Labour on probation over housing crisis - Iain Whyte

Councillor Iain Whyte said there was 'no justification' to back the move to remove parking

The allegations about Cllr Day are for the police and the Standards Commission to investigate, but what did Labour achieve under his leadership? And will another member of a shrinking Labour minority improve the council for residents?

Let me take a key example of failure. Labour’s replacement leader, Cllr Jane Meagher, has been Housing Convener for over two years. She famously declared a “housing emergency” a year ago while there were 1200 empty council houses.

That would have been good practice when the council owned 51,000 homes in 1981. It is a shocking indictment of poor delivery when it now has only 20,000.

Edinburgh declared a housing emergency, as cuts were announced in the Scottish Budget

This meant years of illegal use of unsuitable and unlicensed B&B type accommodation to house hundreds of homeless households.

It took the legal team to get a genuinely emergency process to bring the empty homes back into use with 250 tenanted (as temporary accommodation) before Christmas. Yet Labour joined others in still wanting to slow this process up despite the clear legal advice.

We Conservative councillors have reluctantly accepted Labour continuing in office when our proposal to delay the appointment of a council leader was defeated. It was the best ‘worst option’.

However, Labour should consider themselves on notice in 2025. We need a budget in February to modernise our services making them more efficient and more focused on residents’ needs rather than internal practice that’s “aye been”.

And if there is less money around, we need to do what residents tell us and cut the virtue signalling spending and concentrate on the core services.

Last week, in this newspaper, Cllr Meagher promised her “focus [would] remain firmly on getting the basic services like waste, cleansing and transport right”. We will hold her to that.

I wish you a Happy New Year for 2025. Let’s hope it’s a better one for the council too.

Iain Whyte is Conservative group leader on Edinburgh Council​