Housing crisis

Last week Ruth Davidson proposed wide-ranging solutions for Scotland’s housing crisis.

Margaret Thatcher’s selloff of council housing left her open to accusations of hypocrisy, but in fact Harold Macmillan, then Tory housing minister, supported by Labour, is credited with getting 300,000 council houses a year built in the 1950s.

I actually read her speech, which placed housing in the context of other areas needing radical overhaul, such as education, health and energy, where she mentioned the blindingly obvious option, ignored by the SNP; hydro power.

The proposal to build new towns got the headlines but there were other ideas, many from outside the UK, such as enabling people to build their own home, loans to developers to build infrastructure, renovation of 30,000 empty properties, de-cluttering planning rules and making home ownership more “affordable”.

And many people did build their own house, for example my father, one of many tradesmen working for local builders of the Braehead and Preston Road schemes in Linlithgow, who then lived there.

Ms Davidson faces huge challenges, not least the lack of recent precedent. For example, Chapelton, near Stonehaven, is the only “new town” being built in Scotland. It is well laid out with beautiful houses, not the usual rabbit hutches that the big developers churn out, but the starting prices are an astronomic