Escalating housing crisis is Scotland's shame

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The soaring numbers of people in Scotland’s housing emergency are a blight on our country. When the real-life examples of people such as Michelle Kerr are raised the horrifying impact is made clear.

The mum-of-three has told how she was forced to cook in a bathroom while stuck in temporary accommodation after registering as homeless in Glasgow. Michelle described how she relied on a hotel room kettle to boil eggs or noodles to feed her family.

Scared of setting off the fire alarm, she would only open the kettle lid when in the bathroom. It’s an appalling situation for a family to face in 2024 but one that sums up the indignities too many people are facing every day.

Michelle described the process of homeless Scots being put through B&Bs or hotels as like a conveyor belt. And the number of families caught up in the system is rising due to a desperate shortage of affordable accommodation across the country.

Glasgow City Council recently abandoned plans to stop using B&Bs or hotels to house families. But the pressure on the homelessness system and fewer available housing options means councils are increasingly reliant on unsuitable temporary accommodation to house people forced into homelessness.

The Scottish Government must work with housing associations and councils as an urgent priority to address this scandal and fast. It’s simply not fair that thousands of children are spending weeks in cramped hotel rooms. We owe it to Michelle and other mums like her to find a permanent solution.

Kemi’s Bad start

Kemi Badenoch was only Tory leader for a matter of hours before she made her first gaffe. The right-wing MP used her first broadcast interview as leader to claim the Partygate scandal that brought down Boris Johnson in 2021 was “overblown”.

She also claimed that bungling buffoon Boris had been a “great” prime minister. In case Badenoch has forgotten, her party recently suffered a catastrophic defeat at the general election.

One of the reasons for that was the very real anger many people felt when Johnson and his cronies were found to have repeatedly broken lockdown rules. The repeated incompetence of Johnson’s administration was bad enough, only for it be followed by Liz Truss almost crashing the economy.

Badenoch had a difficult enough job in convincing voters that her party had changed. A tone-deaf defence of a disgraced prime minister has just made that job even harder.

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