Scottish Vacant and Derelict land Survey: uses of the data

The main purpose of the Scottish Vacant and Derelict Land Statistics (SVDLS) is to provide an official and high quality national data source to inform the programming of rehabilitation, planning and reuse of urban vacant and derelict sites.

The publication is released in spring each year, and summarises the information for the previous year and provides time series trends and local authority statistics. A site register is published along with the statistics.

The statistics are used as follows: 

• to inform Scottish Government Development Planning process through identifying and maintaining a record of vacant and derelict land (VDL). This process will become more important once a stronger planning policy position on VDL is adopted within the National Planning Framework (NPF4)
• to provide local authorities with robust evidence to inform their Local Development Plan in terms of identifying the potential provision of land for the housing, environmental and regeneration components of the plan
• to allow the Scottish Land Commission to monitor its programme of land reform, both urban and rural land, in order to create a Scotland where land is owned and used in ways that are fair, responsible and productive
• to enable the Central Scotland Green Network to assess the extent of how much vacant and derelict land has been naturalised as part of its remit around developing natural climate change solutions, making liveable places, promoting health and wellbeing and supporting a green recovery
• to allow members of public to make enquiries about the availability of vacant and derelict land where they wish to find out more about it and/or make use of it
• to provide robust and cleaned shape files to the Improvement Service for upload onto their Spatial Hub which is an online resource that provides a single point of access to quality-assured Scottish local authority data, in a consistent format
• to provide researchers and the media with high quality data where they have an interest in the topic of vacant and derelict land
• to provide urban regeneration companies with details of vacant and derelict in their area which might be used for regeneration purposes and to map those sites alongside other geospatial data that are useful for regeneration

As at March 2022