LAST week I spoke to a young recent graduate employed in the NHS. Working in Edinburgh, she loves her job in a large city hospital where she treats cancer patients and wants to build a long-term career in our greatest national institution. 

Like many recent graduates, she left university saddled with a high level of student debt, paid out mostly to private landlords for exorbitant levels of rent. 

Having spent two years flat-sharing with friends who have now moved to other cities, she found herself having to look for her fifth flatshare in as many years. 

With zero prospect of social housing (there are around 22,000 people on the City of Edinburgh Council housing waiting list) and with private rents sitting at £813 for one-bedroom properties and £1,191 per month for a two-bed, she was forced into looking into buying a home in the city’s white-hot property market. 

This situation made me reflect on my own situation almost 35 years ago. At 17 I put my name on my local council’s housing waiting list. 

Then applicants received points for having a “local connection,” a good system that recognised people who wanted to stay connected to the community they were brought up or work in. 

I was then awarded further waiting time points on the anniversary of my application up to the point when my name came to the top of the list. 

At 19 I was allocated a newly refurbished housing association flat, but was allowed to remain on the council list. 

I happily stayed in that flat for around two to three years before being allocated a one-bedroomed upstairs flat in a traditional four-in-a-block council property — the rent was £21 per week. 

The flat had a coal fire and crap windows, but it was a very good home with a garden near the centre of the village. It was well-built and affordable and allowed my wife and I to begin building our family life. 

When my daughter came along, space was tight and we needed another room and despite many attempts to secure a swap to a larger council tenancy, we were forced to buy a house with the help of a grant that was awarded as long as we handed back the council tenancy, which we duly did. 

The slashing of investment in social housing, combined with decades of sales under the Tory “right to buy” scheme, deregulation of the private rented sector, an explosion of short-term lets and outright profiteering of landlords has meant that for the vast majority of young people who want to leave home and live independently, social housing is simply not an option. 

Someone in the same circumstances as me in the late ’80s would have zero chance of being allocated a council or housing association property. 

In almost all areas local connection and waiting time points are a thing of the past. With a hugely depleted housing stock, points are now awarded on criteria that prioritise those in serious housing crisis, emergency situations or other significant social need. 

An application from the young NHS worker would be deemed as “an aspirational move” and see her receive zero points. 

She is in the same boat as millions of other young people who want to leave their parents’ home and stand on their own two feet. 

With no access to social housing, they need to raise tens of thousands of pounds for a deposit on a home which saddles them with a lifetime of debt as average house prices hit £318,000. 

Where on Earth are working-class young people to get a £60,000 deposit? If graduate health professionals cannot afford these spiralling housing costs then the low-paid have no chance. 

Many of these are people whose families have lived in Edinburgh for generations, now forced to move out of their city to find a home of their own. 

Such social cleansing is not new, the madness of the London property sector is now being replicated in Scotland’s capital. 

We cannot continue like this — the housing crisis is here and now. 

We need a:

• Massive national investment programme
• An end to the short-term lets free-for-all
• A real and genuine private-sector rents freeze
• A suite of regulation of the private rented sector
• Council and housing tenancies becoming a genuine option for all
• The end to build to rent funding for the private sector with cash reinvested in the public sector build to rent
• All homes built to the highest energy-efficiency standards
• A programme to turn vacant town centre shops into public housing 
• A housing innovation fund to develop new forms of housing
• Investment in the upkeep of the public realm 

Good-quality, warm, affordable housing is essential if we are to build a cohesive society — the system is broken, we need radical change. 

Neil Findlay is a former MSP and is now director of Unity Consulting Scotland, a not-for-profit social enterprise.