Catherine Wood, development director, Lovell Strategic Land, explores why housing isn’t being delivered quickly enough in Scotland
IT will soon be one year since the Scottish Government declared a national housing emergency. The most recent quarterly housing statistics, published on 25th March, point to a worrying downward trend on housing delivery and show we’re moving in the wrong direction.
In the year to December 2024, new home completions were 7% lower than the previous year, and there has been a 22% fall in completion of new affordable housing.
Why is housing not being built at the pace needed? There are several contributing factors, but in my view one of the main issues is that we don’t have sufficient deliverable land allocated for development.
It’s a common narrative in Scotland – often used by the government – that the country has plenty of consented land available, and the issue is that the private sector is not doing enough to build the homes.
For instance, in November last year, the government said there was land available across central Scotland for some 164,000 homes – yet clearly these statistics don’t tell the full story. The reality being that much of this land is simply not deliverable in the current environment and will not help to meet current housing needs or demand over the coming years.
The government is introducing policy changes in an attempt to accelerate housing delivery, including the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 and NPF4. In the context of these changes, now is a good time to look past the accepted statistics and take a look at pipeline land in Scotland afresh – starting with what actually goes into turning strategic land into housing.
Development is a complex business and the process of bringing forward a site, from securing planning permission to starting construction, can be long, risky and often inefficient. It takes on average over five years, and for larger growth areas it can take decades. During this time the viability – and therefore deliverability – of a site can and does change.
This is due to many factors, including economic and political stability; changing regulations around sustainability; and issues related to cost, site usage and surrounding infrastructure which impact negotiations with landowners.
There is also a challenge around Local Development Plan cycles which are now 10 years, leading to an increased period of time in which the land is contracted to developers while planning is being secured. Sometimes, accusations are made of developers ‘land banking’ sites when in reality it’s legislation that is preventing development from coming forward at pace.
Land has historically been allocated with limited technical input and just a supporting red line. People want to live in the right areas and places, and sometimes the consented land is not in these locations. Without buyer demand, and given wider viability challenges, the numbers don’t add up for a developer and, as a consequence, the housing won’t be built.
The statistics might give the appearance of there being a sizeable pipeline of land for new homes, but the reality is a far cry from this. As a country we urgently need to re-evaluate sites already allocated and even consented which, under scrutiny, often simply aren’t viable and won’t lead to the housing numbers we all want to see. This land should be replaced with sites that are deliverable.
What we need now is collaboration between politicians, strategic land promoters and developers, and for us to work together to bring forward the right land in the right locations and of the right scale for development. When these factors are aligned, supporting infrastructure can also be delivered which is essential for growth.
There needs to be a shift in how pipeline land in Scotland is viewed in the industry and among politicians. Alongside this there needs to be a wider understanding and increased awareness of what goes into development to ensure it is delivered, and a concerted focus on bringing forward the right land which will enable the delivery of mixed tenure housing schemes, including affordable housing, to tackle the housing crisis.
At the heart of this is a move away from thinking in terms of land availability, instead towards land deliverability.
