LESLEY Riddoch’s article on the Highland housing crisis recalled unhappy experiences for my wife and me. This was not in the Highlands, but in Dumfries and Galloway, where rural communities face the same problem.

Newly out of college in Edinburgh, where I grew up, and about to be married, I got a teaching post in rural Kirkcudbrightshire. At first I boarded with a local family but had only a few months to find something suitable as our own place before the date of our marriage. Easier said than done!

Surplus farm cottages were being snapped up as holiday homes, or farmers would only offer short-term winter lets because they could charge higher summer rents to tourists.

We had a tricky start to our marriage with a series of short lets, and often considered giving up and moving back to Edinburgh. Fortunately I got a promotion as head teacher of another small rural school, and with the post came a four-bedroom schoolhouse, though I totally understand that most young people in our position were not so lucky.

OK, we were “incomers”, but bringing new young blood to the area, doing useful jobs and potentially starting a family– which we did!

Those experiences were defining moments in our lives and led us to join the SNP as a party which, once it held the levers of power, would seriously address these issues. At SNP Conferences in the 70s speakers often passionately denounced the injustices of the rural housing situation in Scotland, which gave real hope to people like us.

I now have been a member of the SNP for 50 years, have held various office-bearer positions in branches, as well as having been an SNP district councillor for four years in the 90s and a Dumfries and Galloway councillor for 10 years until recently.

One of the best things the party has done while in power was to stop the ‘right to buy’ of council and housing association houses in Scotland. But I agree with Lesley Riddoch that that is not enough.

If Holyrood had the power to do this, is it not also possible to legislate to restrict second home ownership, and to reserve a certain percentage of properties for locals and key workers, both for rent and to buy, as is done, I believe, in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man?

Otherwise might we be waking up on Day One of independence to a Scotland where there are few young permanent residents in areas north and south of the Central Belt?
Alastair Witts
New Abbey, by Dumfries

YET again Lesley Riddoch is ahead of the politicians, this time in acknowledging the housing crisis in the Highlands.

The crisis is however a serious problem throughout all rural Scotland where those who require housing in the countryside are increasingly forced toward affordable housing in towns and cities or temporary accommodation in the background of the centre of work, be it farm steading, hospitality unit or visitor attraction.

This problem was made clear to me many years ago on Skye where home-help staff to cater for the large expensive, often second home new houses being built at Armadale had little choice but to travel the 16 miles back and forth to Broadford.

Frankly, housing policy throughout rural Scotland shall remain unsustainable if entirely reliant on market forces unhindered by national policy.

But its not just housing, the problem begins with landownership as long as landowners effectively control development.

Having been clocked into planning for over 50 years, I came to conclusion in 1972 that planning, in particular with regard to housing was largely under control of landowners and developers, if not one and the same. It seems to me that market forces must not be dominant ahead of the social context with regard to housing, sustainability and landownership itself.
Tom Gray
Braco