of policy development, but when I say conclude, I mean conclude, please sit down. It is important that we have this debate on housing today, so I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak and to support Pauline McNeill's amendment to the motion from Adam Tomkins. Good quality housing is central to physical wellbeing and mental health, so ensuring that everyone has a safe, warm home to live in is key to improving general wellbeing and creating a stronger economy. Frankly, solving Scotland's housing crisis should be higher up the political agenda, but I have to say that when I hear from the Tories about new cabinet positions, new towns, new deals, new agencies, I fear that we are hearing from the same old Tories because there is no recognition about what it takes for people to afford to get into a home in the first place and to stay in a roof over their heads. Adam Tomkins mentioned the report by Naomi Eisenstadt on her review of the life chances of young people. He tried to pick from that report, but he said nothing about her findings on low pay and insecure work and the impact that that has, so perhaps we will hear more from that in conclusion. I say housing crisis because that is exactly what we have in Scotland today. The rising cost of housing is pushing more and more people into poverty. The private rented sector is continuing to grow with rents rising faster than inflation and resulting in a growing housing benefit bill for the Government that goes straight to private landlords and around one in four households who rent privately their families with children. The current cost of a house rose by 75 per cent between 2003 and 2013, and only a quarter of people under the age of 34 own their own home. That is down from just under half in 1999. It is unfair that this generation of young people will not be able to access something that previous generations took for granted, including many of us. To tackle the housing crisis, we require a range of targeted approaches. I think that we have heard some good ideas, including from some of the Tory benches. Some of their analysis is correct, and I think that the thinking that Andy Wightman has been leading on is good work that we can look at and build on. We do need to invest and build in social housing for a new generation. As someone who grew up in a council house, I am only too aware of the unfairness of another generation of young people growing up without that option, or I have been forced to wait for years and years and years on housing lists that are impossibly long. We also need to help to ensure that help to buy policies helps everyone, and I think that Pauline McNeill has touched on that, because we have a system where those on the lowest incomes remain locked out of home ownership. The target for 50,000 affordable homes over this parliamentary term is welcome, including 35,000 homes for social housing, but targets can only be met if greater support is given to the construction industry and the supply chain involved in the construction of homes. I worked as a project manager for a major house builder in 2008 when the recession hit. Like many others, I was made redundant and we have seen many people, many skill people, leave the sector. We know that in Scotland we need 12,000 new construction workers between now and 2021, and we need to do much more to make that happen. Adam Tomkins did not take my intervention when he was in full flow about the planning system, but I wanted to raise that if we are serious about investing in social housing and delivering that, that has to be backed up by a well-resourced and a reformed planning system that puts communities at its very heart. That ambitious programme for delivering new towns and new deals, I was interested to find out what the Conservatives are proposing to do to support the planning workforce, which has diminished by 20 per cent in recent years. When the planning bill comes before Parliament later this year, it provides a unique opportunity to be bold and to be radical about how we reshape the planning system so that communities feel that they have a voice rather than being dictated to as it sometimes appears. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity to engage with the planning democracy movement as the bill progresses throughout the Parliament. I have made clear before my disappointment that so far it appears that the Government is not here on a rights-based planning model that would give communities a real say in decisions that have been made about the places where they live. Alex Cole-Hamilton is not in his seat right now, but he talked about place making, and I think that that is the approach that we have to get involved in. I welcome a change in direction from the Scottish Government on that. In the briefing for today's debate, Homes for Scotland has expressed concern over the lack of detail in the planning review proposals, following the places people in planning position statement in July, especially in relation to local development plan gate checks and the introduction of an infrastructure levy. For a long-term house building strategy to work, we need to invest in the planning workforce and we need to facilitate that. There has been a real loss in skills, and I think that I lost in confidence in a sector that has become very reactive. I want to conclude that there is a huge amount of land that is already zoned for planning or has planning permission already, so it is not simply about increasing the size of land banks. We have to have a real honest audit about where housing consents lie. Are they in the right place? We can reinvent the wheel and build new towns, but we really have to get an understanding of what has already been consented and does that fit the needs of communities? I call James Dornan to be followed by Miles Briggs. One of the things that I admire about the Tories is their pure brass neck. Miles Briggs comes up and talks about the NHS, just refuses to talk about the NHS south of the border, does not mention the humanitarian crisis that the British Red Cross described, or the junior doctor strike. Remember that this is the place where you are in control, where your words have to be turned into actions. We get muddle talking about the economy, refusing to talk about Brexit and the impact that it is going to have. 80,000 jobs and reduced GDP by 5 per cent. I am sorry, muddle phraser because I do not want to be accused of being rude. My apologies, muddle. Adam Tomkins knows very well that I am very fond of him, but for him to get up here and talk about housing, as if this is a major issue for the Tory party, is laughable. The next thing we will be getting in education is that a spokesperson is not proposing free school milk, and an economy spokesperson is saying that there should be jobs for the miners. That is just rewriting history. Sure enough, everyone has a safe, warm and affordable home, and it has been for many years a real priority for the Scottish Government. That is why we have invested more than £3 billion in affordable housing to deliver at least 50,000 affordable homes over a lifetime in this Parliament. I just want to touch on what Maurice Golden was making a big play of about targets that the Scottish Government had to change and that the Scottish Government did not achieve. It probably takes me back to my early comments. It seems that I have missed out on something very important that happened around 2007-08, a big financial crash. You might not remember it, and you should, because you would need to deepen it. Obviously, everything had to be re-looked after that financial crash. Our budget was cut. The money that we had to spend on housing was not available. Obviously, things had to change then, but we have reached our target since, and we have been increasing. If you look at what is happening down south and compare it to here, if we had gone by a level of house building down south, we would have 40,000 houses less than we have built in that period of time over the last 10 years. That, I hate to say this with George here, would mean that there was a town the size of Paisley missing from the Scottish population. Good thing, bad thing, you tell me, I do not know. We can be proud of our record in terms of housing. I want to go on to the right to buy scheme. It has been touched on earlier. What has not been mentioned yet was that when that right to buy scheme was brought in, it was brought in purely for political reasons. It was not brought in to help people to buy houses to make their lives better. It was brought in because she thought that if people bought their houses, they would turn into Tories. That is what it was all about. I will tell you how you can tell that, because local authorities were bad from reinvesting that money in housing. If they were serious about housing, that is exactly what they had done with that money. Does the member agree that encouraging local authority pension funds to invest in social and affordable housing has already happened? It was the Falkirk pension fund of which I was a governor, I should declare. It takes so many boxes and also provides pension funds with an ethical investment and a decent return. James Dornan I think that that is a great idea and I would hope that the Strathclyde pension investment fund that represents the workers of my city would consider that. We talk about the right to buy meant a loss of houses for council tenants. Ash very eloquently put forward her case about her grandmother. Please could you use full names? I know that you are trying, but please. I do not think that I am trying. I will do Ash Denham Redd. We never got a council house until I was 16. We stayed in a room and kitchen with an outside toilet. When we got our council house, it had three bedrooms at an inside bathroom inside toilet. It was just heaven. Thatcher came along and said to people, we will give your house for next to nothing. There you go, big bargain. Eventually, because buying the house was cheaper than renting the house, my parents bought that house. They did it with great regret, but they could not afford not to do it. What they did not read was the small print that meant that people were going to have to pay huge bills that they never had to pay before. They were not aware of the knock-on effects because the same clothes that they moved into in 1969, a clothes for many of you, is a tenement that has lots of different built houses in it, has now got two private landlords in the top flats. Their businesses went bankrupt. They are lying empty. It means that that clothes is not the clothes that it was when my parents bought that house and over the 30 years that they stayed in it. That is the downside of what you have done. You never did this. I am not taking you seriously for one instant about why you are doing this. We are doing this because Ruth Davidson has had bad press all summer and what she thought was, let's see if we can get something to deflect attention and show that we are the good Tories and not the supporters of the rape clause and the UDP deal in Westminster and Brexit. That is what this is all about. The member is in his closing moments. This is not about helping the people of Scotland. This is about trying to help the Scottish Conservative Party and its flailing leader. I welcome the opportunity to take part in today's debate, and I am pleased that the Scottish Conservatives are using our first business slot, allocated in this new parliamentary year, to debate the issue of housing. An issue of such importance and concern to individuals and families across Scotland, including in my own fast-growing Lothian region. What we have seen today is that some parties are wanting to engage positively in that. I very much welcome Andy Wightman's contribution to this. Some of the members, like we have just heard, may be less so. I want to focus my remarks today on the impact of health, poor, damp and cold housing. How do we ensure that our existing housing stock and new housing are not creating additional health inequalities? Housing can have a number of direct and indirect effects on both physical and mental health, and it is a significant driver of health inequalities. Health Scotland 2016 housing and health inequalities report sets out the challenges faced in tackling health inequalities around housing. The Scottish Public Health Network's report from earlier this year, Foundations for Wellbeing, Reconnecting Public Health and Housing, is another welcome contribution to the debate on the connection between housing and poor health. Poorly insulated homes that are difficult to heat push people into fuel poverty. Cold houses and flats impact disproportionately on elderly, disabled and in-firm people. The stress of struggling to heat your home can create and exacerbate mental health conditions. Almost a fifth of households state that their housing keeps them warm in winter only sometimes. The latest Scottish Housing Conditions Survey indicates that only 37 per cent of houses were in the energy performance certificate band C or better. Five per cent of homes in Scotland remain within the lowest two energy efficiency bands F and G. Although we welcome the Scottish Government's intent around the warm homes bill, we are clear that it does not go far enough, and we will continue to push for a commitment in this Parliament to upgrade the energy efficiency of all properties to EPCC rating or above by the end of the next decade. That would, of course, reduce carbon emissions as well as household heating bills. It is a real concern that so many Scots are living in cold and damp homes, given the effect that this has on many conditions notably respiratory illnesses. Would the member agree with me that I represent a rural constituency in the far north of Scotland? Would the member agree with me that one thing that might help the people living in my constituency who pay more for their electricity than the rest of the country would be another look at the market prices for electricity that we pay? I think that she's been raising this issue at the health committee as well. We need to look at innovative ways of reducing bills. In the Highlands this week, she's brought projects to Parliament to highlight that. That's something that, as a party, we want to see this Parliament debating, getting away from attacking each other and looking at the issues that will make a real difference to people's lives. Some studies suggest that those living in damp homes may be as much as—you should maybe listen to this—some studies have suggested that those living in damp homes can be as much as 40 per cent more likely to suffer from asthma compared to those living in better accommodation, while those living in dark, poorly ventilated homes are 27 per cent more likely to report poor health conditions, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In its submission to the health committee's recent inquiry into preventative agenda, the British Young Lung Foundation Scotland identified damp housing as a key challenge and noted the growing body of evidence highlighting the negative impact of mould and fungus from damp homes on lung health, as well as the complementary research showing that dry homes can improve people's lung health. The costs to our NHS of dealing with the consequences of respiratory and other conditions caused or made worse by damp, poorly ventilated housing are significant, so investment in improving our housing stock must be an important element of the future preventative agenda. Overcrowding is also another issue to which we must give rapid attention. Around 3 per cent of households in Scotland, some 70,000 people, are thought to be living in overcrowded accommodation.  In particular, it is also a factor in the poorer educational outcomes among children living in overcrowded accommodation. The proposals that we have set out on increasing the number of new homes being built in Scotland with a new national housing and infrastructure agency and a Cabinet Secretary for Housing and Infrastructure to drive forward the delivery of housing would make a real difference. I will not have time. Refurbishing the 34,000 empty homes in Scotland as part of a help-to-rebuild programme should also be made a priority. I hope that that is something that the front bench of the Government is listening to and looking at. I again welcome today's debate and I call on the Scottish Government to ensure the health issues that I have raised today are embedded in housing policy as we go forward. As the Scottish Public Health Network has said, we are up to those whose so-called home is a risk to their health to strive harder to address those problems and to maximise the housing contribution to health of the people of Scotland. I support the motion in the name of my colleague, Adam Tomkins. Thank you, Presiding Officer. If fruntery, arrogance, nerve, audacity, downright, chic, all those describe the Tory's motion on housing today, but I am with James Dornan. I think that pure brass neck is a better description. The Tories demand additional spending every day in this Parliament. They never say how it will be paid for, they demand tax cuts in the same breath and they ignore the effect of their party's austerity, which has resulted in this Parliament's budget being cut by 9.2 per cent in real terms over 10 years of Tory Government. Now they come here with completely uncosted proposals for a new housing quangol. I am sure that that will be a vote winner. I am very grateful to the member for giving way. I think that she might want to reflect upon the statistics that she has just quoted in terms of this Parliament's budget. If she reads her own Government's budget documents very carefully, she will see that in real terms this Parliament's budget in the year that we are currently in is higher than it has been at any point in the past. Will she withdraw her untrue statement? John McAlpine No, I certainly won't. In fact, I would refer him to the Fraser of Allander Institute, which has said that, over the next four years, the Government's funding will fall by 6 per cent. So the quote that I was giving was over 10 years. You could use my quote, you could use the Fraser of Allander Institute, which confirms drastic cuts to this Parliament's budget. As for the new towns, we have not been given any detail of where those new towns will be built, how much they are going to cost, and we do not know which rich Tory landowners are going to benefit. Perhaps one of the lards on the Tory-backed benches could spare Ruth Davidson's plushes by donating some of their expansive acres for this strange project. The Tory's timing is terrible. As others have said, they come to this chamber talking about a housing crisis on the very day that the national audit office says that homelessness in the UK is likely to have been very much driven by the Government's welfare reforms, in particular the freeze on housing benefit. We have seen a 60 per cent rise and the number of households across the UK in temporary accommodation and a shameful 134 per cent rise in rough sleepers since the Conservatives came to power. Indeed, according to official statistics backed by the Chartered Institute of Housing, the number of new Government-funded houses built for social rent each year in England has plummeted by 97 per cent since the Tories came to power. It is set to get worse because the legislation to extend right to buy to housing associations in England will mean that another 800,000 socially rented properties in England will likely to be sold off, just like the 1.5 million council houses that have already been sold off under right to buy. That was a policy that was imposed on Scotland by the Tories before this Parliament was established. It is a great testament in the anniversary of this Parliament's foundation that we can look at our legislation to end right to buy to show that this Parliament has made a big, big difference to people's lives and is reversing Tory policies. It is just a shame that the previous Labour and Liberal Democrat Governments in this Parliament did not have the courage of the SNP to do it earlier. I am very proud that the SNP Government has taken that step. Elaine Smith I thank the member for taking the intervention. I commend the Government on doing the way with the right to buy, but the LibLab coalition did take steps in the direction of that, and I think that we should recognise that. John McAlpine Well, it is all very well. I thank the member for her intervention, but it is all very well talking about taking steps. Perhaps what she is referring to is the previous Labour leader's Mr Gray's comments that he passed excellent homelessness legislation, but he did not build the houses for people to live in. I believe that the Labour Government built six council houses, which is very disappointing. I am very pleased to see that the SNP has absolutely topped that by, I think, about 5,000 council houses that we have built during our time in office, as well as the 30,000 affordable homes that we have already delivered. I do not want to return to the Tories. I thought that their duplicity in terms of their motion, I think that Andy Wightman was a little bit too generous when he praised Ruth Davidson for her sudden conversion to intervention in the market. I would just look at their actual record. The most recent piece of housing legislation passed in this Parliament was the private housing tenancy Scotland bill. That gave more security to the tenants of private rented homes, all those young people that they claim to care about. It gave local authorities the power to apply to ministers for a cap on rent increases in certain areas. The Tories voted against that legislation. Ruth Davidson voted against that legislation. I do not see him making very much noise now. He should buddy hang your heads and say, excuse me, Presiding Officer. Yes, I should thank so much, Ms McAlpine. Could you come to a close, please? I will come to a close. I do not think that the Tories do not have any credibility at all when it comes to house building. They are not the party of housing rights, the party of right to buy, and I do not think that people in Scotland will be taken in by this PR-driven motion by the Tories today. I remind all members that I do not like rudeness, and I would also ask you to be very careful with your language, please. We are pushed for time. Elaine Smith, to be followed by Jenny Gorriss. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. As long as I can remember, I have had a passionate interest in housing, probably because, as a child in a working-class family, I lived in a privately rented tenement building with an outside toilet and a bed recess in the kitchen. We moved to a council house and the luxury of a bedroom in the bathroom due to a massive house building programme by the Labour Government at that time. I then did my honours thesis on housing and I was a homelessness officer. In fact, Presiding Officer, the first falling out that I had with my whips was overhousing back in 2001, and at that time I wrote an article for the Scottish Left Review saying, I believe that a home is a fundamental human right, yet in Scotland today thousands of people are homeless. A walk along the streets of Glasgow or Edinburgh of an evening is a chilling experience. If you care to notice the number of souls lying in the shadows with their begging bowls in front of them, those people are the more obvious homeless, many others on seemingly never ending waiting lists, some of them living in intolerable housing conditions, including overcrowding or sharing with friends or relatives. Sadly, not enough has changed in the 16 years since I wrote that, although I must say that Labour's housing policy is now more in tune with my own views. Presiding Officer, we should commend the Labour-led Government's approach to homelessness in 2003, because it has been deemed the most progressive in Europe. Unfortunately, 20 years from the Devolution Act and 10 years from the current Government, we still have a huge homelessness problem with rough sleeping on the rise. Shelter Scotland tells us that we are facing a housing crisis due to decades of under-supply and affordable rented housing, and homes lost to the right to buy that right-wing housing policy of the thature years. Presiding Officer, there is no doubt that, in a civilised 21st century Scotland, we need to sort our housing problems out once and for all. A home is a human right, and we should approach this whole debate from that perspective. I would say not from the perspective of housing wealth as the Tories want. To thousands of people that I know, housing wealth means a secure, warm, publicly rented home, not a property portfolio of ex-council houses. I am very pleased that the Local Government Committee is undertaking an inquiry into homelessness, which might have helped to encourage the Government's welcome commitment in last week's programme to specifically address rough sleeping. There is an opinion of the homeless that is held by some that the opinion is not only extremely intolerant, but it is also wrong, and it does not recognise that anyone facing unemployment or financial problems could easily face homelessness. People become homeless for a variety of reasons, fleeing domestic abuse, breakdown of relationships, job loss, etc., or maybe they are just one of the over 5,000 kids living in temporary accommodation just now in Scotland. An issue that the Local Government Committee is specifically looking at is the housing first approach, which Shelter first raised in 2008. We must strive to place homeless people in safe and secure permanent tenancies from the outset with comprehensive support. However, until we realise that aim, temporary accommodation must have minimum standards, for example, for cooking facilities. We also need to consider the fact that rough sleepers are currently being helped by mainly Christian charitable organisations. Although such help is commendable, the state needs to think again about night shelters, in my opinion. Homeless people should not have to be dependent on charity, church halls, sleeping bags and soup kitchens. There is no doubt that a lack of secure affordable housing causes many problems for people aside from the obvious ones, including ill health, exacerbating poverty and exclusion from the democratic process. Too many people at present, as we have heard earlier in this debate, are depending on private landlords. Some of those, let us face the reality, are the rackman type that was abolished in the 60s. Unbelievably, the private sector now is actually bigger than the local authority housing sector in Scotland. However, hopefully, that is changing, and I applaud my local council North Lanarkshire for its programme to build thousands of new council homes on going at the moment. Housing is undoubtedly an issue of class politics, and the Tories knew that when they successfully attacked council housing in the 80s and the 90s, they undid the good work done by the post-war Labour Government, and they specifically undermined Nye Bevan's vision of the living tapestry of the mixed community, where professionals such as doctors and teachers were living beside manual workers with no difference in the type or quality of houses. That, of course, was based on an understanding that housing should be a universal public provision such as the NHS. In 1979, more than 20 per cent of those in the top 10 per cent of earners lived in council housing. However, as a result of right to buy and the encouragement of owner occupation, by 2005 it was less than 5 per cent of households in the top half of the income distribution who were living in social housing. A continuation of Labour's earlier housing vision would have avoided people scrambling to burden themselves with never-ending mortgages. It would mean that we would not have been dealing with this housing crisis, and it would have resulted in a decent affordable home truly being a right of every citizen. I really doubt that that is the kind of vision that the Scottish Tories have for their new towns. The right to buy, stopping councils building houses, where right-wing Tory policies underpinned the housing problem that we now have, there is no doubt about that. More recently, introducing the bedroom tax, removing financial support for housing for under 21 and taking six weeks to give people their first payment of universal credit exacerbates the housing problem. Although I do not object to the idea of a national debate, I think that Tory members in this chamber really need to recognise that, before they can be taken seriously with regard to housing in Scotland, they really need to think about what they have done over the past few decades to housing in Scotland. At least we are moving on in addressing the housing crisis slowly, but we must urgently address homelessness. Thank you very much. We are really pushed for time, and unless the last three open speakers voluntarily cut half a minute off their speeches, I am going to have to cut the closing speeches. Jenny Gilruth, followed by Rachel Hamilton. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Today's motion from the Tory benches calls for a new generation of new towns and garden villages. As a constituency member for Glenrothes, it would therefore be remiss for me not to begin today by discussing our old new towns, as it were. Next year marks Glenrothes' 70s birthday. A post-war new town was originally planned that Glenrothes would be a garden town, creating a self-contained and balanced community, much like Holyrood then. The Kingdom Centre was, for a time, the largest indoor shopping centre in Scotland. Today, it is owned by Mars Pension Trustees Ltd, a private company. They own the civic space of our town. Much as my charm has been known to lure even the most surprising of suspects, Mars Pension Trustees will not speak to me. They put me on to an American real estate company, Jones Lang LaSalle, and another individual said that a faceless individual does not want to speak to me, either, out of the transpire. He works in London, a long way away from Glenrothes. Although I appreciate that the Government is currently reforming the planning system and that legislation is imminent on this issue, I ask the minister to look critically at the ownership of town centres by private companies, including Glenrothes, and I do understand that this is also the case in other new towns. Bricks and mortar don't build a community. Civic space is important for people to have pride in the place that they come from.  That's why we need to go back and look at how we support our old new towns, the ones that actually exist today, unlike those in the Tory motion—Cumbernauld, East Kilbride, Irvine, Livingston and Glenrothes. Along with SNP colleagues in this chamber, I am supporting a motion submitted by the Cumbernauld brand to our national party conference, which reads, Our new towns have also shared challenges and opportunities as a result of their planned nature and time development. It would be beneficial for those towns and for Scotland to develop a new towns action plan with a clear focus on helping to shape a sustainable future for those towns. People often talk about Glenrothes and our roundabouts, but what they don't mention are the private landlords, the folk who bought up the cheap council housing-owned stock and rent it out now, the folk that often don't care about the livelihoods of the people who inhabit their properties. The private housing tenancies act, as Joan McAlpine previously mentioned, passed last year, is of vital importance in that respect. That legislation protects people from the prospect of unforeseen and unfair eviction and unpredictability over rent increases, and, as already been stated by colleagues today, Shelfter has argued that it was the Tory's right to buy policy that has resulted in the loss of more than half a million homes. It was under this SNP Government that the Housing Act of Scotland 2014 extended the right to buy for all social housing tenants in Scotland, protecting our existing stock available for social rent and crucially, stopping the sale of up to 15,500 homes. We also know that when housing stock is sold on to private landlords, safety is not always of paramount concern, but the right to buy didn't only decrease Scotland's housing stock. In written evidence to this Parliament's local government committee, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations stated, where properties within blocks are purchased by owner occupiers or private landlords, fire doors are often removed and replaced with doors that aren't fire rated. In a post-Gremfell era, this warning carries added significance. Today, Scotland is building social housing at a faster rate than any other part of the UK. Social rented completions have exceeded the set target of 20,000 in between April 2011 and December 2015. 20,854 houses with social rent were completed. The Scottish Government also offers significantly more grant funding for each unit of affordable housing, with each unit in Scotland supported by an average of £52,400 compared to just £25,300 in England. The Tory motion today, perhaps unsurprisingly, makes no mention of homelessness, and homelessness causes pressures on the housing sector. If a good parliamentarian in this place should consider why, Fife has the third-highest largest homeless population in Scotland by council area, with 515 adults and 353 children in temporary accommodation in 2016-17. Just yesterday, the Fife Courier reported that Fife Council is now asking for homelessness agencies to fill the gaps in their service provision. Through housing benefit cuts alone, Fife will lose £3.2 million by 2019-20. The council attributes this to the Tory's welfare reforms and cuts to housing benefit. Today, the national audit office, as has already been stated, reported a 60 per cent increase in homeless families in England. That independent public services watchdog agrees with Fife Council's analysis, stating that Westminster's benefit reforms are likely to have contributed to an increase in homelessness. From the Scottish Government's research on the total financial cost of the Tory's welfare reforms, North Lanarkshire, Fife and Edinburgh stand to lose £65 million. That is for each council area by 2020-22. That is a 22 per cent total reduction in welfare spending in Scotland. Ruth Rape calls Tories do not care about community. They are not interested in building bridges. Rather, they have sown the seas of division through draconian welfare reforms, which contravene human rights legislation. Reforms that punish Scotland's poorest marginalise the underrepresented and enable a culture of blame, as long as we don't point the finger of blame at the DUP. Let them pontificate today about garden villages and new towns, about building community when, as a party, they have actively worked to destroy the social fabric that has bound working-class communities in Scotland together for generations. Those of us who represent the new towns know everything that we need to know about the Tories and their record on housing. I welcome the debate. It is clear that housing supply in Scotland is not keeping up with the need and demand generated by demographic change. It raises an important issue that many in Scotland share—a growing housing crisis that risks being neglected by an SNP Government obsessed with looking south to deflect on the concerns that we have in the north. Home ownership is a shared aspiration by many, but one that may never materialise. Home ownership has fallen under the SNP. The percentage of housing stock that its owner occupied has declined from 62.1 per cent in 2006 to 57.9 per cent in 2015. In absolute terms, it has fallen from 1.49 million to 1.48 million dwellings. That does not look set to improve when we consider that, also under the SNP Government, the number of new homes completed has fallen by more than a third. In 2006—can I finish this point, please? In 2006, there were 25,305 new homes completed. In 2016, there were 16,498. I will give way to Joan McAlpine. I thank the member for taking the intervention. Can she explain to us if she is so keen on new housing developments, why she stood up in this chamber and repeatedly criticised housing developments in East Lothian, including Glane, Durlton and Humby, and asked the housing minister why they should not go ahead? Rachel Hamilton. I will not take that point from Joan McAlpine. I think that Joan McAlpine has made some ridiculous accusations today, and I will not engage because the SNP is not willing to engage on this very important housing crisis that has been brought on by your Government. I think that you should get your shovel out. Deputy Presiding Officer, the SNP is on course again to fail housing commitments. Well, you are. The 2016 SNP manifesto pledged to build at least 50,000 new affordable homes over this Parliament. However, later stats for 2016 and 2017 show that only 7,336 such homes were completed. If this level continues, there will only be just over 36,000 homes completed by March 2021. The SNP's target will not be achieved until two years later in 2023. The SNP Government's warm homes bill is welcome. However, the bill was announced in the last programme for government but was never presented. Even in its delay, the bill does not go far enough. It should include legislation to include a commitment to upgrading the energy efficiency of all properties to an EPC rating of C or above by the end of next decade to reduce the carbon emissions as well as households' heating bills. It is also a mystery why there is a reluctance to include a commitment to upgrade energy efficiency. As we have heard today, Shelter Scotland has said that 940,000 live in fuel poverty. The proposed bill will set a new statutory fuel poverty target. Why, then, will the Scottish Government not commit to an energy efficiency target that will help to reduce the costs of heating a home and alleviate fuel poverty? Of course, with any new housing development must come the infrastructure. Building new homes is only step 1. The next step is to fill them. Nobody will move to a new town or development that does not have the appropriate infrastructure in place to accommodate it. In this respect, we need to see and improve broadband roads and transport links. This has felt particularly in the Scottish borders, an area that has long suffered from these issues. This does not entice people to come and live in the borders or indeed for the borders to be recognised as a place that would be worth investing in building new homes. However, I believe that new housing in the borders can work in tandem with improvements to broadband, road improvements and integrated public transport network. There is a strong case to undertake strategic economic transport and housing planning in a co-ordinated manner. Rural constituencies like mine with huge opportunity for growth face a form of geographical inequality because it suffers from this infrastructure investment and that puts off potential investment. Deputy Presiding Officer, the issue is not only that new homes need to be built. The more prevalent issue is the amount of empty homes in Scotland. There are 34,000 empty homes that should be refurbished and brought back to use. The Scottish borders are not immune from this problem. Whilst I was canvassing, I was alarmed at the number of empty homes. They were either vacant or in disrepair. It is estimated that the Scottish borders has 1,000 long-term empty homes. Those who wish to refurbish homes, sell or rent to help ease the housing crisis should be encouraged. However, numerous constituents have contacted me about their efforts to do just that, making an inhabitable house a home, but now suffer financially from an increased council tax of up to 200 per cent for owning a vacant home. The Conservative's proposal of help to rebuild would allow councils to implement incentives to owners of empty homes. Presiding Officer, this afternoon we have focused on the housing crisis in Scotland. There is a crisis, and the SNP needs to understand that. It needs fresh thinking, but one that does not have to be looked upon as a singular issue. Instead, we can see housing as an opportunity and an opportunity to alleviate fuel poverty, encourage investment in rural areas and see infrastructure improvements for all. The Scottish borders, for one, would certainly benefit from such an approach. May I remind all members that they should always speak through the chair and not directly to each other? I call the last of the open speakers, Ruth Maguire. Last week, the unfortunate spectacle of Tory MSPs boldly trying to claim universal credit was an unmitigated success in one debate and then trying to pin the blame for rising child poverty on this Scottish Government and another, despite sound evidence to the contrary. This week, they came to the chamber of our Scottish Parliament with a motion on housing, a motion that completely ignores the staggering damage that has been caused and continues to be caused by the party that they represent, a motion that completely fails to recognise the many achievements of this SNP Scottish Government. Let's start with some examples of the damage so conveniently ignored by the Tory motion. We could cite the right to buy policy, which, since its introduction in 1980, has seen nearly half a million council and housing association homes sold off with little replacement, a scheme introduced by Thatcher and one still being expanded by the current Tory UK Government. We could cite the shameful bedroom tax, condemned by the UN, as having failed to recognise the specific living arrangements that persons with disabilities require, or, most recently, the axing of housing support for 18 to 21-year-olds. Despite warnings from charities and from across the political spectrum, that will force vulnerable young people on to the streets. They have some nerve coming to this chamber posing as concerned housing campaigners. The motion refers to the importance of housing for improving health and wellbeing. I agree that good-quality, warm, safe home is of course crucial for health and wellbeing, but have they really got that little self-awareness? Health and wellbeing from a party whose policies are described by the UN as a human catastrophe for disabled people. Without an acknowledgement of the harm their policies have done to communities, I just can't take them seriously on this issue. It feels like this new Tory concern for housing, health and wellbeing is nothing more than an unconvincing PR stunt. As well as ignoring uncomfortable facts about their own party's record, the motion avoids any mention of the positive steps taken by the Scottish Government, an SNP Government that has an extremely strong track record when it comes to housing, a Government that is building social housing at a faster rate than any other part of the UK at 64 per 100,000 population compared to 51 in England, 40 in Wales and 39 in Northern Ireland, a Government that, since 2007, has built over 40,000 more homes than if we would match the lower rate of our neighbours. A Government that, over the life of this Parliament, will invest more than £3 billion to deliver 50,000 affordable homes, a 76 per cent increase on our previous five-year investment, and a massive investment to back up an ambitious target, a Government that exceeded its previous target for 30,000 affordable homes by more than 10 per cent, and, importantly, a Government that ended right to buy, a major step in building a sustainable housing policy for the future, safeguarding our crucial social housing stock, so that is where it is there when people need it most, and a Government that is spending millions of pounds mitigating the harmful impact of UK Tory welfare cuts on Scottish households, money that, of course, is then unavailable to be invested elsewhere in things like affordable housing. The Tories have repeatedly opposed progressive measures to improve conditions for tenants and protect social housing stock. Since the SNP came into power, the Tories have opposed improved security for tenants, the opposed protection for tenants against high rent increases, the imposed giving local authorities the power to implement rent caps in areas where there are excessive rent charges, and the opposed the abolition of right to buy, protecting remaining social housing stock. Based on all that, it is clear to me that the Tories are one of the biggest roadblocks to housing progress, and they really have a brass neck coming to this chamber pretending otherwise. We will not take any lectures from the Tories. The SNP is cleaning up their mess when it comes to housing. I thank you very much for giving us extra time, Ms Maguire. We now move to the closing speeches, disappointing to note that not all those who were in the debate are in the chamber for the beginning of them. I call Alex Cole-Hamilton for a strict six minutes, please. A strict six minutes, no problem. Thank you, Presiding Officer. It's not much, is it? A roof over your heads and three square meals a day. It's a social aspiration that's echoed down the centuries in this country, but that first clause in that goal is increasingly hard to come by. Be that through the slowdown in house building since 2008, the fact that people are living longer and are not releasing or vacating stock as quickly as they used to, or in the monstrous gap in the socially rented sector in terms of accommodation. Those are the tenets of this debate. I thank those who have offered consensus, and I think that that is the answer to much of the problems before us. At the top of the debate, Adam Tomkins reminded us of the words of Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, who stated that problems in housing represent the biggest risk to the UK economy. It's not just the vagaries in the housing market that he's referring to, but the fact that there is a causal link between the health of our housing sector and the health of our nation in terms of the ability for people to hold down work, to have good physical health and, indeed, exert less of a demand on the welfare states. Mr Tomkins offered a well-crafted speech, but he was rightly intervened upon by Elaine Smith, who challenged the Tory assertion that the only house worth having is a home that you own. At no moment did he refer to the socially rented sector in his offerings. Throughout the debate, the Conservative benches have sought to conflate the concept of affordable homes to buy with the socially rented sector. My exchange with Andy Wightman about the idea of affordability should give the light of that, because 75 per cent of half a million is still blindingly out of reach of most first-time buyers. Cabinet Secretary and her speech referenced the need for planning reform and the nascent planning review being undertaken by her colleague Kevin Stewart. I'd like to take the opportunity to record my thanks to the minister for the time and access that he's offered me and others who hold the housing brief to feed into that review. I'd like to reiterate my call to him to look at amendments to things like section 75 orders around planning gains so that we build communities around health services, roads infrastructure schools and give planning officers far more teeth than they currently have, in addressing the backlog in building control, which is causing a material hold-up in building capacity, and in addressing the issue of land banking, which was rightly raised by Monica Lennon. Monica's colleague Pauline McNeill rightly pointed out the diminishing proportion of our housing stock given over to the socially rented sector. She was also right, important as she was, to point out the way in which we're given to undercounting the extent of homelessness in this country. As such, the problem is far bigger than we think. She also took time to evoke the very popular new landmark in my constituency, the Queen's Ferry crossing, and she's right. When it comes to the legacy of government, this SNP administration will be recognised far longer into history if it can answer the rising demands in our housing sector, the needs for social rent than for what has been uncharacably referred to as the longest three-span traffic jam in the world. That is an issue that should unite the chamber, and we saw that somewhat unlikely lovin from Andy Wightman in the words an intent of Ruth Davidson in her recent contributions to this national debate. We stand together on the benches with the Green Party on issues such as the need to reform local taxation and on discussions around land use, the obligations of developers, and I welcome his contribution. It's clear that, as a chamber, we are largely agreed on the nature of the problem, even if we have different ways of solving it, but it's clear also that, given the stock that we need, it is a question of material capacity that we need to address. However, that problem is going to be exacerbated by two problems in particular, both addressed in the amendment in my name. First, in the impact of a hard Brexit. Now, there isn't a soul in this chamber who doesn't understand the importance of our European migrant workforce to the construction industry. For decades, they have contributed skills, experience and innovation in the building of Scotland's homes. Brexit is fundamentally undermining the security of their status here, and they are leaving. That is an existential threat to our country's capacity to build homes, and it's a challenge that we can't expect to answer with apprentices coming out of Scotland's colleges. Why? Because they simply don't exist. The quiet erosion of the FE sector has led to a fundamental skills gap. We must also take steps to close and through the reversal of our cuts to Scotland's colleges and college places. I submit the Liberal Democrat amendment to the will of this chamber. There is much about the contributions that we have heard this afternoon in this debate, around which we should coalesce and can build consensus, not least about the fact that having a stable home is not just the foundation but is the prerequisite to social mobility. As Sol Horwick, the American impresario, said, the sky is the limit when you have a roof over your head. As such, Presiding Officer, I once again move the amendment in my name. Thank you very much again for brevity, and I call Andy Wightman. Six minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. It's been a good debate this afternoon. I think that one year exactly on from the last very short Government debate that we had on the 13th of September last year, and I hope that it's not that we won't just have these debates on an annual basis, because I think that many of the points that members have raised are far too important for that. Despite the understandable political ding-dongs and critiques that I'm happy to engage in at any time, but perhaps not in very valuable chamber time when we're looking for solutions, I think that there is a lot of agreement. As I indicated at the outset, we want radical change, and we are convinced that that's possible within the powers of this Parliament. I'm also encouraged from what members have said that I think that some of that radical change could, with the political will, command a majority in this chamber, and some of what divides us, I think, may be assumptions about how we should go forward and, certainly, perhaps priorities as well, priorities for housing. James Dorman explained that the failure of the 2007 target that was set by Nicholas Sturgeon was due to the financial crash. Monica Lennon indicated that she, in her professional capacity, had been a victim of that. However, the aftermath of that crash was a consequence of the financialisation of housing. It wasn't a response to any fundamental failure in our ability to acquire land and build houses. It was entirely due to the financialisation of housing. We have the powers to ensure that the consequences are overcome principally by tackling the key component of that financialisation, which is the land question. In particular, let me reiterate and recognise that the speculative volume house building industry is due to its financial model part of the problem, and our priority should be to eliminate that industry within a decade. I regret that that analysis is not more widely shared, but I am happy to speak to members about some of the assumptions underpinning it. It was well illustrated, in fact, by George Osborne, who I seem to remember was a chancellor some years ago when he went to Dublin in 2006 and gave a speech in Trinity College where he claimed that Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking. Soon after, of course, the Irish economy crashed and burned on the back of £420 billion of debt secured on a mountain of land and property speculation. As I said at the outset, I agree with Ruth Davidson that we should be looking to countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, where, as she said correctly, 60 or 70 per cent of housing is self-procured and customers are in control. The SME sector is much more powerful. Competition by house builders is not for land, but for companies that want to build the best possible house that is as energy efficient as possible and will last as long as possible. Those are not the competitive pressures that are currently in place in the volume house building industry. In addition, municipalities in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands can have the legal power, and they have had it since reconstruction after the Second World War, and we had those same powers as well before they were abolished in the 50s. They have the power to acquire land at existing use value, well, well below, to a factor of 20 or 100 or so, the cost of land with planning permission, to service those plots to master plan them and to sell them on. As a consequence, they have higher-quality homes with lower costs of energy that last far, far longer than the design life of most new-build property in the United Kingdom. I was reading recently, for example, of something that is entirely normal in the German experience—a group of women in their 50s whose families had left home, who got together and built a new tenement block in the heart of Berlin. That is entirely unexceptional. That kind of project is undertaken with the assistance of the local council and with an ecosystem of highly professional, technically skilled and innovative builders and designers. Labour's Elaine Smith rightly pointed out that housing is a human right. We agree, and Pauline McNeill said that it should be part of the national infrastructure priorities. One point that I have frequently made in relation to care and repair of properties and refurbishment and energy efficiency is that, in places such as Edinburgh, the tenements, in fact, are not, strictly speaking, private property. They may be that in law, but they are in fact part of the public infrastructure of the city. They have been there for longer than some of the streets and some of the other public infrastructure. The private interest occurs as a consequence of the fact that people occupy them for short, temporary periods of time, and yet it is incredibly difficult still to get the appropriate maintenance and upgrade that we need to common property. Alex Cole-Hamilton mentions affordability, and we think that this is a priority for Government to redefine what is meant by affordability. Just yesterday, the UK Government's house price index showed a 4.8 per cent increase in house prices in Scotland, the only part of the UK where house price inflation is growing, and in the private rented sector, a two-bedroom flat in Edinburgh, £950 a month, a 6 per cent increase on last year, a 32 per cent increase in the last five years. We also agree with Maurice Golden that the Warm Homes Bill provides an incredible opportunity, and we are welcome discussions around mandatory interventions in the private-owned market to upgrade properties at the point of sale. Miles Briggs made some good points about health. Jenny Gilruth regaled us with the wonders of the new towns, much of which I agree with. I do not have time to tell the story about my favourite author, Ian McHarg, and his bid to develop Scotland's third new town. Greens have exciting ideas, and the forthcoming planning bill we want to implement some of them. I want to thank all members for their contributions, commend our motion and look forward to further discussions. Mark Griffin, up to six minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. First, I would like to draw members' attention to my register of interests. I always welcome the opportunity to speak about housing in the Chamber of Science. I think that housing homelessness, house building, availability and housing support are massive issues facing people in Scotland. Like Adam Tomkins, I do not feel that that gets the coverage that it fully deserves. Monica Lennon said in her speech that housing is essential to people's physical wellbeing, mental health, education and to a strong economy. Highly others have said that solving Scotland's housing crisis must be higher up the political agenda. Affordable housing is a platform for those on low incomes to build their lives as a potential stepping stone out of poverty. Under the SNP and the Tory's housing costs have pushed more people into poverty. Rent arrears are increasing as a result of benefit changes and social sector evictions are on the rise. It is frankly absurd for Ruth Davidson to suggest that Tories have the answers to the housing crisis when her party is doing so much to make it impossible for people to afford a warm, safe home. Housing is a key pillar of the welfare state, but it seems that that has been forgotten. Only Labour has the right to a warm, safe home for everyone at the centre of our philosophy. In our 2016 manifesto, we committed to building 60,000 affordable homes over the parliamentary period, three quarters of which would be available for rent. We can be in no doubt that there is a housing crisis in Scotland. There are so many individual statistics and indicators of that. Scottish householders rented privately at almost three times the level that it was in 1999. Social housing tenants rented from a local authority or housing association down a third over the same period. Last year, housing costs pushed 170,000 more people into poverty. That growth of the private rented sector, coupled with private sector rents, rising faster than inflation, means a growing housing benefit bill for the Government, and more of it is going to private landlords. In 2015, almost half a billion pounds of Government money was spent on the private rented sector through housing benefit. How much good would that have done to build new, energy-efficient, safe homes? Evictions are increasing in local authorities and housing associations. People are finding it harder and harder to buy their own home, and a third of all households in Scotland are living in fuel poverty. We can go on and on and talk about different statistics and indicators, but it should be clear to everyone that there is a housing crisis in Scotland, but that does not seem to have been acknowledged. I might be wrong, but I do not think that a single Government speaker addressed or acknowledged that we have a housing crisis in Scotland. However, we have been clear and we have set out a range of policies to start addressing that situation. We need more, truly affordable homes, and that means building more. The Government is committed to building 50,000 affordable homes, including 35,000 for social rent by the end of this session, but we believe that we need more. Shelter Scotland's recommendation was for 60,000 new homes, and we agree. We also need guarantees that the Government is on track with its home building. When questioned, the Government points to statistics that give no guarantees of that end target being hit and demonstrate no national strategy. Social sector evictions have increased in areas where universal credit is being rolled out, driven in particular by that six-week waiting period for the first payment. In full service areas of universal credit, citizen advice has reported a 15 per cent rise in rent arrears compared to a national increase of 2 per cent and an 87 per cent increase in crisis grants compared to a national average of just nine. It also published research earlier this year in that found that 22 per cent of the public have no savings to fall back on while a further 24 per cent had less than two months income. Shelter Scotland warned that the cuts to housing benefit and the roll-out of universal credit could have a considerable impact on rent arrears and evictions. The roll-out of universal credit should be halted and the six-week waiting time should be scrapped. Rent rises in the private sector have increased faster than the rate of inflation, and we welcome the Scottish Government's reversal of their opposition to rent controls. We are also calling for the Government to ensure that all private sector properties reach an energy performance certificate rating of at least C by 2025. Although that has been recommended by the Government's own strategic working group on fuel poverty, it has chosen to disregard it and set a minimum standard of EPC level D. That lack of ambition comes after the Government missed the eradication of fuel poverty target set by Labour and 33 per cent of homes in the private sector are in fuel poverty. Presiding Officer, the scale of the challenges in the housing sector are clear. We are calling on the Tory Government to reverse their crippling welfare reforms, which are making things worse, and for the Scottish Government to step up their response to the same scale as the challenges that the sector faces. I am aware that the sound has gone a bit strange. We are investigating it at the moment. Meanwhile, I call Kevin Stewart to echo through the chamber for up to seven minutes, please, minister. I will be a joy for everyone with the voice that I have, Presiding Officer. I probably do not need the microphone, but there we go. I certainly welcome the opportunity to close the debate for the Government. We, as a Government, want to maintain a range of housing options to suit not just a range of individual circumstances, but also how those circumstances change over time, where we live, can shape us and can shape our life chances. We have already heard from a number of speakers today about their experiences as children, and we got our first council house when I was four, and I know how grateful we were for that. From the homes that we grew up in as children to entering an adult hood of student accommodation, social or private rents, first owned homes and on to the homes where we may want to retire and which will suit our differing circumstances and may be, of course, also our changing health or mobility needs. That is why we, as a Government, are absolutely committed to delivering affordable housing across this country. We recognise the intrinsic links between building housing and inclusive growth, providing warm and affordable homes, and tackling inequalities and poverty. In 2009, we reintroduced council house building, building more than 8,500 council homes since then, and I want there to be many, many more of those council homes across Scotland. As many speakers have pointed out, this Government that ended the right to buy, protecting the existing stock of social rented homes and the sale of up to 15,500 other houses. In the last parliamentary session, we delivered over 33,000 homes for affordable rent, 10 per cent above the target, and 22,523 of those worse for social rent, 20 per cent above the target. Our rate of house building completions across all sectors put Scotland ahead of England and Wales, and that is borne out by the statistics that were published only yesterday. House building across all sectors was 19 per cent higher here than it was in England and two thirds higher than it was in Wales. Beyond that, yesterday's figures show that affordable housing supply approvals in the year to end June 2017 were up 30 per cent on the previous year to 10,612 homes. A level of activity in the affordable house building sector is not seen since the early 1980s, with almost 12,000 homes approved since the start of the target period. Much already achieved, much more still to be done. That is why we have invested over £3 billion over the course of this Parliament to deliver that target of 50,000 affordable homes, a 76 per cent increase on our previous five-year investment. Beyond that, we have given stability and guarantees to local authorities that have not existed for a very long time, with three-year resource planning assumptions amounting to £1.75 billion of investment. Beyond social housing, we have also ensured that funding has been maintained for rural housing funds and at the instigation of some of our Liberal Democrat colleagues, we added an island housing fund to that mix, too. We will continue to listen to folk around about all those issues. Open market shared equity has helped other folk into home ownership, and Pauline McNeill asked me a specific question about help to buy schemes. We have made £195 million available over the three years until March 2019. The scheme will be carefully monitored and will consider its future in 2018. I am willing to speak to Pauline McNeill and other colleagues about that. Beyond that, in general terms, we are bringing together, after an independent review, a planning bill that should simplify our planning system and, hopefully, will lead to greater growth in terms of housing. One of the things that frustrates me as housing minister and planning minister is that, on the one hand, I am told that we must have more houses and, often, the same person will respond in the next sentence by saying, we did not want them built there. That is one of the reasons why I want community planning and spatial planning to become intertwined, which was something that Monica Lennon mentioned in her speech. There is much work to be done in this area. We have no monopoly of knowledge. I will continue to speak to colleagues from right across the chamber. However, one thing that I will not do is that I will not take any lectures on housing from the Conservatives, the party that sold off council housing willy nilly in this country. The party that wants to repeat that mistake by selling housing association homes in England under a new right to buy there, we will not make those mistakes here and we will take no lessons from the Conservatives on that front. Mr Griffin, in his speech, was right to point out the dangers of Tory welfare reform and its impact on housing and people here in Scotland. The Tories are the party that provides no financial support for under-21s and instead introduced the benefit cap and freeze that are seeing families right across the UK, not just here in Scotland but right across the UK at risk of homelessness. That is something that we will never consider and I believe that all of those powers should rest here so that we can make those decisions. The Tories are also the party that voted against the Scottish Government's tenancies bill that is introducing stability and predictability for tenants and instead they brought in the bedroom tax, which affects over 70,000 homes in Scotland and which Scottish Government mitigates to keep people safer in their homes. If we had that money from bedroom tax mitigation to put into even more housing for the people of Scotland, the Government is committed to everyone in Scotland living in an affordable quality home that meets their needs, not just the wealthy and not just those who can afford to buy a home, but everyone across Scotland. I call Graeme Simpson to close this debate. Nine minutes, please. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. It has been a useful and important debate that has been considered contributions from most sides by the SNP. Housing is too often the poor relation of political debate. It is overlooked, it does not get the press very excited and frankly it does not get a lot of politicians excited, though they will try to tell you otherwise. The fact that we have only had one cabinet minister here today perhaps tells its own story and I thought her contribution was something of a shambolic rant in contrast apart from the end section to her colleague Mr Stewart's. Housing is just not seen as sexy. I think it is, Presiding Officer. Nothing is more important than having a roof over your head, a warm, well-insulated property in good condition, security of tenure if you rent the right to back up if you need it, as Pauline McNeill said so eloquently. We have heard some right old nonsense today from other parties, mainly the SNP, saying that housing is not an issue that Conservatives should be talking about. Maybe they are embarrassed by their own records. They certainly should be that we have sinker states in our great cities, no-go areas, people sleeping rough should be a source of shame for the SNP and Labour. You have counted on the votes of people living in the poorest areas of this country for decades and taken them for granted. Expert after expert says that we have a housing crisis. Crisis, the homelessness charity, was formed 50 years ago by a Conservative, Ian McLeod. It should not exist today, nor should shelter, whose plea for a national homeless strategy, was snubbed for so long by the SNP. I am certainly not convinced that the measures announced by the programme for government amount to such a thing. Perhaps Kevin Stewart will tell us differently next week. Homelessness is the end result of a failed system, or a lack of a system. It is not some academic concept to be discussed in worthy research papers, it involves real people, leading the most chaotic of lives. So when we put housing at the forefront of our policy agenda, it is these people, Ms Martin, that we are thinking of and proud of that. I will take your intervention. Gillian Martin. It is a question that the Tory party wants to build 100,000 new homes. Can you tell me how many of them you would like to make social housing? They would affect the people that you are just talking about. Graham Simpson. I will come on to those new homes but we are talking about homes across all tenures. We do need new homes, as Adam Tomkins said. In 2015, Nicola Sturgeon said, making sure that everyone has a safe, warm and affordable home is central to our government's drive to make this country fairer and more prosperous. I could not agree more, but housing output in Scotland is flatlining. Just over 16,000 homes were built last year. Will you give way, Mr Simpson? A whopping 88 more than the year before. The number of homes being started in the same period fell by 2 per cent. The number of homes being built is more than a third down on 2007 levels. That means that prices and rents are still too high for many people and our youngsters struggle to get their foot on the housing ladder. We need to do more across all tenures and for that we need, again, as Adam Tomkins said, imaginative policies of the kind lacking from this government. Ruth Davidson has called for a new generation of new towns to be built. I live in Scotland's first new town, East Kilbride. It's 70 years old.  To do that, we say that there should be a new national housing and infrastructure agency and a cabinet minister covering the same. That might benefit you, Mr Stewart. Not to override councils, but to lead from the front. Too often things don't get built because of wrangles over who's going to pay for what, so we say we need an infrastructure first approach. Ruth Davidson has highlighted one way of achieving that, land value capture. Again, Presiding Officer, it doesn't sound very sexy. It's really sexy. Using this system could unlock £8.6 billion of additional funds in the Edinburgh city region alone over the next 20 years, according to the Centre for Progressive Capitalism, and at no cost to the public purse. It could be one feature of a dynamic reformed planning system, and using this system or other methods, the new agency would pinpoint and evaluate new development sites, bring ground-field land forward for development, and install any necessary infrastructure. Agency-acquired land could be sold specifically to smaller builders, private rented sector investors, or for self-build and co-ownership, and Scotland lags behind other countries in all those fields. This widening of participation will assist a vibrant SME sector and support the wider economy, but, as Maurice Golden, Miles Briggs and Andy Wightman have said in this debate, we also need to ensure that existing homes are fit for purpose. The Scottish Housing Condition Survey published in December paints a harrowing picture of the current condition of Scotland's housing stock, particularly, certainly. Presiding Officer, I asked Mr Simpson's colleague earlier if he would support our calls to get the UK Government to eradicate VAT from housing repairs, which would help in a great degree in that regard. Will he support our call for that eradication of VAT for housing repairs? Given the state of the housing stock, particularly the stock that was built pre-19, a quarter of Scottish dwellings are in our tenements, given the conditions and some of them are in critical disrepair, some critical urgent and extensive disrepair, all options need to be looked at. We do need a strategy to deal with the condition of tenements. A significant proportion of more recently developed housing is also reaching a similar stage of requiring major repairs. We have got two opportunities to change things, Presiding Officer, through the planning bill and the warm homes bill. The planning system is reactive, it is developer-led. We actually need a system that plans for what we need. It is also true that planning has done two communities and not by communities, so we need to factor in the best standards of design and energy efficiency. We can already build homes that require no central heating. None. I have seen some near Lockerbie, built in a factory at Camberslang by CCG. We should have more homes like this built off-site. The warm homes bill should provide a clear foundation for a new fuel poverty strategy, including the new target date for the eradication of fuel poverty, which affects a third of households in Scotland. We have huge challenges ahead and settling for more of the same is no longer enough. Big challenges require big thinking. We on these benches are up for that. We are proving it, but the Scottish Government is being found wanting. I support the motion in Adam Tonkin's name. Thank you very much. That concludes our debate on housing. The next item of business is consideration of two business motions. Motion 647, setting out a business programme in motion 748, on the stage one timetable of a bill. I would ask any member who wishes to speak against the motions to say so now, and I call on Jo Fitzpatrick to move the motions on behalf of the people. Move together. Thank you very much. No member has asked to speak against the motions. The question is therefore that motions 747 and 748 be agreed. Are we all agreed? Thank you. The next item of business is consideration of a power interview in motion 7655 on substitution on committees. I will ask Jo Fitzpatrick to move motion 7655. Thank you very much. Now we come to decision time. There are six questions today. I would remind members that if the amendment in the name of Angela Constance is agreed, then the amendment to the name of Alex Cole-Hamilton would fall. The first question is the amendment 7613.2 in the name of Angela Constance, which seeks to amend motion 7613 in the name of Adam Tonkin to be agreed. Are we all agreed? We are not agreed. We will move to our division and members will cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment 7613.2 in the name of Angela Constance is yes, 61, no, 62. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. I remind members that if the amendment in the name of Pauline McNeill is agreed, then the amendment