Holyrood allocates more money for housing in Edinburgh

The council’s Housing Convener, Kate Campbell, has welcomed news that The Scottish Government has increased the amount of funding available for housing by £3million.

After the Scottish Budget delivered last week at Holyrood which included a £17 million increase in support for affordable homes, a top up of £300 million has been committed to all local authorities for 2021-2022.

SNP Councillor Campbell said: “We were expecting to receive around £45 million from the Scottish Government for social housing but the commitment confirms this will in fact to rise to over £48 million.

“This is the single biggest investment towards our housing on record for a starting budget and will support our own ambitious programme to deliver thousands of new and better homes for our residents.

“This announcement is to be welcomed and we will continue to work with the Scottish Government, locally and as a regional housing partnership, to secure as much grant funding as possible.

“We urgently need to keep building and delivering new homes to meet our city’s unique housing pressures and we’ll continue to prioritise and develop communities like Pennywell. We’ve recently invested £150 million towards creating a new school, medical practice and town centre in the area alongside mixed use housing. This includes 575 affordable new homes of which close to 200 are complete and have seen families move in.”

Conservative Group finance spokesman Cllr Graham Hutchison told The Edinburgh Reporter : “The announced increase in funding from The Scottish Government to help address housing pressures is indeed welcome.  These headline announcements however should not detract from the fact that the Scottish Government continues to chronically underfund our capital city.”

There is a meeting of the Finance and Resources Committee on Friday when the city’s revenue budget and spending plans will be debated. The agreed measures will then be referred to the meeting of the full council next week on 20 February 2020.