Affordable Homes Programme

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing the debate. He made an excellent speech, as did all the other speakers.

It might not be obvious why I am going to take my contribution in this direction, but I am going to outline a situation that developed recently in my constituency, which has a link to housing and should be aired publicly. Today I spoke to Councillor Michael Baird, who represents North, West and Central Sutherland, one of the biggest wards in the United Kingdom. It is 1,800 square miles—the size of three Greater Londons and 18 Edinburghs. It is vast.

Michael has outlined to me a harrowing situation. He and his fellow councillors have one facility for the elderly in the entire ward—in that vast area. It is called Caladh Sona and is in the tiny village of Talmine on the north coast of Scotland. It has six care beds and, at the moment, four residents. NHS Highland has announced that it will close the facility in 12 weeks, and the residents will be moved to the two nearest homes, one of which is in Thurso, 47 miles away, whereas the other—if they can get beds—is in Golspie, 62 miles away. I think about those old people being moved and about their families, their loved ones, trying to see them. It is a lot harder with distances such as that.

I think also about the remaining staff. They have been offered jobs somewhere else, but will have to move from their community or make long commutes, sometimes in pretty dreadful winter weather. This is happening because the home cannot get the staff needed to run it, and that is because—this is where I return to the agenda—there is not the housing. If a house comes on the market on the north coast of Sutherland, it is snapped up as a holiday home or becomes an Airbnb. It is so like what everyone else is saying. If we cannot get the carers, we are in real trouble.

To echo what everyone has said this afternoon, if young people’s families cannot get an affordable home, they will not live there, and that means that school rolls drop and we have that old, dark monster of depopulation, which we had for far too long—for hundreds of years in the highlands. People up sticks and away. They go to Canada, Australia and America and never come back. That is one reason why we have a diaspora of Scots all over the world.

What can we do about it? It is ironic that we have one of the greatest sources of renewable energy, that is, land-based wind farms, in my constituency. Some of the money that the wind farms make could help the local authority—the Highland Council—a housing association or whatever to buy properties when they come on the market. An old expression we used to use has already been referred to: key worker housing. That is the key. Even if they come up for only five days a week, if we can offer a carer somewhere to live that they can afford, we will go some way to looking after the old people. As the oldest member of my party in this place, I can remember when houses were being built in the 1960s in my hometown of Tain. They were going up and it was great. There was hope that people would be housed, but the situation is very different today.

I will conclude with what the hon. Member for Slough said: we need a renewed national effort. By goodness, we certainly do. I am aware that housing is devolved, but I am sure that Members who belong to the Scottish Government’s party would admit that there is a major problem, just as hon. Members have described this afternoon. There has to be a renewed national effort. It has to involve all the nations of the United Kingdom, and we have to get it going, because if we do not, we are going back to the bad old days of our past. That is something that we thought was dead, buried and gone forever, but it seems to have come back. Action has to be taken.