Scotland's housing emergency demands radical solutions. Here's where to start

Scotland is in the midst of an officially declared “housing emergency”. Charities warn that homelessness is set to soar; working people struggle to afford a house for their family without moving away from their home town; many young people despair of ever getting on the housing ladder.

Yet new figures show the number of new homes finished last year fell by 17 per cent while developers also started work on 15 per cent fewer. Social housing completions have dropped by more than 25 per cent, housing association properties by nearly a third. These extraordinary figures mean one thing – the housing emergency is about to get dramatically worse. Prices and rents are going up, more people will be squeezed out of the system.

It is a basic requirement that everyone should have a decent home, owned or rented, where they can live in dignity. But there is also a dream, shared by most, of a ‘home-owning democracy’, in which every citizen has a real stake in society. Yet both these aspirations are both being thwarted by a broken system.

Housebuilding holds the key to tackling Scotland's housing emergency (Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

We must now accept that current housing policies are not working. A cumbersome planning system, much reduced from its former glories by council cuts, is too slow; well-meaning legislation designed to protect the greenbelt is being wrongly used to prevent developers building on undistinguished fields; and overly complicated, ‘gold-plated’ regulations are now a serious obstacle to investment.

It’s time to make Scotland attractive to housebuilders, rather than putting them off with counter-productive rent controls. It’s time to use compulsory purchase orders to demolish unproductive urban buildings and rebuild with well-designed, high-density housing. It’s time to clamp down on excessive ‘land banking’, a market partly created by restrictive planning policies that inflate prices.

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And it’s time to consider even more radical solutions. Freeports are designed to encourage enterprise with a light touch from government. 'Freetowns’, released from many planning constraints, could perhaps do the same for housing.

Politics is about choices, about balancing ‘social goods’ against ‘social harms’. Homelessness and a generation of young people robbed of hope for the future represent an emergency no politician can ignore or glibly dismiss with lip-service.