HOUSING CRISIS OF LABOUR'S OWN MAKING SAYS SNP SPOKESPERSON

Falkirk Council's SNP Housing Spokesperson, Cllr John McNally, has hit out at the handling of the Housing crisis by the current Labour / Tory Coalition Administration.

Speaking to the SNP website, Cllr McNally said,

"For ten years the Labour Party in government ignored the need for a radical change from the Tory agenda of running down public sector housing.

They shared the Tory vision of a property owning society, a vision that has created the housing nightmare for thousands of local families and now they are panicked into ill conceived knee jerk responses without tackling the core problem.

Warnings that current policies on council housing allocations would lead to people having no choice but to declare themselves homeless were ignored when the policy was introduced in January this year. Now Falkirk has twice the increase of individuals presenting themselves as homeless than the national average.

"The latest panic reaction to withdraw 105 houses from the allocation pool is being driven because of the failure of existing Labour policy.

The Falkirk Herald may have been fooled into thinking this is a positive move but what it means is that 105 families are going to be offered temporary tenancies instead of permanent."

Despite being allocated £1m by the SNP Government to purchase properties within the private sector for homeless applicants not one single property has been purchased, nor has the Falkirk Herald carried the news of the cash bonus. Instead the paper has perpetuated the myth that Falkirk Council are to build 300 new houses over the next four years when the actual figure is 100.