Hopeless future

One in four Scots is so worried about covering the cost of their housing that they fear they’ll have to default on a mortgage or rent payment, according to a new poll. Shelter, who commissioned the poll, said hundreds of thousands of Scots were living on a “knife edge”.

Adam Lang, from Shelter Scotland, said it was “a worrying sign of the times”. Shelter, he said, had seen a jump in the number of calls to the organisation. In 2014, they took 21,284 calls, up from 19,906 in 2013.

Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale will say in a speech that young people in Scotland have “left behind by austerity” which has made the prospect of owning a house unrealistic. The press release of her speech says: “For too many young couples in Scotland today, buying a house isn’t a realistic prospect. A lot of young people are stuck in a cycle from which there appears to be no escape. They decide to rent a flat to save for a deposit to buy a house, but the rent is too high so they can’t save much for that deposit, which means they continue to pay the high rent for years to come. Lots of young people now live at home with their parents well into their thirties, as it’s the only realistic prospect of ever being able to save for a house. The price of austerity has been that aspiration has stalled for a whole generation.”