By Alasdair Rankin, managing director, Aitken Turnbull Architects
It’s well known that we are in the middle of a housing crisis; high prices and funding challenges are impacting purchasers; lack of supply is pushing up prices; delays in planning are impacting supply and efforts to combat the huge increase in short-term letting have also damaged the traditional rental market.
Councils across Scotland have declared housing emergencies. The Westminster Government has targeted 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament with changes to planning laws planned to fast track this pipeline.
The Scottish Government announced increased investment in the Affordable Housing Supply Programme in their recent budget, so at a political level there appears to be the will to address the issues.
Funding has been a challenge for a number of years. In the affordable housing sector previous funding schemes didn’t provide the flexibility to address the spike in interest rates between July 2022 and July 2024 leaving schemes which were advanced in planning and development terms unable to proceed due to funding gaps. Housing associations had to pause, or at least scale back, their development pipelines to address this interest rate driven funding gap.
There has been recent positive news on private funding. NatWest Group recently announced an ambitious new fund of £7.5 billion over three years for the affordable housing sector and Lloyds Banking Group have provided over £19 billion in funding over the last seven years.
The main issue in the successful delivery of the required housing pipeline is consistency.
We’ve recently completed a series of small infill developments in Hawick with Scottish Borders Housing Association. These projects were fast-tracked with the process from pre-acquisition feasibility study to completion and handover of finished houses taking around 30 months.
Moreover, we’re on site with a development of 70 new affordable homes in Jedburgh, again a brownfield development on the site of the former school. This development being delivered with Cruden Group for SBHA. Eildon Housing Association, one of our long-term Housing Association clients, has benefited from new funding from RBS unlocking a significant development pipeline.
While there is now increased funding from the Scottish Government a significant portion of that simply reverses the funding cut in the previous year. While at local level we have direct experience of engaged local planning departments and committees who have been supportive and positive about promoting appropriate positive development, however that experience is not universal and there are always examples of projects held up in painfully slow planning processes.
In order to develop, manage and deliver successful housing developments there needs to be confidence in long term funding, support from planning departments, opportunities for positive engagement with utilities suppliers and statutory bodies – like SEPA. There needs to be a genuinely collaborative approach to understanding and addressing the problem.
