Liberal Democrats are to develop a new programme to create “attractive, sustainable housing” for key workers, Scottish leader Alex-Cole Hamilton pledged.
Mr Cole-Hamilton vowed to work with businesses and council group leaders in a bid to develop the initiative.
It comes after the Scottish Government declared last week that the country is facing a housing emergency – meanwhile First Minister John Swinney has admitted staffing issues contributed to Portree Hospital on Skye not being open when Eilidh Beaton needed help during a medical emergency.
Mr Cole-Hamilton stressed the importance of housing for key workers such as NHS staff, saying that health boards and care homes “can’t get the staff they need if there are no homes for them”.
In the wake of that he told the Scottish Liberal Democrat conference in Hamilton: “Today I am committing to working with business and our council group leaders to develop a new programme for key worker housing.”
He promised party supporters the scheme would seek to provide “attractive sustainable housing, reserved for the key workers our communities need”.
The commitment came as he hit out at the Scottish Government for cutting the funding available for affordable housing in Holyrood’s budget.
Mr Cole-Hamilton said this had come “at a time when homelessness is at a record high, there are 10,000 children living in temporary accommodation, and hundreds of thousands of people on housing waiting lists”.
Meanwhile he claimed Scottish Government policies were “scaring off the investment Scotland needs” in housing.
He said: “Industry experts tell me that £3.3 billion of reliable investment in housebuilding has either been lost or put on hold, some of it shovel-ready, because of the decisions of the SNP/Green Government.
“It’s one of the key reasons that affordable housebuilding has collapsed, dragging Scotland back to levels not seen since Margaret Thatcher.”
While he insisted the SNP “have been in power too long” – after first taking charge at Holyrood in 2007 – Mr Cole-Hamilton said he would work with the First Minister on areas where there is “common ground”.
The Scottish Lib Dem leader said: “My message to John Swinney is this. I’m in politics to get things done. To change things for the better.”
He said Lib Dems would only have talks with the SNP “on the issues that matter to our communities” and which are in line with the party’s “values as liberals”.
With Mr Swinney now heading a minority government at Holyrood, Mr Cole-Hamilton was clear, saying that “for me, sitting on the opposition benches doesn’t mean opposing for opposition’s sake”.
But he also told the First Minister Liberal Democrats would still seek to hold the Government to account “where it falls short”.
Mr Cole-Hamilton added: “In a Parliament of minorities, where every vote matters, we will never shy away from exercising our vote and our voices.”
He also warned the new First Minister he could face a “day of reckoning” over deleted messages during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Mr Swinney, as the then deputy first minister, was at the heart of Scottish Government decisions.
Complaining that “ministers never take responsibility for their actions any more”, Mr Cole-Hamilton said his party would campaign for a new Accountability Act.
He said such legislation would “break open the scandal of government by WhatsApp, expand freedom of information and create the right for people to recall their MSPs”.
This he said would “put power back in the hands of the voters, end the culture of secrecy and spin, and fix our broken politics”.
Meanwhile with a general election looming, he said Liberal Democrats could overtake the SNP to once again become the third largest party in the House of Commons.
In Scotland he said his party would be “taking a paint to the acid yellow wall of the SNP and repainting it good old Lib Dem gold”.
Mr Cole-Hamilton told supporters: “We’ve beaten the SNP before, we know how to do it and we will do it again.”
He added: “It is absolutely within our grasp to overtake the Scottish National Party, with more liberals than nationalists in the Parliament to come.”
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