Edinburgh Council recently declared a housing emergency amidst rising levels of homelessness and skyrocketing private rents. Rents have doubled since 2011 and have risen faster than any other UK city in the past year. In recent years, the average detached house has appreciated by more per annum than the average worker has earned after tax.
Edinburgh’s crisis comes despite affordable housing being a high priority for the Council and the Scottish Government following many housing policy prescriptions favoured by progressives. It has ended right to buy, subsidised the full cost of the bedroom tax, spent a significant amount of money on affordable housing and, more controversially, introduced rent controls.
There is heartfelt concern amongst councillors over the impacts of the worsening crisis. However, this has not been matched by a willingness to make land available for housing. Edinburgh’s current Development Plan, which controls the amount of land available for housing, only plans to provide for 61% of the houses that it needs.
This is not an isolated incident. Other Scottish councils have often failed to meet their housing targets. However, Edinburgh is the only council to set targets which have planned to deliver fewer homes than are assessed to be needed over successive development plans.
Decades of delivering too few homes has handed pricing power to landlords and stoked house price inflation as supply has been prevented from keeping up with demand. Rent controls will do nothing to address this lack of supply and appear to have driven up prices as well as deterring build to rent investment. Remarkably, despite the mounting evidence of the intensifying housing crisis, Edinburgh’s draft new Development Plan continues this approach. It proposes to meet only 69% of its assessed housing need, ignoring the needs of over 25,000 households. This ‘no new green belt release’ draft plan is soundbite-led rather than evidence-based policy making.
The Council argue that meeting the needs of the 25,000 households ‘is not realistic’. What they mean is that it would involve difficult political decisions in the face of determined opposition. Edinburgh, like many other cities, has a powerful anti-development lobby which helps to explain the decades of housing failure. While this lobby may have recently donned the garb of a ‘do less and say no’ style of environmentalism, the consequences are depressingly familiar and far from progressive: idle houses earn more than hard-working people and wages make merely a fleeting visit to bank accounts before being consumed by rising rents.
Declaring a housing emergency is a timely call to action, but the motion makes no mention of the lack of available land. If it is to lead to meaningful change, it also needs to mark an end to taking the easy decisions and shirking the hard ones. It is easy to call for more money to be spent on affordable housing much like it is easy to rail against unfair policies such as the bedroom tax and to say rents should be lower. But delivering real change requires tough choices and prioritisation. There is no point making ambitious plans for affordable housing delivery if the Council won’t release the land for said housing to be built on. Until now, many of Edinburgh’s policy makers have believed in two completely incompatible notions: the city has a serious housing problem which needs urgently addressing and the development needs of a growing, prosperous city can be met without making any new land available. For the declaration of a housing emergency to lead to any meaningful impact, this doublethink needs to end and
