Build, baby, build

Ross Greer MSP, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, thinks I’m “super-rich” as the owner of a small (50m2) second home (lodge) overlooking Loch Earn.

“All over Scotland people are being priced out of the communities they’ve grown up in, all while tens of thousands of homes sit empty for most of the year. They are being hoarded by a small number of wealthy people who clearly do not need them,” he says.

There are, according to a report from SPICe, the Scottish Parliament’s information service, 21,606 second homes in Scotland (as of a year ago) or just 1% of all Scottish homes. Hardly the “tens of thousands” (well, two tens) mentioned by Greer who is delighted to see the numbers go down 2500 in a single year. People are selling up (where and when they can) because they cannot afford the double council tax imposed since April 1, 2024, by most of Scotland’s 32 counties – and that levied on their primary residence (perhaps £5000 a year at least taken together). More are likely to sell up after this week’s 59-50 vote in Holyrood to enable councils to raise it as high as they deem appropriate, removing the 200% cap. The second home premium is likely to rise to triple the standard rate from April 1, 2026, though it is as high as quadruple in parts of Wales.

“The Greens want to see the cap lifted in its entirety, meaning that councils could impose rates so high that an owner will in effect be forced to sell,” as the Times put it in its Scottish edition. This amounts to an eviction notice. As such, it will elicit little or no public sympathy given that Scotland is officially living through a housing emergency and there are officially 34,000 homeless in Scotland, along with 17,000 people living in temporary accommodation, according to the latest stats issued on September 16.

“The Scottish Government has made significant public investment over many years. This has resulted in the delivery of affordable housing in Scotland being 47% more per head of population in England and 73% more than Wales between 2007-08 and 2023-24. We have helped deliver more than 139,000 affordable homes between 2007 to March 2025 with 99,000 of these having been made available for social rent. Latest statistics demonstrate the challenge we still face, but I am focused on delivering the required change,” Màiri McAllan, housing secretary, declared early last month.

Her latest stats went unmentioned, perhaps because they make for uncomfortable reading: in 2024 housing starts were at their lowest for over a decade at 15,814 in Scotland compared with over 25,000 in 2019 while completions were just south of 20,000 or much the same as in recent years. Completions of affordable housing for ownership in 2023-24 were, at just 289 units, the lowest they’ve been this century and overall affordable supply 7444 versus 10,466 two years earlier.

Not enough houses

Scotland is simply  “woefully short” (Shelter Scotland) of building enough houses to meet government targets (110,000 affordable homes by 2032), let alone satisfy needs. The removal of the cap on council tax for second homes came in an amendment to the Housing (Scotland) Bill which was passed in its entirety this week yet which does little to address what McAllan admits is an imbalance between supply and demand or indeed the housing emergency.

The Bill’s (final) Stage 3 approval coincided with publication of a substantial paper on Scotland’s housing crisis – Prosperity begins at home – written by Prof Duncan Maclennan (with Jocelyne Fleming) and commissioned by the David Hume Institute (of which I’m a trustee). It proudly sets out seven “disruptions to improve Scotland’s housing system,” urges us to abandon what Maclennan calls “a 1960s view of what housing policy is in Scotland” and excoriates “virtue signalling” in the field (of the Greer kind IMO).

As the report says: “‘Emergency’ is a poor framing for what Scotland’s housing system faces (as the crisis is long-standing)… Clearly Scottish housing is at a time of crisis, even polycrisis. Too many Scots, often the poorest and youngest, are suffering.” This, it declares, “will take fundamental system change to diminish and end.” What’s more, this polycrisis “undermines Scottish wellbeing, social inclusion and social mobility. It diminishes multiple aspects of environmental quality and slows the shift to net zero. It has negative effects on stability, growth, productivity and the distributions of income and wealth.

The paper warns, (with one eye on the far right): ” This is quite a charge sheet for Scottish housing policymakers to face and to seek solutions for a better system. But they need to seek major, system change. For if Scottish politics does not change the housing system, another Parliamentary term of the polycrisis will change Scottish politics.”

Maclennan, who advises the Australian and Canadian governments as well as the UK government, points out that housing crises have been overcome in the past – largely by dumping the “business as usual” approach all too prevalent today. “In Hume’s terms, this is a time for less passion and more reason about the means by which we pursue (passionately) a better housing system. Business as usual will merely prolong the polycrisis.”

He told the launch audience that a planning system designed to raise growth and productivity was key and housing should be recognised as core national infrastructure, with new combined strategic housing authorities set up.

Shades of Angela Rayner, who (I jested at the launch), should be offered political asylum in Scotland with a remit to help transform planning procedures. She could perhaps work alongside Prof John Muellbauer, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in Oxford who has proposed inter alia a property wealth tax (to replace the top two bands of council tax) and a land value tax on the most expensive (and unoccupied) land.

Time to build

We’ve talked about reform of council tax and planning procedures for donkey’s years. What was depressing about the passage of the new Housing (Scotland) Bill was the absence of commitment to do anything about either in the next (or any other) parliament. That plus the grandstanding on relatively peripheral issues such as second homes – 79 out of every 10,000 homes as SPICe says. Removing the council tax cap may, it’s suggested, raise as much as £70m for investment in affordable housing though there’s no statistical evidence for what the first year of a 200% premium has yielded and, what’s more, no guarantee these monies will indeed go to housing rather than overall council budgets.

Maclennan is right to say it’s time to “meet the aspirations of Scots not yet in their 40s” in the housing market as well as those of the homeless and others living in often appalling conditions. If I thought that forcing folk to sell second homes would help I’d happily help – and may be forced to anyway. But politicians should not pretend that a much more radical, comprehensive policy change can be avoided for much longer. Build baby build.