Keeping a roof over your head
Scottish government announces new money for council houses. House-builders talk of crisis. Shelter talks of ministerial failure.
What's going on? Firstly, a Westminster election. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖs for Scotland, the construction industry body, wants to influence MPs and would-be MPs with regard to mortgages and tax.
In particular, it is pressing for fundamental reform of stamp duty plus tax incentives for private rented accommodation to counter the sluggishness verging on lethargy which it is experiencing in the wider housing market.
But it highlights that by warning the Scottish government will be unable to meet house building targets unless things ease.
Secondly, there is the issue of the Scottish government budget.
Yes, the minister Alex Neil has announced that extra cash, drawn from Barnett consequentials, will be converted into council housing investment with authorities invited to bid.
Yes, the capital investment over three years in housing has been some £1.7bn.
Treasury rebuff
However, in the budget secured by John Swinney last week, housing suffers one of the biggest cuts.
Year-on-year, compared with 2009-10, the money allocated to housing for 2010-11 is substantially down in both capital and revenue accounts.
You can say - Alex Neil does today - that this is largely because funding accelerated to other years has to be repaid in 2010-11.
Remember Scottish ministers pressed for further acceleration and were rebuffed by the Treasury.
However, it is also the case that John Swinney and his team made choices within the money allocated to them.
Glance at table three in the annexe to the Scottish Budget (already your daily reading, I feel sure.)
You will see that, overall, health is protected while housing is not. Now, of course, housing is relatively capital-dependent and thus particularly vulnerable to the acceleration issue.
Social housing
It is, however, also partly a question of choice.
That is where the Shelter criticism comes in. They welcome the money diverted to affordable housing but note that it "failed" to address the emerging "hole" in the wider housing budget.
There is a range of further issues here.
House construction soaks up labour and enhances the economy - but is it universally welcome? Or should we target social housing in particular? Or, as ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖs for Scotland argue, is private housing often developed in tandem with social housing?
Is the big problem productive social investment?
Or does the real blockage lie in the mortgage market: those pesky banks again? Could the UK government do more to ease credit availability?
Not easy - but germane.
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In response to the blog, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations set out its position on the issue of affordable homes.
Here is what the organisation had to say:
Dear Brian,
Today's edition of your blog - Keeping a roof over your head - neatly comes to the nub of the problem when arguing for more money for affordable housing - as the SFHA has done consistently over the last 12 months.
On the one hand, the Scottish government has stuck to its commitment to spend £1.7bn over three years (as set out in the 2006 Comprehensive Spending Review), enabling it to claim that the budget has not changed.
On the other hand, £120m from this year's budget was accelerated to cope with the effects of the recession, into the two previous financial years - meaning that this year, when we are scarcely out of recession, there is £120m less to spend on building homes than we otherwise would have had.
That's why opposition parties and campaign groups have branded it a cut.
The Scottish Federation of Housing Association's consistent position has been for MSPs and the Scottish Government to close this gap by reinstating the £120m to the budget.
Housing currently enjoys only around 1.6 per cent of the total Scottish Budget.
Your blog, on the other hand, overlooked the primary builders and managers of affordable housing in Scotland - housing associations and co-operatives.
Associations are the main builders of new homes, manage around half of Scotland's affordable housing stock, and receive public subsidy through the Affordable Housing Investment Programme (AHIP).
In the 2010-11 Budget, this year's AHIP will drop will drop to £471m from £675m in 2009-10.
For every pound of public subsidy housing associations receive, they lever in approximately an extra pound from private finance.
However, our members face the twin threat of more difficult-to-obtain private finance and the effort of front-funding development projects.
Currently our members are front-funding around £100m of new build projects.
Housing associations are now facing gaps opening up in their budgets for 2010-11 and beyond.
There is a danger that affordable house building, which has been bridging some of the gap created by the slump in private developments, will fall significantly - at a time when demand for homes, especially affordable homes, is extremely high.
According to the Scottish Housing Regulator (April 09) there are 285,662 people on waiting lists for Registered Social Landlords.
We also have an all-party commitment to ending involuntary homelessness by 2010 to take into consideration, as well as the strong economic multiplier effects of building new housing, for a country which is struggling to emerge from recession.
The SFHA will continue to campaign for a greater share of the Scottish Budget to be spent on building new homes and creating sustainable communities.
I'm 
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