Labour will deliver more homes across a range of tenures, increasing supply, tackling homelessness, and ending the housing emergency in Scotland:
- Give greater support for tenants, ensuring a fair private rental sector.
- Stand up for first-time buyers by ripping up the punitive rules locking people out of existing support schemes and using planning rules to deliver cheaper homes.
- Speed up our planning system, fast-tracking projects across the country which are identified as drivers of economic growth.
- Implement a mortgage rescue scheme to provide a safety net for those at risk of losing their homes because of the Tories economic chaos. Our revamped Mortgage to Shared Equity Scheme would mean people can access capital support from the Government to help lower their mortgage payments if they face arrears – paid for by reallocating underspends in the housing budget and revising the funding timeline for the Scottish National Investment Bank.
- Reduce the amount of empty and derelict houses that blight our communities. Our council tax escalator would target tax rises for these properties and we would help councils buy up neglected houses, selling them on for just £1 to future home owners who are committed, with government support, to turning them back into homes that are lived in and loved – paid for by the new taxes we would create for second and empty homes.
- Address the growth in second homes and holiday lets, which take local homes out of the market, Labour will create a 100% council tax surcharge on second homes and close the tax loopholes available to self-catering properties and AirBnBs.