Graeme Brown: Housing policy must focus on our society's most disadvantaged

It has some real hostages to fortune. It's come late in the parliamentary term, perhaps too late for a government with the thinnest of margins to be confident about implementing.

Nevertheless, let's suspend cynicism awhile. The paper is both welcome and timely. It is welcome because it does not shirk from the scale of the challenges we face: the 16 billion needed to bring Scotland's homes into line with our climate change ambitions; the need for new homes to meet our internationally acclaimed homelessness commitment; the implications of an ageing population.

It is also timely because we have seen the consequences of speculative gambling on the roulette wheel of house-price inflation. The housing-based debt bubble has burst spectacularly and the financial fall-out now frames the way public policy in every area will be discussed for at least the next five years. We must learn from that: and to start seeing housing policy as about providing homes for people and stable communities in which families can grow and thrive.

So does the housing discussion paper do that? Were I a betting man, I would not place money against the housing market returning to a familiar boom and bust cycle, each set of peaks and troughs more amplified than the last. The extent to which we can release Scotland from that addiction is down to us all: builders, developers, landlords, financiers, planners, even individual consumers. Not just government.

However, government has a crucial role. One of the critical questions which the new paper poses is how should government spread its resources in a climate where these are falling for the first time in many years? Should government target its investment on those most disadvantaged by the housing system, or should it seek to spread its spending more thinly?

This, to me, is the central question. The litmus test that future generations will apply to the success of our policy is to what extent it improves the fortunes of that 20 per cent of our population who experience the harshest housing problems; the homeless, children living in below-standard temporary accommodation, women fleeing domestic violence, the poorest and the dispossessed. That means decent homes at costs they can afford: help, where it is needed, to keep a home; an end to the blight of homelessness.

Does that mean the Scottish Government should ignore that other 80 per cent? Emphatically, no. We are where we are today because the housing market as a whole failed and repeat failures should not be tolerated. Government has tools other than tax-payers' millions. Legislation shapes the rules and seeks to align consumer choices with long-term public interest. Information and analysis allows us to make better policy choices. Collection and dissemination of what works means we learn and improve together. And the sheer weight of government can help to forge consensus where hitherto there has seemed to be only competing interests.

It is in this last point that I want to suspend habitual Caledonian cynicism. It is possible that, as discussion of this document proceeds towards hard policy choices, a consensus can be built and maintained – one which rejects the roller-coaster housing market of the last four decades, positions people at the heart of housing policy and forges a housing system Scotland can be justly proud of.

• Graeme Brown is director of Shelter Scotland, housing and homelessness charity.