OUT and about in East Lothian last weekend, constituents were voicing positive reactions to First Minister John Swinney and his deputy Kate Forbes.

The declaration of a ‘housing emergency’ spotlights issues responsible for the pyramid of housing inequality, with homelessness at its base and unaffordable properties and second homes at its apex.

The post-war model for social housing plus affordable home ownership was killed off by Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’. This was introduced in 1980, when the SNP had just two MPs at Westminster and devolution was a quarter of a century away.

Right to Buy put two million discounted social homes into private hands, depriving the state of a huge asset.

As a report by the New Economics Foundation reveals, 40 per cent of those previously ‘affordable homes’ are now let by private landlords. In the coastal town of Brighton that proportion is 86 per,cent – a warning to our own coastal county.

In 2014 the SNP Government legislated to scrap Right to Buy in Scotland but, by then, nearly half a million social homes had been lost to those in greatest need.

Our children, grandchildren and those under 40 now belong to ‘generation rent’, priced out of the housing market.

Another report this week revealed that a businessman whose company is paid £3.5 million a day to transport and house asylum seekers is now one of the richest in the UK.

Housing, poverty and deprivation are linked: while the Archbishop of Canterbury is calling for the two-child limit to be scrapped, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won’t commit but the Scottish Government’s Child Payment is already lifting children out of poverty.

This week, I have contacted housing spokespeople in other parties in Holyrood to work collaboratively in dealing with housing issues. I have also contacted housing stakeholders in Scotland, whom I meet with regularly, to engage with myself and each other to address this housing emergency.

Since 2007, Scotland has built 40 per cent more affordable homes per head of population than England, 70 per cent more than Wales.

We all need to be working collaboratively to address the current housing issue.