Your location: Call for more affordable rented housing
23 June 2008
Public investment in affordable rented housing is needed more than ever as the credit crunch bites in Scotland, a major conference has been told.
The current slow down in the private house building market could provide affordable housing providers with opportunities to take up the slack.
At Shelter's annual conference, 'Homelessness: four years and counting', Minister for Communities and Sport, Stewart Maxwell, lead a range of invited speakers from the world of housing, as they debated how best to reach the homeless target of 2012.
Shelter Scotland is calling for the following actions to be prioritised to help meet the 2012 homelessness target:
- The Scottish Government must undertake a full stocktake on progress on homelessness to ensure that this pioneering programme stays on track and continues to enhance Scotland’s reputation abroad.
- Greater public investment in affordable rented housing. Shelter, along with other housing bodies in Scotland, believes a minimum of 10,000 additional affordable rented homes a year are needed.
- Scottish Ministers should push for creative options to ensure a greater number of affordable lets are available in the housing system. This includes pressing housing associations to help house more homeless people, and using private landlords to fulfil a semi-social role, involving longer-term lets, higher management standards, and measures to address high rents.
- Homelessness prevention - ie ways to stop people becoming homeless in the first place, for example, reducing evictions, improving housing benefit payments and providing support to keep people in their homes - should continue to be a priority.
- Further reform of the Right to Buy to ensure that councils can determine how best the policy should fit with the needs of their area.
