Planning and the housing emergency: delivery plan

The challenge

The Scottish Government is focused on addressing the national housing emergency. Our planning system has a key role to play in facilitating the delivery of more homes across Scotland.

We have taken a progressive and positive approach to planning reform in Scotland to support the delivery of the right homes in the right places, helping to tackle the housing emergency. Our national planning policies are clear about what good development looks like, including contributions to sustainable development and wider place-making objectives. With the right support and investment, planning can and should actively enable good quality development.

Evidence shows that the housing emergency has emerged as a result of a number of factors. In Scotland, planning permission has been granted for many more homes than are currently being built. The Competition and Markets Authority, in a report published earlier this year, identified that since 2014, the average number of homes given planning permission in Scotland was 29,000 annually, and that this significantly exceeded housing land supply targets, and indeed the number of house starts (average 19,892 per year) and completions (average 19,160 per year), over the period as a whole. This evidence on supply raises questions about how sites that already have planning permission, which in total are estimated to represent more than 164,000 unbuilt homes across Scotland^[1], can come forward to delivery.

To further understand the specific challenge for planning, we have reviewed in more detail the land supply in the Glasgow and Edinburgh city regions^[2], based on data gathered by local authorities in their latest housing land audits and compiled by the Improvement Service, as well as commercially available construction data on activity on sites. This suggests, as a broad estimate, that across these regions land for around 114,000 homes has been granted planning permission and not yet completed. Of these, 38,000 units had started work on site. In addition to this, there was also allocated land for a further 64,000 homes that had yet to receive planning permission.

Notwithstanding the above, we of course recognise that there is scope for improvement in the planning system in Scotland, something that the CMA report also identified noting that the process was not predictable for housebuilders, and can be costly, lengthy and complex. It set out a number of recommendations for improving planning. Whilst planning delays can arise for a number of different reasons, statistics on decision-making timescales show that there is scope to make the system more effective, particularly at a time when new homes are urgently required. We have been clear that more capacity within planning authorities, as well as greater efficiency, could have the most significant, positive impact on the ability of the planning system to play a more active role in co-ordinating services and facilitating delivery. There is also scope for streamlining practice to make best use of available resources.