A Highland housebuilder is warning that red tape is threatening the future of small firms that rural and island communities depend on.
Speaking today at BE-ST Fest West, a festival for a zero-carbon built environment, MAKAR CEO Neil Edgar will say that Scotland’s efforts to remove every risk from an increasingly protracted housing delivery are creating a bigger problem.
Through one local authority route, MAKAR – an Inverness-based offsite homebuilder specialising in low-carbon, timber-rich homes – revealed that it worked through around 400 pages of contractual documents. On its project for the Lismore Community Trust, also publicly funded, the contract was just seven pages.
Neil Edgar said, “In housing and public delivery, we seem to have spent years trying to remove risk completely, to the point where we have designed out the ability to deliver. Of course we need protection when a contractor or supplier fails. But are we spending so much trying to eliminate every conceivable risk that we have created the biggest risk of all: the loss of capable suppliers?
“Only the largest companies remain able to participate, leaving smaller rural schemes without a practical route to delivery.
“Simply put: the route to the work should not be harder than the work itself.”
For a small business, MAKAR explained that every page has to be read, questioned, negotiated and often paid for in advice, long before there is an order the workshop can act on. When a capable firm decides not to bid, that lost capacity never appears on a tender comparison.
The contracts carry different obligations, and MAKAR added that it is not arguing that seven pages is always the answer. It is asking whether the burden is proportionate, particularly for the small rural schemes where a pair of homes can decide whether a family stays on an island.
“I’m not asking for risk-free business,” Neil Edgar said. “I’m asking for enough clarity to employ and train people over a period of years. Keep the safeguards. Raise the standards. Remove unnecessary friction.”
