Housing secretary pledges almost £5bn for housing over the next five years

Scotland’s housing secretary has pledged almost £5 billion of cash over the next five years to build around 36,000 affordable homes.

Setting out an emergency action plan, Mairi McAllan told MSPs that housing supply was under “unprecedented strain”.

To help with this she promised the Scottish Government will invest £4.9 billion over the coming four years, adding this could provide “up to 24,000 children with a warm, safe home”.

More details of the funding will be announced in the forthcoming spending review, but McAllan said the money would be a “mixture of public and privately leveraged investment”.

Looking ahead to the first three years of the next Scottish Parliament, she said SNP ministers wanted to increase delivery across all parts of the housing sector “by at least 10% each year”.

However, a report earlier from key housing organisations said that Scotland needs to see an “almost doubling” of the number of affordable homes being built.

Research for Shelter Scotland, the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) Scotland and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA) found that the country needs 15,693 new, affordable homes to be delivered every year between 2026 and 2031.

This would cost “in the region of £8 billion to £9.2 billion”, the report added.

As it was published, Callum Chomczuk, national director of CIH Scotland, said there needs to be a “step change in how we deliver and fund social housing”, pointing out that in 2024 Scotland “only delivered 8,188 homes”.

McAllan, in her first statement to Holyrood since becoming the first ever Scottish Housing Secretary in June this year, stressed the importance of providing people across the country with a “safe, secure, warm and affordable place to call home”.

As well as the £4.9 billion investment in affordable housing, she promised the Scottish Government would double funding for housing acquisitions this year to £80 million.

This should allow councils to acquire approximately 1,200 properties over 18 months, potentially helping 600 to 800 children out of temporary accommodation.

Adding that “no-one in Scotland – and especially no child – should have to live with damp or mould,” McAllan pledged that Awaab’s law will be implemented from March 2026

Named after Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old who died after exposure to mould in his Rochdale home in 2020, this will seek to ensure landlords promptly address issues that could be hazardous to tenants.

To help those fleeing domestic violence, McAllan promised the government would establish a national “fund to leave” with £1 million – saying this could help up to 1,200 women and their children leave an abusive relationship.

Meanwhile, £4m this year will go on expanding Housing First tenancies, which provide permanent homes along with support for those who have been homeless and who have “multiple and complex needs”.

The housing secretary went on to pledge £500,000 for “winter preparedness measures” in a bid to ensure homeless people can “get a suitable bed for the night in the cold winter months”.

She highlighted these as being “bold actions” in her housing emergency action plan, with McAllan saying she wanted to “turn commitment into action, and action into early, positive and lasting change”.

However, Labour housing spokesperson Mark Griffin said the strategy she had delivered “lacks ambition”.

He said: “The promise to move children out of temporary accommodation is welcome, but the SNP’s plan still consigns at least 9,200 kids to these shameful conditions.”

Also criticising ministers for a lack of action on planning, he declared: “This is still too little, too late, and it will not tackle the housing emergency the SNP created.”

Conservative housing spokesperson Meghan Gallacher also hit out, and said: “The SNP need to go much further and faster in tackling the housing emergency, but these measures will do very little to achieve this.”

Meanwhile, Shelter Scotland director Alison Watson told how 2.3 million adults across the country had been affected by the housing emergency – adding there were 10.360 children “trapped in temporary accommodation”.

She stated: “Scotland urgently needs an action plan with long-term investment to fix a broken and biased system.

“At least 15,693 affordable homes a year is the bare minimum if the Scottish Government is serious about tackling homelessness and getting children out of harmful accommodation. We simply cannot afford not to do it.”

SFHA chief executive Sally Thomas said: “The research is clear: ending the housing emergency is going to require building a lot more social homes and a radical and sustained increase in the housing budget.

“Put simply, we need around 15,693 social and affordable homes per year and total public investment of at least £8.2 billion over the course of the next parliament.”