Exclusive:The biggest crisis hindering economic growth? Scotland's houses
Senior figures from the public and private sectors took part in the Scotsman Leaders Forum, a roundtable event hosted in partnership with Turner & Townsend, to consider the challenges Scottish local authorities face on issues including economic development, housing and infrastructure.
In this, the second part of our series, leaders discuss what they believe is the biggest barrier to all other success - housing.
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Hide AdRobin Presswood, executive director of city development at Dundee Council
I’m not being flippant - the solution to the housing emergency is to build more houses.
I think there are unintended consequences of everything that is done at a regulatory level. So the potential rent cap has the potential to destroy the build to rent market in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It hasn’t really got outside of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but it is immensely successful in limiting the number in Glasgow and more in Edinburgh.
It’s about making sure that a computer games designer or a junior doctor can actually buy somewhere decently, not stuck in the old tenements they used to live in as a student.
Paul Lawrence, City of Edinburgh Council chief executive
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Hide AdCertainly what's happened in Edinburgh is because of house price inflation, people's travel to workers has widened and widened and widened, and now a lot of our key workers - people who could get a mortgage if they choose to do so, could pay a decent rent, but I'm earning aren’t fortune - they now live probably many in the Borders, lots in East Lothian.
I think the latest stat is that the traffic on Edinburgh's road is between 60 and 70 per cent of people driving into Edinburgh, not circulating within the city, and that's because of the nature of the housing market.
I was talking to teachers, I prepared some remarks and they had one question: what are you doing to enable newly qualified teachers to live near their schools? We can't recruit people because it's too expensive as a newly qualified teacher or a relatively early stage career teacher.
Susanne Miller, Glasgow City Council chief executive
We were able to put values on the number of developers who had moved from ‘build to rent’ to purpose-built student accommodation, and we did get a really clear steer from developers.
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Hide AdWe've concrete evidence that it was impacting but the perfect storm is also that the housing investment grant for social rented housing has also been decimated. The whole of the housing market, including the social rented sector, is entirely stilted and that leaves you with the problem - that particularly cities have - of homeless people in hotels.
That kind of temporary housing then has an impact on the local authority budget, then has an impact on what we can invest in including the time and effort we can invest in economic development.
BAE, when they came into Glasgow, had to build their own modular housing to attract the workforce, because they had to get the workforce to come.
Lawrence
In Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, if you're building on brownfield sites - which is, from a sustainability point of view, where you want to build - then it is going to cost more money because of what's in the ground.
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Hide AdWhat volume house builders like is nice a greenfield sites at the edge of the city. What we really need to do is to find a way of regenerating brownfield sites. That costs more money. In England, there is significant funding available, either through grants or more likely things like loans and equity. We don't have that kind of arrangement in Scotland.
The emergency is very much here and now. Robin's right: more homes is the answer, but I don't care what you do, it's going to take a while.
John Curry, Borders Council director of infrastructure and environment
We probably struggle to compete because we don't have the same types of developers in the area. We don't have the same supply chain in the area, and we've heard what Edinburgh and the Lothians have got, so developers are focusing their attention here.
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Hide AdSo we struggle. Our biggest house builders are RSLs (registered social landlords). Most of the stuff that's coming to market is social, affordable homes, but it's not of the scale that we need.
The characteristics of the region are very different to the kind of larger populaces. We're trying to build about 200-500 homes in one site. That's tiny in comparison to what you're going to see in Glasgow, Edinburgh, the Lothians. But that's almost 1% of our housing stock, you know. So it's a different challenge, but a similar challenge at the same time. And I think supply chain is a big issue.
Sebastian Burnside, chief economist of Natwest Group
If you had a program where you knew you had a pipeline of homes in a particular area, then you have the opportunity to completely rewire all those relationships, take out the excess loadings of risk and enable much more change.
This is the second in a series of articles about the roundtable, which was held at The Balmoral in Edinburgh and chaired by Joshua King, Head of Business at The Scotsman
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Hide AdThe original version of this article stated that the biggest housebuilders in the Borders was Borders Council. The biggest house builders in the Borders are actually RSLs (registered social landlords). We are happy to correct this.
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