THE creation of a new public land agency and an obligation for transparency on land deals are among the recommendations in a major report on land for housing and development in Scotland.
The Scottish Land Commission says significant reform is needed to the way land is brought forward for housing and development if Scotland is to build the houses it needs.
The transparency obligation may prove controversial, however, and is likely to be opposed in the industry, according to one developer who spoke to the National.
The Scottish Land Commission was established under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 and came into being on April 1, 2017. Based in Inverness, the commission is made up of five land commissioners and a tenant farming commissioner with a team of staff led by chief executive Hamish Trench.
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Publishing a review and recommendations to Scottish ministers about land for housing – the culmination of two years’ work on this topic – the commission is proposing a new model where the public sector takes a leading role in the housing land market to create places people want to live at prices they can afford.
The approach set out in the recommendations could help Scotland deliver more homes more quickly – helping to address the housing crisis – while also delivering benefits that go well beyond that.
Speaking about the review, Trench said: “Currently Scotland is not delivering enough homes of the right type and in the right places. An important part of the equation is land: getting land development-ready is complex, risky and time-consuming.
"We have relied for too long on an almost exclusively market-led model of delivery rather than an approach that has the public interest at the heart.
“Our recommendations outline a number of changes that can be made to reform the housing land market so that it better serves the people and communities of Scotland in a fair and productive way.
"We are proposing that the public sector plays an active role in enabling housing delivery by providing land for new homes. This is not about a public sector takeover but about the public sector working in partnership with the private sector to deliver more homes.
“A more proactive role for the public sector will share the risk and reward, enabling developers to focus on building houses and creating better places, allowing more affordable homes of all tenures to be built."
The commission has made five practical recommendations for reform that draw on Scotland’s long history of bringing together planning, land ownership, design and infrastructure to deliver great places.
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Trench continued: “Somewhere in our enthusiasm for market-led delivery this tradition has been diluted. Our recommendations set out a programme of reforms and action that could help us rediscover it.
"It also brings much wider benefits to Scotland’s economy, helping to stabilise house prices making them more affordable and releasing wealth locked up in land and housing to help drive sustainable and inclusive growth.”
The commission’s report sets out five building blocks which together would deliver this shift. Recognising the scale of change needed, the recommendations are structured to provide a practical pathway to implementing reforms in a phased way.
The five building blocks include the establishment of a new recyclable fund to help create a network of "place pioneers" – an ambitious programme of affordable housing delivery utilising repurposed publicly owned property assets in town centres and privately owned housing stock in remote rural communities.
Local authorities would be empowered to designate Regeneration Partnership Zones to speed up the redevelopment of land in fragmented or multiple ownership so that landowners and public authorities can share the long-term uplift in land values.
There would be new approaches to land value capture to ensure that uplifts in land value arising from public investment in infrastructure and land remediation are captured effectively and invested in place-making.
A new public land agency would be created, with the power and resources to ensure that a steady supply of development-ready sites is brought forward at the right time and in the right places to meet Scotland’s housing needs.
Probably the most controversial recommendation will be the introduction of a new transparency obligation that would require options agreements and conditional contracts over land to be disclosed on a public register that is kept updated alongside regular publication of a statistical bulletin on land sales prices.
A property developer speaking on condition of anonymity told The National: "Most of the recommendations are fair enough but the transparency obligations will be very difficult to introduce.
"I personally have just signed a deal for an option on major piece of development land and the owner was insistent on a non-disclosure agreement which are very common in options contracts. People just don't want their business being made public until they have to, which always happens anyway when planning application notices go to local authorities."
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