Hansard

It is said that 1,000 affordable homes across the north and west of the Highlands would have a more positive impact than adding 1,000 houses to the urban sprawl of Inverness or tacking them on to Nairn. I first heard that from Ailsa Raeburn of Community Land Scotland. I heard it again when talking to Ewen McLachlan of the Assynt Development Trust in relation to the trust’s ambitious community-led housing and place-making project in Lochinver, and I have heard it from others. Building four or six new homes in a village can be transformational.

We have a commitment to build 11,000 new and affordable rural homes by 2032. All too often, our rural and island communities are low on the priority list. Let us not leave it until 2028 to turbocharge that effort. We have what we need in place to deliver the experience and effort in all parts of rural and island Scotland, but we need input from the Government to streamline funding and delivery processes, and we need public bodies to work constructively with communities, recognising that their needs are different from those of private developers.

The remote, rural and islands housing action plan is due imminently and should acknowledge that we have the necessary know-how and local commitment, as well as a history of constructive partnership working. With the commitment of £25 million to help councils to buy affordable homes for key workers in rural communities, the First Minister has recognised that something must be done.

There is a range of measures in place, or being developed, to ensure that we steer housing away from the extraction model and towards one that will lay the foundations of a wellbeing economy and will build community wealth. Those measures include regulation of the short-term lets market and a consultation on council tax on second and empty homes, but we still need to get on with building new homes in places where nothing is available. Young people and families are crucial to ensuring the long-term future of our communities, but, if they cannot find affordable homes, they cannot stay or settle in a place.

Communities in the Highlands and Islands have been leading the way and are ready to do more. The rural and islands housing fund and the Scottish land fund are game changers. With Greens in the Government, both funds have been secured, with a commitment to increase them. Greens have also secured a commitment to ensure that community housing trusts are adequately funded to support the delivery of our enhanced rural homebuilding plans. Those trusts are crucial in helping communities to find confidence and build capacity to take on their homebuilding and place-making projects.

The people at the heart of those organisations have been working on this for long enough to understand the hurdles that communities must overcome. They can help with building design, financial packages and the mix of tenures, and they can bring together constructive partnerships. In my region, the work that the Communities Housing Trust has undertaken is not only about housing. The trust supports communities in relation to place making and community wealth building by ensuring that income-generation elements go beyond housing.

In the Highlands, along with providing 25 houses, the Gairloch and Loch Ewe Action Forum has developed a tourist information hub, shops and training facilities. On Skye, the Staffin community trust, as well as providing new homes, workshops and business units, rents a purpose-built health centre to NHS Highland, which makes much-needed medical services more accessible for people. In Moray, the Tomintoul and Glenlivet Development Trust has recently handed over 12 eco-homes to new residents and is developing a bunkhouse.

Pipeline projects include those by Assynt Development Trust, the Invergarry Development Trust and Woodland Trust Scotland. They all have housing in their plans, along with other amenities including woodland crofts, path networks, enterprise work units, and education and training facilities.

Given the desperate need for affordable housing in my region, I know that Highlands and Islands Enterprise would love to see the CHT’s capacity being doubled. It has told me that we have much employment potential in the region, but, without housing, we will not be able to take full advantage of it. I have heard from communities that want to develop co-housing models, in which housing is designed to include shared common spaces. Hope CoHousing in Orkney, supported by Orkney Islands Council, is establishing the United Kingdom’s first rented tenure co-housing for over-50s. It says that it will involve

“looking out for each other, not looking after each other”.

With the Government’s commitment to a preventative approach, and the rapid closure of care homes in rural Scotland, that model must be urgently explored and invested in—not just for over-50s but for intergenerational housing for families.

I come back to the 1,000 new homes in the Highlands. The CHT and the communities that it is working with propose rolling them out at scale, just as though we were building a housing development in Inverness. That could be done by setting up hubs, which would be staging areas for materials and equipment at key locations so that we would not be starting from scratch every time. Materials could be purchased in bulk for a number of projects, which would reduce costs and carbon emissions from hauling them for long distances and would create local employment. That would utilise the often-overlooked north Highland circular economy and community wealth-building potential.

The model is not just for the Highlands; it could work in other parts of my region and in the south of Scotland. I have focused on rural housing, but we also have beautiful but neglected town centres that are ripe for redevelopment into housing. In the south of Scotland, we have the transformational Midsteeple Quarter in Dumfries, which is supported by South of Scotland Community Housing. It is being keenly studied both nationally and internationally, and Scott Mackay from the project will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming town centre regeneration conference in Moray.

As the minister will know, town centre redevelopment and retrofitting align well with our new national planning framework. Such initiatives should be enabled across Scotland. That process needs to start with a pilot project fund for market towns that would be similar to the rural and islands housing fund.

I welcome the minister’s keenness to understand the need in Scotland’s rural and island places and his intention to make visits. However, communities know what they need, and they have a proven track record and a tremendous network for peer-to-peer learning. Community-led housing enables rural communities to thrive and is an investment in people and place.

Let us support communities to get on with it and follow their lead. Let us deliver on the Bute house agreement commitments, fund the enablers, invest in the set-up of hubs for materials and prioritise a dedicated workforce. Let us start rolling out community-led housing at the scale that will be needed if we are to reach our ambitious commitment to deliver more affordable homes by 2032.