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Glasgow Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
19 amazing pictures as festival-goers arrive at Glasgow's TRNSMT 2025
The three-day event kicked off at 12pm today (July 11) with hundreds of people arriving in their best festival outfits. The first day of this years TRNSMT will see headliners 50 Cent and The Script take to the main stage, with Wet Leg, Jamie Webster and Twin Atlantic also among artists who will perform there today. READ NEXT: LIVE updates from TRNSMT 2025 as artist pulls out and crowds arrive (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) Temperatures are expected to reach 27 degrees today, with those attending being urged to stay hydrated and apply plenty sunscreen. Our photographer Gordon Terris captured these shots as excited revellers arrived at the festival. Can you spot yourself in the pictures? (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times)
Glasgow Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
Cast and crew spotted filming on Glasgow street for BBC show
Production members and camera equipment lined the street as filming commenced for the new season of BBC comedy, Dinosaur. Created by Matilda Curtis and Ashley Storrie, it follows Nina, a woman in her 30s with autism, who adores her life living with her sister, Evie. The show also stars Kat Ronney as Evie, Kate Dickie and David Carlyle, with Still Game's Greg Hemphill and Sanjeev Kohli and River City's Sally Howitt in supporting roles. Ashley Storrie filming new series of Dinosaur in Glasgow's West End (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) READ MORE: Filming crews take over Glasgow street for new BBC comedy Ashley was seen being filmed at the entrance to a tenement flat and on the streets outside. She was also spotted filming alongside Kat Rooney, who plays Evie in the show. In the previous series, Evie rushes into an engagement after only six weeks and makes Nina her maid of honour, Nina grapples with what this new challenge means, leading to a surprising journey of self-discovery. Kat Rooney and Ashley Storrie on set (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) READ MORE: Still Game and River City stars join cast of sitcom filming in Glasgow READ MORE: Hundreds of homes water supply interrupted for hours In her 2019 Edinburgh Fringe show, Ashley said her own autism is "what makes me me ... I'm very good at hiding it. I've got what's called 'masking'. Ladies are very good at hiding autism, it's when we put on a muggle face and we can pretend to be normal.' BBC Comedy and BBC Scotland picked up the Glasgow-set six-part first series for BBC Three and the BBC Scotland Channel, and it's expected that the second season will be on the same platforms. Road restrictions have been in place since July 6 and will remain in effect until August 1. The restrictions are as follows: Prohibition of waiting, loading and unloadingFrom 15:00hrs on the 6 July 2025 until 20:00hrs on the 7 July 2025 Mansfield Street between property number 22 and Dumbarton Road Prohibition of vehicle movementsFrom 06:00hrs on the 7 July 2025 until 20:00hrs on the 7 July 2025 Mansfield Street between property number 22 and Dumbarton Road Prohibition of waiting, loading and unloadingFrom 15:00hrs on the 7 July 2025 until 21:00hrs on the 10 July 2025 Caird Drive, north side, between property number 20 and Hyndland Street Hyndland Street, west side, between Partickhill Rd and White Street Prohibition of vehicle movementsFrom 07:00hrs on the 8 July 2025 until 21:00hrs on the 10 July 2025 Caird Drive (loop) between property number 4 and 12 Prohibition of waiting, loading and unloadingFrom 15:00hrs on the 31 July 2025 until 19:00hrs on the 1 August 2025 Albert Road, north side, between property number 29 and Victoria Road Langside Road, west side, between property number 300 and Albert Road Langside Road, both sides, between Langside Lane and Albert Drive Prohibition of vehicle movementsFrom 10:00hrs on the 1 August 2025 until 20:00hrs on the 1 August 2025
The Herald Scotland
26-06-2025
- Health
- The Herald Scotland
What I learned when I visited Scotland's only nuclear power station
Already suited up is dosimetrist and radiological compliance officer, Andrea McPherson, a 30-year-old keen tennis player brought up in Dunbar, who runs the dose reports and confirms that 'background radiation is higher than what we occupationally receive here". 'If you fly to Spain,' she says, 'you're going to get much more than any of us. Everything is kept conservative. We have a LARP principle which is keep everything as low as reasonably possible. That's what hit me hard when I came here. The conservatism is really dominant which is great.' Even those people working on the station's most radiologically risky area, the fuel route, Forrest tells me, receive just 2-3% additional radiation beyond background. 'We're highly regulated,' he says. 'We've got restrictions. Our annual restriction is 5 microsieverts annually. I'm in and out the reactor area all the time. Mine tends to be round about zero.' Andrea McPherson in Torness power station's turbine hall (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) Scotland's only remaining working nuclear reactor, set to close in 2030, is managed, like the rest of the UK's nuclear plants, by the French-government-owned EDF (Électricité de France) and follows the company's safety principles, the most highly-emphasised of which appears to be banister-holding when walking up and down stairs. 'How I describe it is a visible manifestation of your safety culture,' Forrest observes. 'We hold the handrail. That's what we do. So when you walk through the workplace you're holding the handrail. It's like a mindset. You're locking in. You find that when you go to Edinburgh Airport all the EDF people hold the handrail.' Handrail holding is stressed so many times it begins to feel like a reassurance as much as a safety principle. Everything will all be okay, even though, as has been much reported, cracks have appeared in the graphite of Torness's aging reactors. Everything will be okay because, though there have been some truly catastrophic accidents in nuclear power's global history, for the most part the biggest risk to employees is from slips, trips and falls. The power plant has recently been given a two-year life-extension from 2028 to 2030, throughout which it will continue to check and test the concerning cracks in its graphite core. 'The extension,' says Forrest, 'was very welcomed. Our demographic here average age is 43. Whole bunch of people in their twenties and thirties, for them that security and those few years more, very important there.' Torness power station director, Paul Forrest, next to a turbine (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) There is a lot, on the tour, that seems mundane or familiar. Gaskets, it turns out, are the most common bit of kit that needs to be replaced. 'The kind of kit and skills we've got here,' says Forrest, 'are not dissimilar to the water industry.' A butterfly flutters through the turbine hall, dancing this way and that. It's a reminder, as it flits past the two sky blue turbines, of the biodiversity programme being carried out on the site, which has, I am told, seen butterfly species in the area increase from 12 to 21. Peregrine falcons also breed on the roof of the building, where a camera is installed. The gas turbines, which bear a plaque dated 1985, are elegant, classic industrial machines which have been kept running over the year by regular maintenance and repairs in three-yearly outages. They are also the same as the turbines, generating by spinning magnets, that might have been found in coal or oil power stations of the era. Even the UK's planned new reactor, Sizewell C, will generate using turbines not so very different, though bigger, and with two magnets perpendicular to each other so that it can rotate at lower revolutions. The way Forrest touches the turbine as he presses a hand against its surface to show its warmth, seems almost admiring, and he observes, 'We'll take that turbine apart every three years. It's just a beautiful machine.' His admiration for the design extends to the whole power station. Some years ago, however, when he was working as station director at Hunterston B, he featured in an episode of Great British Railway Journeys, greeting Michael Portillo with the words, 'Welcome to the most beautiful power station in the world.' By the time it aired on television, slightly awkwardly, he had been taken up post in Torness. But Forrest obviously also feels a keen appreciation of the distinctive, pale block of Torness, whose light grey form, on the East Lothian coast against the sea, in a colour believed to have been chosen to match the sky, is so iconic it featured on the cover of a Teenage Fanclub single, Ain't that Enough. Inside, Torness feels like going back in time. Following a previous visit I made to the plant, in the company of family and friends, what lingered most in my mind was the aesthetics of the control room, which bore the design of another age. Looking down into it felt like traveling back in time: lowing buttons and ivory panels, green and red 1980s-style phones, and box files lining the walls. Journalist Vicky Allan and photographer Gordon Terris in the reactor hall at Torness (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) But this latest tour is taking me further into the heart of the plant, and into the radiologically controlled area, access to which is via a tight system of security. Prior to entry I'm issued with a pocket-sized dosimeter on which I can check my irradiation level and which will alarm if it goes too high. Standing on top of a nuclear reactor, casually, whilst conducting an interview, is a pinch yourself moment. We chat while staring down at the pile cap, designed as a shield, to absorb for instance, the energy from an aircraft crashing into the site. Below us is forty metres of reactor and cover. For the staff the experience is clearly everyday. At one point they say, 'Take a look at your dosimeter. It will say zero'. And it does. What about the cracks? I ask. Forrest observes: 'For both the reactors we monitor the graphite cracks, constantly, every two months.' Might the plant extend still longer than its new 2030 date? 'We're quite conservative in nature,' he says, 'That extension doesn't mean to say that 2030 will be the final end date. We'll continue to review. I do feel that if there is further life extension beyond 2030 it will be in the two three years kind of… It won't be five years. It will be two or three years.' On the day of our visit, according to the National Energy System Operator, Torness, is delivering 22% of south of Scotland electricity. That's fairly common for the power station, and its fraction of the mix mostly ranges from around 10%, when only one unit is, to a quarter, with two units working, though it has been known to be as high as a startling 90%. Every eighteen months one of the turbines is shut down for maintenance in what is called a 'scheduled outage'. 'There's two things that Torness provides,' says Forrest. 'One is straight MW. The other is inertia in the grid: stability. Our turbines spin at 3000 revs per minute and that's 50hertz. So that provides that stability and there's only so many technologies that can provide that. Coal can do it, gas can do it, nuclear can do it – but wind doesn't do that, and neither does hydro'. There has been a great deal of talk about inertia recently. At the time of the recent outage in Spain, which left the country in blackout, it was suggested by many that 'lack of inertia' was to blame, fuelling calls for more nuclear baseload in the UK. But, actually, it turned out that Spain's outage had nothing to do with inertia and renewables, but had other causes, including the fact that some of the conventional power plants required by law to regulate the grid's voltage failed to do so. Torness, however, is about more than the inertia or the electricity spun into existence by its magnet-twirling turbines. When I ask Paul Forrest what nuclear power means to him, he says, 'The traditional answer would probably be low carbon electricity in Scotland. But actually how I look at it it is as beautiful jobs for people. You must have seen people smiling a lot. People enjoy working here.' One of the things that becomes apparent to me as I tour the site is that a nuclear power station is not just its infrastructure and engineering, it is also about what people call 'the Torness family', the community both working currently at the plant and in a diaspora across the nuclear world. Torness father and son, Archie and Lewis Martin (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) What's remarkable is how many actual family relations, fathers and sons, are working on the site – from Forrest's own son, a mechanical technician, to work manager Archie Martin and his control and instrumentation engineer son Lewis. When I meet these two in the lift running up through the building to the reactor hall, Archie, who began working there in 1984, recalls standing in the lift with Margaret Thatcher when she visited the site. 'There was a big buzz about the place,' he says. 'That evening, we had a big dance in one of the construction sheds. I remember I won the big prize at the raffle, a 14 inch portable colour television from Currys. 'I remember at the time,' he recalls, it was called a job for life. It has been a job for life.' Will it be a job for life, for Lewis who started on the apprentice scheme in 2014, thirty years 'to the day' after his dad started, he began working at the plant? Certainly he believes, he will have ongoing work defueling the site and then opportunities within the wider nuclear industry after that. Standing by the reactor, he explains what his job, working in robotics around the dismantling of the fuel, entails. He is involved in controlling a machine that is essentially a radiologically shielded crane which pulls out units called 'irradiated fuel assemblies', containing the spent fuel, which are then stored for sixty days before being taken to a dismantling service, and also in controlling further machinery that is used to pull the spent fuel away from a reusable plug, before ultimately it is transported, after 90 days, by truck and train to Sellafield. Currently Torness supports an EDF staff of 520, but also the 250 workers with its main contractors, scaffolders, joiners, plumbers facilities management workers. Torness father and son, John and Callum Gibson (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) It's not common, says Forrest for people to leave the company, with only about 1% going elsewhere. 'When oil and gas was booming people would go to Grangemouth. What we're finding right now is people from Grangemouth are coming here after the petrochemical reprocessing plant shut down.' The other striking thing is how long many of the older staff have worked at the site. Forrest, for instance, was there at the start of the power station, during its construction. 'Nuclear was the future wasn't it?' he says. 'And also it was just being involved in something so big.' He is also likely to be here when the station shuts down in five years' time. If he is, it will not be the first nuclear station that Forrest has guided to its end of life. Forrest was station director on the countdown to shutdown at Hunterston B. He remembers that emotional moment, and the lead up to it, in January 2022. 'It was sad,' he recalls. 'But we had a wee saying because we were facing into it and you can't kid on that it's not going to happen, especially for the younger people there. It was, 'Respect the past but embrace the future.' I was up in the control room and we did the one, two, three and pressed the button.' Footage from the time shows the power plant, in a landscape sprinkled with snow, release a plume of steam, the visible sign of its end. 'People,' he says, 'were in tears that day. But there's another wee emotion that kicks in. It was pride. People had been working there for one decade, two decades or four decades and they're all looking up, pride.' 'In the run up, we accepted what was going to happen and then the question then is how are we going to secure employment for the young people. That was the focus. How do we retrain, how do we redeploy? Most of the skills are similar so we've got riggers and slingers and forklift truck drivers and you need all that for decommissioning as well. Those raw skills became our focus. Ultimately, we ended up getting every single person who wanted a job got a job.' When Forrest first took up his post at Torness, he talked staff t through what had happened at Hunterston. 'I was really proud that every single person at Hunterston who wanted a job got one. I was able to tell that story. I look people in the eye and say that. And they go okay it's not a theory or aspiration. I'll be honest and I'll say I'm not certain I'll get every single person but I'm very confident I'll get 98%. And people go right okay I understand. It's a reassurance.' Torness apprentices, Andrew Hall (left) and Harry Bertrand (right) (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) Torness, however, doesn't feel like a place at the end of its life. It is still taking on new apprentices and host to workers in their twenties and thirties, with many decades of work ahead of them. What, I ask some of the apprentices, on the tour round the plant, do they feel about their future? They seem highly positive. Harry Bertrand, who graduates this year from a chemistry degree apprenticeship at Torness and Andrew Hall, 22 years old, and training to be a control and instrument technician, speak with enthusiasm about what the power station had already brought them and what the future might bring. 'EDF,' says Hall, 'is like a family fleetwide. There are loads projects that the government is planning in nuclear: look at Sizewell C. It sets you up well for the future. But anyway, once the station closes, we'll have a lot of work to do. And also you can tell that you've got a quality education and training that could be transferrable anywhere.' "It set you up well for the future," says Bertrand. But perhaps 2030, in any case, won't be the end of nuclear. There are other suggestions, though, for a still longer life for the Torness site, one of them being that it could be home to a small modular reactor. Forrest, however, is not getting involved in that debate. 'Right now,' he says, 'the Scottish Government policy is not supportive of new nuclear build. I love nuclear power, and the land is just outside that window there for a potential SMR, but I think we've got to be respectful of the democratically elected government.' It's a calm and conservative answer, in keeping with the style of the place.
The Herald Scotland
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
First impressions of new Motherwell boss Jens Barthel Askou
This week, the press had their first meeting with new Motherwell manager Jens Berthel Askou. And to paraphrase from that famous scene in Jerry Maguire, he had me at 'I scored against Airdrie'. It wasn't only his willingness to dredge the dark corners of his memory bank to give the papers a colourful wee line about his strike against the dastardly Diamonds that impressed me, though. The Dane was affable, certainly, but he also came across as driven, direct, and a clear communicator. That will be most important of course in getting his message across to his new players as he looks to implement his style of play. It was striking just how clued up he already appeared to be not only on his own squad, but the playing styles of the other teams in the division, and it was intriguing to hear how he thinks a more 'modern' style of play could be effective in the Scottish Premiership. The cherry on top though is that he comes across well on camera and in print. (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) Sometimes, I think the media can be guilty of overemphasising our importance. At the end of the day, if a manager is getting results on the park, fans probably couldn't care less about how his relations with the press pack might be or even what he is saying in his post-match MFC TV interview. Read more: And as we all saw when Ange Postecoglou was prowling around press rooms up here, the majority of fans actually love to see a journalist being chopped down to size and their ego being pricked when they put forward a daft question. Not that it ever happened to me. Not at all, mate. On the other hand, when things aren't going so swimmingly, the ability to convey a compelling narrative and explain what it is you are trying to do can buy managers a fair bit of time, and encourages more patience from the stands. There is an element of familiarity breeding contempt when a manager is wheeled out in front of the cameras for the umpteenth time in a season, particularly when they are on a poor run of results. Fans start to pick up on mannerisms, and start to get annoyed by them, like Stevie Hammell scratching his head, for instance. Or they get fed up with long answers, such as those preferred by Stuart Kettlewell, particularly in the latter days of his Fir Park reign. Otherwise small - even absurd - things, that become big things in the wrong circumstances. If Berthel Askou loses his first 10 games, I'm fairly sure he will be rubbing folk up the wrong way in his post-match briefings too, but the first impressions were good. Scottish football, and I include the media in this, can often be hostile to outsiders when they land one of our top managerial jobs. That doesn't necessarily have to be a foreigner, it could be a coach who hasn't played professionally or as simple as someone who talks a fair bit about xG and low blocks. That has changed significantly over the last few years, but getting the right balance between relaying your tactical plan to your fanbase while also being a personality that people can warm to is still more important, in my view, than some people might care to believe. And having impressed the fans and somewhat charmed the press (not just Motherwell media mafia sorts) in his first press outing, it inspires confidence that he will also be able to communicate what he wants clearly to the players. What he also conveyed, along with a sense that it probably wouldn't be wise to get on the wrong side of him, was a sense of calm. That after the tumult of the last few weeks following the departure of Michael Wimmer, things were back under control and a plan was in place for the new season. (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) There is much work to be done, as he readily acknowledged. He needs an assistant manager for one, following the delayed departure of Ahmet Koc on Tuesday. Despite the still decent size of the squad, he also stressed the importance of getting some quality players in, and while not giving away any names, he hinted that he is already a good way down the road in identifying his targets. In short, it was all very reassuring. And more than a little exciting. After the bubble was burst a little following Wimmer's exit, the board seemed to have identified a candidate who inspires the same sort of intrigue around what he may be able to bring to the table and achieve with this team. The proof will be on the pitch, as it always is, but hopefully Berthel Askou's appointment, and his talk of 'breaking barriers' in Scottish football, will reinvigorate a bit of that optimism that was around at the tail end of last season within the fanbase. All he has to do now is give us a wee verse of that song I taught him about Section B and he'll be in with the bricks.
The Herald Scotland
12-06-2025
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Why are house hunters flocking to previously unfashionable Glenrothes?
Earlier that afternoon, around two and a half miles away in the Macedonia area, Scott Hume is drinking tea in the sunshine outside of his new, temporary flat. Dandelion clocks the size of baseballs rise up from the unkept garden in front of the brutalist concrete cube of the council property. The retired army veteran, 59, narrowly escaped placement in a homeless hostel by the council. It came down to the wire, but a veteran's charity stepped in at the last minute. They helped him secure the temporary council flat in three hours, he tells me. He moved in last night. The idea that Glenrothes is the 'most popular affordable town for families' is a lie, Hume claims, his tone indignant. 'This is a bad place to try and get accommodation.' Welcome to Glenrothes (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) Scott Hume in his rented accommodation (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) The affordable tag was placed on the town in the heart of Fife by Zoopla in early May. The property website measured affordability by looking at the ratio of average three-bed house prices in locations across the UK, compared with average earnings in the local authority area. The popularity ranking was based on the average number of Zoopla listing views for a typical three-bed home in each area, with the research based on the first quarter of 2025. Glenrothes topped the list (which was dominated by Scotland and Wales) with the average price of a three-bedroom home listed as £136,900 and the house-price-to-earnings ratio at 1.8. Wishaw, in North Lanarkshire, was second in Scotland and fifth on the list with £168,600 for the average three-bed and an earnings ratio of 2.1. Leven, a seaside town in Fife where a three-bed is £164,600 on average, came in at third for Scotland (eighth in Britain) with an earnings ratio of 2.1. 'The willingness of many to consider different regions or compromise on property features further highlights the adaptive strategies families are employing in today's market,' said Richard Donnell, executive director at Zoopla. READ MORE: Glenrothes 'UK's most popular location for family house-hunters' Glenrothes is within commuting distance of several Scottish cities. It's just over 30 miles to Edinburgh, and a train from nearby Markinch Station will get you into the capital in just under an hour. By car, you can commute to Glasgow in about an hour, Perth in 40 minutes and Dundee, about 35 minutes. Family house hunters and first-time buyers from the city might migrate to a commuter town like this, where they can stretch their deposit further and get more space for a growing brood. 'We came from Kirkcaldy, but we liked this area better than some other areas,' Mounsey says. 'It's quieter and it's very handy to everywhere.' The commute from Glenrothes to Edinburgh Airport, where she works, is only around 40 minutes, she adds. Basically, the same time it took from Kirkcaldy with traffic. Mounsey's fiancé is training to be a police officer. They don't know where he will be stationed yet, but the ease of access to the motorway means they do not have to worry too much about it. 'We would like something bigger, maybe when we do start a family,' she says. 'Maybe just a slightly bigger garden, but we're not fussed about leaving here.' 'In Glenrothes, you get a lot more for your money than in cities,' explains Dylan Kimmet, a local property partner at Purple Bricks. 'You'll get more garden space, a bit more room. I think overall it's quite a nice place to live. It's got a really good community vibe and a lot of people know each other on a community level.' Kayla Mounsey in her Bellway home (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) Bellway advertisements (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) A general view of Glenrothes (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) Glenrothes was Scotland's second new town (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) Glenrothes was designated as one of Scotland's first post-war new towns in 1948, with most of its housing built by the Glenrothes Development Corporation and later managed by Fife Council. From the 1950s through the 1970s, large council estates were built in areas like Auchmuty, Macedonia, Pitteuchar, and Collydean, their curved roads complemented by the clean lines and flat roofs of modernist housing. At the time, renting your house from the council was commonplace. But by the 1980s, the attitude towards council housing shifted. Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme, founded on the idealisation of home ownership and the ideological idea that it would shrink the need for social housing, forever changed the make-up of towns like Glenrothes. As in many other places, it created a two-tier housing market that separated new homeowners with equity and renters grappling with a dwindling supply of housing options within their means. Now, 10 years on from when the SNP ended the Right to Buy scheme, its legacy still haunts those who were left behind. The affordability touted by Zoopla's figures makes sense on paper, but when I put this to people in Glenrothes, many asked, affordable to whom? Inside his new temporary flat, veteran Scott Hume explains he has been struggling to access accommodation in the town since the breakdown of his relationship during the pandemic. His things are piled around him, brought over from his former flat with the help of the Armed Forces charity SSAFA. Hume retired from the army in 1996 but has kept close links with the Services. Scott Hume has kept close links to the army after retiring (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) A playful grin flashes across his face when his satirical t-shirt is pointed out (it reads, 'Royal Engineer (Rtd) – responsible adult supervision is required at all times.'). He's a proud man, but the distress of coming so close to being placed in a homeless hostel is ever-present behind his eyes when we speak. Last February, Hume fell off a roof. The accident left him with a disability, unable to work and with new accessibility requirements for accommodation. 'Being out of work destroyed me,' he says. But his journey through the housing system started four years prior, this is just the latest knock in his quest to find a home. When Hume first reached out to the council for help with accommodation, he says he was advised to secure a private let and told the waitlist was 'about 16 months'. As part of Fife Council's Covenant Commitment, the local authority allocates a minimum of 40 properties annually to Armed Forces personnel. But this is 'ideally at the point when they leave the forces,' according to Gavin Smith, Fife Council's access service manager. Hume says: 'After 16 months, I inquired about it and [they] said, 'you're not on the list, you've got a roof over your head'. So, I was stuck then,' he says. His private rental was around £500, and Hume enjoyed a good relationship with his landlord. But a few years after he moved in, Hume's landlord broke the news that she had to sell the flat so she could retire. She gave him as much notice as she could, around 15 months. The last time he had to look for a flat, Hume says there were 'hundreds' on the private market. 'Now you're lucky if there's a couple.' And the rents have jumped from £500 per month to between £750 and £850 for a flat the same size. 'That's not affordable,' he adds. Glenrothes is close to Scotland's major cities (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) He and his landlord have been navigating the Scottish Government's eviction process since. Landlords must go to the First-tier Tribunal to legally evict a tenant, and the whole process can take weeks or months. But councils do not treat someone as 'homeless' until they are formally evicted, leaving vulnerable people like Hume in limbo. 'How long is temporary? Not knowing is worse than anything,' he says. He claims the temporary council flat is costing £623 a fortnight, £1246 per month. "The council's rent policy is reviewed annually, but the costs of temporary accommodation are higher than standard council rents,' says Smith. 'Where households have no choice but to enter temporary accommodation, we'll make arrangements with them to pay what they can afford based on an income and expenditure calculation. We always try to ensure that people aren't negatively financially impacted because of homelessness and charges.' Hume's landlord, who didn't want to be named, says the decision to sell up was not one taken lightly. The stress of making someone homeless is clearly eating her up. 'It's not as stressful as the risk of being homeless, obviously,' she says firmly. I ask her what she thinks has been the biggest contributor to the housing crisis. 'Right to Buy,' she replies quickly, acknowledging that is how she came to own two properties in the area. 'If you look online at what's to rent in Glenrothes for the price, they're like pigsties,' she says. 'It may be, in comparison to the rest of Scotland, a relatively so-called 'cheap place to live', but I would say rents are quite high for the standard of the properties.' 'Glenrothes is by no means a mecca for getting a house,' she adds. Glenrothes (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) Kayla Mounsey with her dog (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) 'When the Right to Buy came on the scene, it allowed people who had council homes to buy them at a heavily discounted rate,' explains Dr Kim McKee, a professor of housing and social policy at the University of Stirling. 'But the issue was that we never really replaced these homes. We lost tens of thousands of homes in the social rented sector in Scotland, but we've not replaced them.' Mortgages became more affordable during that period, and home ownership boomed. But in the last 20 years, Dr McKee says, the private rented sector has grown exponentially. 'If you look back 20 years ago, the private rented sector was mostly for students, and perhaps migrants and professionals who had to move around for their jobs. But that's not the case now. 'It's now housing a really wide cross section of society, with one in seven households in the private rented sector, and that's one of the real difficulties. The affordability of rent is very different between social and private, but you also have different housing rights in terms of security of tenure as well. It's very difficult for people.' The three leading contributors to the current housing crisis are fallout from the Right to Buy scheme, a broken allocation system for social housing, and a lack of investment in new council houses. 'In the 1980s, it was pretty common to rent from a social landlord,' Dr McKee explains. 'Big urban centres house a lot of the population, but now it's more difficult to access social housing if you're not coming through the homeless system. If you're applying for a general waiting list, you can wait a very, very long time.' 'It's very difficult for people, they're stuck,' she adds. 'They're languishing on temporary accommodation lists and often the only option they have is to rent privately, which obviously, budget-wise, can be more expensive for them than renting from a social landlord would be.' Those who do not have the means to save for a deposit are shut out of the housing market. Bad credit, precarious work, disability and rising rents can make climbing the property ladder inaccessible to many. Wider shifts in the economy related to the cost of living crisis (rising energy bills, inflation, surging cost of food) have also contributed to the trade-offs young families are making to stretch their budgets. Hence, the uptick in first-time house hunters seeking out communities like Glenrothes. Peter Gulline, 59, moved to Glenrothes aged 13. The Conservative politician was elected councillor of the Glenrothes North, Leslie and Markinch Ward in 2022. He says wherever new housing estates are built, the properties are always 'gobbled up'. A lot of the market is people in Glenrothes moving to another property, he claims. The current strain on services is temporary. 'We just have to get through this hiccup of everything being really, really busy and weather the storm,' he says. The private rental market has also 'gone through the roof', but councillor Gulline does not see that as a 'bad thing'. He does not agree that the Right to Buy scheme has contributed to the housing crisis. 'People say we've lost 40,000 houses because they were sold off,' he says. 'Well, actually, we haven't lost 40,000 houses. We've lost the responsibility of having to maintain 40,000 houses, but they are still houses. 'There is still somebody living in them. They've not been bought, bulldozed and replaced with a car park.' He describes the wait for social housing as a game of snakes and ladders when I ask about the backlog for council homes. 'Everybody thinks there's a list. And the list has got 17,000 people on it,' he says. 'There are actually multiple lists.' He rattles off some of the categories: homelessness, disability, domestic abuse, and prison leavers. 'It's not a list that you just crawl up. It's a list you can move up and get knocked down a couple of pegs if people come along that had more justification.' Marissa MacWhirter in a Glenrothes park (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) The town is known for its public art (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times) As far as Gulline is concerned, 'Glenrothes is a fantastic town for families.' It's easy to navigate, it has plenty of decent schools, there are lots of parks and green space, and clubs and activities for the young and old. The administrative capital of Fife, the town also boasts the largest shopping centre in the council area (Kingdom Shopping Centre) and decent transport links from the bus station. The number of outdoor artworks dotted around town, the carefully landscaped roundabouts, and the spring flowers blooming from every public space give Glenrothes a wholesome community feeling, even for those just passing through. The town, like many in Scotland, is caught between two narratives. Its affordability gives many the chance to get on the housing ladder and provides young families with a safe, quiet community in which to raise children. But the housing crisis has made the security of home ownership increasingly out of reach for many. Fife Council acknowledges the 'extreme pressure' it's under to meet housing needs in the crisis. The local authority has created the Fife Housing Register, a shared list providing a single access route to available homes, in partnership with local housing associations. "We're actively reducing waiting times for those assessed as statutorily homeless as part of our short-term housing emergency response, though challenges remain, especially for larger families and those with specific health or disability needs,' says the authority's housing access service manager. 'Precise information about housing prospects is difficult to provide. We understand the uncertainty this creates and remain committed to supporting applicants through the process." I ask Hume how he feels about his new temporary accommodation. 'I've got no storage, but it's better than a hostel,' he sighs. Marissa MacWhirter is a columnist and feature writer at The Herald, and the editor of The Glasgow Wrap. The newsletter is curated between 5-7am each morning, bringing the best of local news to your inbox each morning without ads, clickbait, or hyperbole. Oh, and it's free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1
