In light of the recently declared national housing emergency, Lichfields have looked at the delivery of housing within Scotland and how this compares to local housing delivery targets.
The Scottish Government declared a national housing emergency in May 2024 acknowledging the considerable pressures on housing within Scotland and the need to address them. This national declaration followed similar local declarations by Councils in Argyll and Bute, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fife and West Dunbartonshire. Recent research for Homes for Scotland suggests that 28% of all households within Scotland in some form of housing need.
The root causes of the housing emergency are complex and wide-reaching and this Insight will look at only one aspect of this, how the delivery of new homes compares to local and national housing targets.
Each Council in Scotland is required to produce a Housing Needs and Demand Assessment (HNDA) to provide the evidence to inform the preparation of their Housing Strategies and Local Development Plans (LDPs) that set out housing targets and housing land allocations. Evidence based plans and policies which deliver desired outcomes for local communities are a key goal of theScottish Planning System but there remains a significant gap between housing delivery targets and the completion of homes within Scotland.
This Insight looks at the housing supply targets outlined in local development plans for each of Scotland’s 32 Councils, annualisingthese to compare with the average annual delivery of housing on the ground (using Scottish Government reporting on housing completions). We have also compared these metrics to the Mixed All-Tenure Housing Land Requirement (MATHLR) outlined within National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) to establish the role of targets moving forward.
