Too many children with no place to call home - Ian Murray

​In March 3817 households were in temporary accommodation in Edinburgh

And 1535 of those households have a child or a pregnant woman, and in total 2955 children are stuck with no place to call their own. That figure has steadily risen year after year.

This is a moral scar on our communities. Our first duty should be to keep our children safe and give them the best possible start in life, and yet here in our capital almost three thousand kids don’t have that.

It is a scandal that families in Edinburgh are being left in limbo for months and even years. No-one should have to spend their childhood dealing with the anxiety and insecurity of temporary accommodation, but that is the heartbreaking reality of the SNP’s housing emergency.

Building more homes with infrastructure is the key driver to reducing poverty and growing our economy. It will create jobs, economic growth and deliver social justice. The UK Labour government has unveiled a suite of ambitious measures to get housing built in England. By comparison in Scotland, housebuilding is down by 17 per cent in a single year and new starts, including affordable housing, are at an 11-year low.

This is an appalling failure and that’s why yesterday my Labour colleagues in the Scottish Parliament held a debate around the housing emergency in Scotland.

What is astonishing, however, is this is the second time they have had to do so this year, with the Scottish Parliament in May voting to declare a housing emergency and yet the only response from the SNP was to further slash the affordable housing budget. In fact, the SNP housing minister insisted that the government had a “good track record” on homelessness. The figures and my postbag disagree.

I’m not sure how nearly 3000 children in Edinburgh, and 10,000 across Scotland having no home to call their own reflects that good track record. Growing up in a council flat in Wester Hailes, I know how much that permanent roof over my head helped my life chances and that of my family.

Another way to ensure families have the best start in life is paying maternity pay to mums. That’s a sentence so staggeringly obvious I can’t believe I am writing it and yet favoured Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch seems to believe this is excessive. She said on radio that: “Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for but statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive.”

These comments underline how hopelessly out of touch the Tories are with working people’s lives, and how dangerous some of their ideas are. That’s why Scotland voted to kick out the Tories this year and deliver a Labour Government with Scotland at its heart – but it’s also a reminder of why we can never go back to the chaos of the Tories.

Ian Murray is Labour MP for Edinburgh South and Secretary of State for Scotland