A Scottish housing charity plans to tell the government to uncover the full extent of the country’s housing crisis at the SNP conference in Perth.

Shelter Scotland will tell the new Scottish Housing Minister Margaret Burgess that the government needs to "initiate new, in-depth research aimed at identifying the real number of new social homes Scotland needs."

Gordon McRae, Head of Communications and Policy at Shleter Scotland will be talking alongside the Minister at a fringe event organised by Home Scotland for October 19.

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Gordon MacRae was speaking ahead of the conference, entitled 'Meeting Scotland's 21st Century housing needs'.

He said: "There is now broad political consensus that a solution is urgently needed for Scotland's housing crisis - in particular the lack of social housing. The shortage across Scotland is well-documented, but the full scale of the problem and what is needed to solve the crisis is not known.

"The last study of how many homes we need to build each year was 10,000 and that was nearly ten years' ago - before the world recession and banking meltdown, not to mention Westminster's destructive welfare reform programme.

"What we do know is that housing of all tenures is needed - from one to four-bedroom social houses, to new-build affordable homes to rent. What we don't know is exactly how many and where.

"I urge the new Housing Minister to back our call for new research into the full scale of the crisis and then, when the picture is clear, invest in a long-term house building programme aimed at ending Scotland's housing crisis for good."

(IT)