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