James Kelly MSP

Every single person deserves a decent and affordable home.

This should not be considered a luxury or laughed off as fantasy, this is and should be a right for everyone.

There is a housing crisis in Scotland. With overcrowding and a lack of suitable accommodation for families and people with disabilities, there are at least 150,000 households on waiting lists for housing.

Scotland not only needs more homes but more of the right homes.

Independent research by Shelter has identified that 60,000 homes will need to be built by 2021 to address this crisis.

This is something that Scottish Labour is absolutely committed to delivering, ensuring everyone can have a home.

We need tens of thousands of new homes, but these have to be high quality and affordable.

We cannot carry on building new houses that are either extortionate and only available to a select few; nor can we allow poor housing to continue and with rogue landlords dominating the market.

Scottish Labour would make different choices than both the Tories in London and SNP in Edinburgh.

We would reinstate housing benefit for the under-21s that was so cruelly cut by the Conservative government.

We would correct the SNP’s mistakes in government. Since 2007 nearly £4 billion of housing benefit has been spent in the private rented sector.

We would establish a national house-building strategy which sets out the numbers of houses to be built in each area and allows for proper planning and delivery.

This strategy also means planning local jobs and apprenticeships around the programme.

A Labour government would oversee the most radical, and the largest, housebuilding programme since the second world war, investing to build over a million new homes across the UK.

This will provide resources to the Labour, Glasgow region Scottish Government to invest in Scotland’s housing stock.

Labour will not only build more homes, we will build better homes. We will insulate more homes to help people manage the cost of energy bills, to reduce preventable winter deaths, and to meet our climate change targets.

Our local candidate in the Rutherglen Central and North by-election, Martin Lennon, is campaigning for 1,000 new homes to be built across South Lanarkshire and is fighting to bring more social housing to Rutherglen.

This is yet another reason to vote Labour on 23 November and elect a hard-working local councillor.