Four ways Mairi McAllan can fix Scotland's housing crisis

The National

7 days ago

Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Dr Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research at Common Weal.
Màiri McAllan has returned to the Scottish Government after a well-deserved period of patient parental leave, though has left her former post as Cabinet Secretary for Energy and has been tasked with fixing Scotland's housing crisis.
As a writer of policies on both topics I don't exactly envy the position but I can at least lay out some of the options I and my colleagues in Common Weal have published over the years on the topic. Housing is about more than homes – as anyone can attest if they have ever objected to a planning application for a new suburban sprawl on the basis that it would add extra pressure to services such as GPs, schools and other public services without adding to provision – but about building a sense of place, of community and about meeting a fundamental human need for shelter.
The task is far larger than I can do justice in these few lines of text but I shall offer Màiri (below) four ideas to help fix housing in Scotland.
Actual land reform
You cannot build a home without having the land to build on it. This is a particularly acute problem in rural Scotland where despite having the space to build we often cannot access the land due to it being held by mega-estates and is simply not for sale or when it is, the price to buy is being speculated beyond control.
We need a land tax and other mechanisms like Mercedes Villalba's proposal to cap maximum land ownership. One of the most powerful ideas though would be to allow councils to buy land at 'existing use value'. That is the value of land as it currently is, not an inflated value based on its 'potential' for housing or other uses.
Build 'enough' social housing
The central reason why Britain's housing 'market' is broken is because we run housing as a market.
Thatcher broke the previous system by selling off social housing and making it impossible for councils to replace them. Social housing should never be the last option before homelessness but the first choice for housing for many.
My paper Good Houses for All shows how the borrowing powers of councils and the Scottish National Investment Bank could build essentially unlimited homes for social rent (councils aren't limited in borrowing powers like Holyrood is, so long as the rents are sufficient to pay back the loan).
They could be built to the highest possible energy standards to outbid the private sector in both price and quality. And they shouldn't be built to an arbitrary target of 'more houses than the previous government' but based on actual need. Councils should have a waiting list of people who want one of these homes and be resourced to deliver them by a certain date. If we do this, the private sector will be forced to cut rents and increase quality ... or their landlords will decide that they can no longer exploit people for a profit and will have to sell.
(Image: Supplied)
Fill vacant housing
'But what happens to the houses if the landlords sell?' Scotland already has more vacant homes than we have homeless households.
Many of those homes are not being sold, but are still being clung on to as a speculative investment because prices are rising higher than costs. We also have even more vacant housing than appears in those statistics because many high street shops in Scotland have housing units above them that are vacant but are classified as 'commercial use' rather than residential. Look above the ground floor in many places in the centre of Glasgow and you'll start to see them.
Policies like increasing council tax multipliers on empty homes and Màiri's announcement this week of extra vacant housing officers will go a long way towards fixing this.
Councils should also be resourced to allow them to use their compulsory purchase powers more aggressively – particularly to support them to purchase vacant homes not at 'market rate' but at a fair rate that will include consideration of the costs to repair and retrofit the housing up to the standards expected of newbuilds – this will often be far cheaper than building new and therefore will contribute to the solution to the crisis in a much more resource efficient way.
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Increase rental building standards
For the housing that remains in private rental hands, we need to continue the work already being done around tenants' rights, rent controls and quality standards.
As hinted above, many private rented houses in Scotland fall far short of energy efficiency and other environmental standards and urgently need retrofitted.
France is rolling out a scheme whereby it will be illegal to rent properties that fall below a certain EPC rating and the minimum rating will keep rising every few years. Scotland should do the same.
Before those retrofits happen, many of these properties also need to be repaired first (there's little point in installing solar panels on a leaking roof).
The aggressive recapture of housing for social rent mentioned above could also be done with private rented homes that still have sitting tenants if the landlord wishes to sell or is deemed no longer adequately responsible in their management of housing, converting them to social rents and offering a rent-controlled lifetime tenancy to the tenant along with an improving their homes.
Conclusion
The housing emergency in Scotland is perhaps second only to the climate emergency that Màiri was familiar with in her previous brief. The two are, in fact, interrelated and can't be solved separately.
What won't solve it is shovelling more money into the paws of private developers under the guise of 'affordable housing' that is barely either.
It's not going to solved by a single tweak anywhere or even if we only do everything on this list but every step we take will lead to more people living more affordably and more securely in a country that can more than afford to provide that, but for too long hasn't by design.