Professor John Robertson OBA

Thanks to Dottie once more alerting me to this:

In the Guardian today, the above and:

The stats are stark: families on Bath and North East Somerset council’s social housing list face a 200-year wait for a four-bedroom property and the latest available figures show England is building just a little over 10,000 social homes a year.

Tackling this crisis was a key element of Labour’s election promise to build 1.5m homes over five years, with the government in July announcing plans to spend £39bn building 300,000 affordable homes over a decade, 60% of them for social rent.

But hopes of hitting these targets are fading. In London, housebuilding of all kinds has pretty much stalled, prompting the housing secretary, Steve Reed, and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, to announce a controversial package last week that cuts from 35% to 20% the percentage of affordable units a site needs in order for it to be fast-tracked.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/31/stalled-newbuilds-labour-social-housing-target-out-of-reach-uk

I’m guessing the Guardian chose a four-bedroom request to get that big number.

In Glasgow where the demand is greatest in Scotland, 4-bedroom units make up a small but unspecified fraction of stock (focused on families with multiple children or specific needs). Typically the wait would be around 5 years or 2 years in priority cases. Across Scotland, the wait would be nearer 1 year.

https://www.gov.scot/collections/homelessness-statistics/

https://www.housingregulator.gov.scot/

What are Glasgow Council and the Scottish Government doing about this in contrast to Labour’s failure in England?

Scottish Government’s one-year 26% increase in funding for affordable (70% social) housing is not dramatic enough to mention it seems

SNP-run Glasgow City built 110 times more social rent homes than Labour-run Liverpool last year