Collaboration key to navigating housing crisis - Innes Smith

​City of Edinburgh Council has declared a housing emergency. While deeply concerning, sadly this is not the first local authority in Scotland to escalate their housing crisis to emergency status this year, with Argyll & Bute Council also signalling this in June.

Innes Smith is the chief executive of Scottish housebuilder Springfield Properties.

The City of Edinburgh Council has advised that close to 5000 households, including many with children, will need to live in temporary accommodation this Christmas. Yet, its emerging City Plan 2030 seems to be seeking to deliver fewer affordable homes than the Council itself identifies are required.

In addition, the City Plan’s focus on brownfield land, while great for sustainability, has had a detrimental impact on the supply of quality new housing for the city, with many of the sites allocated for residential development simply undeliverable.

In 2020 Springfield put forward a major planning application to City of Edinburgh Council to deliver almost 200 homes – including 66 affordable – regenerating wasteland in the west of Edinburgh close to Little France Park.

Frustratingly, City of Edinburgh Council rejected our plans which was a blow, given the site was and remains vacant, is being used for dumping and has little existing community benefit. It is likely that other developers will also have sites within their ownership that could truly make a difference.

With land for housing available it is hard to understand why the City Council do not want it, particularly amid an emergency. Now is the time to revisit proposals that have been previously refused to identify what could be taken forward to deliver more desperately needed, new homes at pace.

The planning system is far more complex than a simple supply versus demand tick box exercise, but the current housing emergency underlines that a change in tack is needed.

The alternative is that we continue as we are and the crisis deepens with more and more families facing future festive seasons without a good home.

It is in our interest to deliver great places for people to live and to work with public and private sector partners to achieve this. In declaring the housing emergency, the council has acknowledged that collaborative working will be key and we wholeheartedly welcome this - private housebuilders like us want to work together and for a common goal.

However, collaboration must result in review, action and, crucially, an increase in positive planning decisions – it’s not our words that matter, but the homes we deliver to people that will make a difference.