Scottish Land Commissions calls for major reforms to land market
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The public sector should be given a much greater role to enable more affordable homes to be built in Scotland.
That's the view of an advisory body to the Scottish Government which has released a report today following a two-year study into the nation's housing land market.
The Scottish Land Commission states the system at the moment is too reliant on the private sector to identify and develop plots of land for housebuilding.
The commission says that developers, in order to maximise their profits, tend to concentrate on green field sites in up and coming areas.
However, such a focus can come at the expense of brown field sites as well as rural areas.
Hamish Trench, the commission's chief executive, said: "Currently Scotland is not delivering enough homes of the right type and in the right places.
"An important part of the equation is land: getting land development-ready is complex, risky and time-consuming.
"We have relied for too long on an almost exclusively market-led model of delivery rather than an approach that has the public interest at the heart.
"We are proposing that the public sector plays an active role in enabling housing delivery by providing land for new homes."
The commission suggests a new fund to allow publicly owned land in town centres and rural locations to be 're-purposed' for housing.
It adds that local authorities should also be given greater powers to compulsory purchase private land which is not being used.
In addition, the commission is calling for a new land agency to eventually assume responsibility for planning and for identifying strategically useful plots of land.
Mr Trench claims the suggested reforms would benefit Scotland’s economy and also make houses more affordable.
The SNP government recently announced it had delivered 100,000 affordable homes during the 14 years since 2007.
In its election manifesto earlier this year it pledged to deliver another 100,000 by 2030.
See the full report HERE
