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Scotland 50,000 homes target ‘is achievable’
The Scottish Government will meet its target to deliver 50,000 affordable homes by 2021, a civil servant overseeing the programme has insisted.
Fears that the goal could be missed were raised last month after official figures revealed a 6% drop in affordable housing starts from April to June this year compared with the same period in 2016/17.
But Deborah Smith, deputy director of the Scottish Government’s More Homes division, moved to allay those concerns.
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She said: “Clearly we are building up intelligence and information as we proceed through the five years of the programme. And I think what I have been saying, with increasing certainty I think, over the past year, is that the target is achievable.
“It is at the challenging end of deliverability but we genuinely think we can do it. This isn’t a figure that’s plucked out of the air.
“We think the target can be achieved and we have increasing confidence of that as time goes on, but we’re also realistic about the limitations of that confidence because we can’t deliver it on our own.”
She was speaking at the Social Housing Finance Conference Scotland in Glasgow today.
Ministers committed to the target for the 2016 to 2021 Scottish Parliament term last year, setting aside £3bn of investment in total.
It is a significant increase on the previous term goal of 30,000, which was eventually exceeded by around 10%.
Ms Smith said the Scottish Government would like to repeat that success, but added: “Clearly all the low-hanging fruit is gone, so this gets increasingly more difficult to achieve.”
In July, Scottish housing minister Kevin Stewart came under fire for admitting the target would include councils buying back homes from the private sector, as well as new builds.
