Scottish Parliament local government committee 05-11-24

Edinburgh Evening News

Edinburgh housing director Derek McGowan gives evidence to the Scottish Parliament local government committee on Edinburgh's housing emergency  05-11-24

Transcript

00:00Fundamentally, our emergency was based on homelessness. The number of homeless households

00:06that we had, the number of children and young people who are in temporary emergency accommodation

00:14and the rates of them, and the difficulty in shifting that number and bringing it down.

00:22The factors that feed in there are probably numerous—certainly housing supply, availability

00:28of affordable housing, city factors such as average rents. Average rents in Edinburgh,

00:36say, for a three-bedroom house are about £400 more a month than they are in the rest of the

00:41country. The average house price in Edinburgh is 93 per cent above the national average,

00:47so there are contextual factors in the local economy. There is a realisation that,

00:52without a concerted and focused effort that the emergency declaration would bring,

00:57it would be difficult to challenge them.

01:00Some of the issues around the affordable supply programme, including the level of

01:06funding that is provided to us as a TMDF authority, along with Glasgow City Council,

01:11to disburse that funding to RSLs. The last calculation showed that, in order to build

01:19the number of affordable houses that we needed in the city, there was £693 million more than

01:25we have available. That is the stark reality of the situation. Some of those factors

01:31were instrumental in the declaration, which was agreed unanimously by our council last November.

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