Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast where in this episode we are looking into what it takes to adequately house people living in rural areas. Places where the challenges affecting the rest of the country are even more acute and require unique solutions.

I’m Kieran Findlay and joining Jimmy Black and I today are two guests who believe they have the right ideas to solve many of these problems and are busy trying to convince the right people to implement them.

Jimmy Black

Hamish Trench is the chief executive and the countable officer of the Scottish Land Commission, which has just published a new report that outlines various proposals to increase the supply of developable land and therefore the supply of affordable homes in rural areas. And returning to the podcast is Ailsa Raeburn, chair of Community Land Scotland, which among other things has called for a right to live to be introduced to establish a legal right for people to live in the community where they grew up.

Kieran Findlay

Ailsa, let’s start with those right to live proposals. Late last year, Community Land Scotland called on politicians to establish a right to live for people who have grown up in rural communities and for this to sit alongside people’s rights for, for example, the rights to food and education. Can you outline what those proposals are exactly and what problems they aim to address?

Ailsa Raeburn

Yes, morning Kieran and Jimmy. Thanks very much for inviting me back to chat.

Yeah, the idea of the right to live, it came out of discussions at our conference last year. It’s a theme that has been very prevalent amongst particularly rural communities in the north and west and in the south of Scotland. Members, who are living really at the sharp end of this housing crisis and are doing a huge amount of work to make their communities sustainable and great places to live and work, but are absolutely hampered by the fact that there is a lack of affordable and accessible housing, particularly for young people in their communities.

So we know that in most of these rural areas now, young people want to stay. There was a really great survey done by the Young Islanders Network last year, which showed that only 9% of young people living in our islands think they will be able to afford a place to stay and 69% of them were thinking they were going to have to leave because there just wasn’t any housing for them. So this lack of access to housing, whether that’s housing to rent or housing to buy, is absolutely crippling some of our rural communities.

And then coupled with that, obviously we’ve got this huge potential economic boom from renewables developments and natural capital, which is bringing lots of potentially other young working-age people to our communities. So in a way that’s sort of not happening in other European countries where we’re seeing rural communities wither, we’ve got fantastic economic opportunities in many of our rural areas, but we’re not able to take advantage of them because we don’t have housing.

So there’s a lot going on here and you’ve covered quite a lot of it in your podcast previously, but the particular right to live idea was an idea that was also included in what we were all hoping would be a human rights bill, this parliament, which includes the right to health and right to education in Scotland. And it’s really about making sure that local people are able to use local housing. So it’s really about ensuring that housing that exists in a rural community at the moment is available to use.

for local need. So whether that’s young people who are leaving home and want to stay in that community because they’ve got a job or whether it’s that, you know, fantastic local economic opportunities and people not being able to live there. And so it’s all about having a sort of a connection to a place, whether that’s a family connection or a work connection. And actually, this whole concept is already included in homelessness legislation in terms of having connection to a place. So it’s only really an extension of what already exists.

But we think introducing a right to live in a local area where you’ve got a work or a family connection would force us all to think more creatively and innovatively about how we use our existing housing stock, but also how we develop new houses in the right places. Thanks.

Kieran Findlay

Would these rules be attached to specific properties, meaning they can only be sold to people with these rights? I know you can probably do that a bit easier if you’re renting them, social renting them. Is that how they would work in practice?

Ailsa Raeburn

Well that could be one of the ways that they work in practice, particularly if you’ve got housing stock at the moment that isn’t used for full-time use, so whether that’s short-term lets or second homes, then over a period of time you might want to see some of that actually brought back into affordable long-term rental use. And there’s lots of ways you could do that, you could do that through planning or you could do that through taxation incentives. Or you could do that through taxation penalties, which is increasing small business rates relief or land and building transaction tax on second homes and council tax on second homes, all of which the government are sort of on the stepping stones to doing.

But we think you need a sort of a set of sticks and carrots to encourage people to return housing stock into permanent residential use and away from it just being used as an investment or a second home or just for financial speculation.

So that is one route to doing it and obviously other routes for new development is, for new developments, for there to be specific planning conditions around them only being used for affordable residential use. And the use of things like rural housing burdens. So I’m also involved with Eigg and there we’re looking at whether or not owners that want to sell that perhaps have second homes in a community and have been a big part of that community for decades in some cases. They want to see that community thrive and grow. And so they’re proposing to sell their house with a rural housing burden, which means that it can only ever be used as a permanent residential home in the future.

So there’s not one silver magic bullet, but there’s a whole range of things that we could already do with the right support, which will help establish this right to live.

Kieran Findlay

Yeah, I think you’re right. course, nobody’s arguing that this would solve the shortage of affordable housing in rural areas. So what measures do you think should be taken in support of the right to live?

Ailsa Raeburn

So I think there’s a whole range of things. It’s a really complex problem, again, as you’ve explored on your podcast, but availability of land is absolutely critical. The right land in the right place. And I Home is just got lot more to say on that. But how we manage second homes, particularly the prevalence of second homes and short-term lets in our very tourist-led communities, those really attractive locations on the west and north coast and islands where you’ve got 30 to 40% of the stock having been lost to second homes and short-term lets. So how we manage those, I think that’s really important.

We need to encourage more builders in these locations. So we know that we’ve lost 40% of the small and medium-sized builders over the last five years and of course, in many rural locations, they’re the only actors building in this space because you don’t get speculative house builders because the profits just aren’t there. And so that’s another thing, talked already about tax and tax that’s within devolved powers that we could make changes to, which would encourage both existing second home and short-term let owners perhaps to transfer their houses into permanent use.

But also perhaps landowners, perhaps there are incentives there to encourage landowners to release land for housing. We’ve got obviously a big public sector housing, land ownership, particularly in the Highlands and Islands. And again, I think that’s key to really putting pressure on public sector landowners to say, what land have you got? What might be suitable? Can you bring this forward for development?

So I say that there’s a whole range of things that we could do from tax to making land available to supporting small and medium sized enterprise builders to planning changes and I note that the Scottish Government have recently launched their planning and the housing emergency delivery plan. I think there’s some really good things in there. But what it requires all of us is all of us to work together. So communities to come forward with ideas, landowners to release land, public sector to release land, planners to recognise that, you know, things need to change in the national planning framework and support for small builders. So as I say, each of these things are not easy, but they are doable in isolation, but it’s bringing them all together.

Jimmy Black

Hamish, you’re the chief executive of the Scottish Land Commission and you’ve just published a report, the Land Supply for Rural Housing. And that comes on top of a report which you commissioned from Savills about three or four years ago, which was pretty much on the same subject, a very extensive report. So can you tell us what’s in the new report and tell us how that all kind of interfaces with the land reform bill that’s going through parliament at the moment?

Hamish Trench

Yeah, and it’s really good to have a chance to chat with you both about this today. The new report that we’ve published looks specifically at bringing land forward for rural housing. And Ailsa has outlined why this is so important in terms of the economic opportunities, maintaining populations. There’s lots of factors involved in making new housing happen and delivering it. There’s big finance challenges, for example. There’s the construction sector challenges.

But underlying all of this, of course, is actually being able to bring land forward, bring land forward in the right place, at the right price, but also land that is in active ownership. So it is owned by somebody who is actually going to take forward the steps to make development happen. Now there’s some fantastic examples where communities are delivering that directly. There’s some really good examples where private landowners are able to deliver that. But fundamentally, we need to really scale up this effort.

And we think that if land is not in active ownership at the moment there’s a much bigger role for public bodies, for government and public bodies to be not just using land they already own, but actually actively looking at where should we be buying land to create a long-term pipeline. And I suppose the ultimate goal for the advice that we’re publishing at the moment is that rural communities should have a 10-20-year pipeline of land identified that is in active ownership, where people are able to take steps to be bringing development forward.

Jimmy Black

One of the things you highlighted in your previous report was the cost of development in rural areas where you could actually find that the value of the house at the end of the process was less than the cost to build it, which makes it very difficult for, for example, speculative builders to get involved in rural housing. And in fact, even not-for-profit organisations like housing associations will struggle unless you’ve got a very high level of grant.

The other thing is the kind of people who want to build in rural areas. Well, we just saw the Wee House Company, which was doing some promising things in the Isle of Mull, going into administration. So how can we support the supply chain of builders, of developers, of potential landlords? What do we do to make it possible for them to build viable projects in rural areas?

Hamish Trench

Yeah, I that is a real challenge, isn’t it? It’s a fact of life that building in rural and island communities is more expensive than many other places, whichever sector, whoever is leading that. So I think that’s why one of the issues we think we should be looking at here is the scale at which this is coordinated in the scale of investment. In putting together our advice, for example, we’ve been speaking with the enterprise companies and with the Scottish National Investment Bank.

And we think there’s real advantages here to working at least at a regional scale in how some of the finance can be brought together, how some of the land can be brought together at that kind of scale. And operating, for example, at a highlands and islands-wide scale, you could begin to create a land supply that creates more certainty for SME construction businesses. If we can see that pipeline of land supply coming ahead for the next 10 years, it creates a bit more certainty into that supply chain. It allows organisations like the National Investment Bank to come in behind the finance at the kind of scale that they can operate at.

So think there’s some really good work already underway, know, in Highland Council, for example, are very active and very proactive in acquiring land for housing. But really we see an opportunity to scale this up both in geography and in the finance that comes in behind it.

Jimmy Black

And there’s another question here about the work of the development agencies. It’s fine if you’re an economic development agency and you try to create jobs in rural parts of the Highlands. But if you don’t provide the housing that goes with it, that’s not working. And one of the things that you seem to have been calling for is to link economic development with housing development.

Hamish Trench

Yes, and it’s very striking, I think, that both Highlands and Islands Enterprise and South of Scotland Enterprise have both stepped forward to be much more active in housing over the last year or so. Both are leading different groups to try and coordinate that activity in the South of Scotland and in the Highlands and Islands. And we think this is a natural part of that. So part of what we’re proposing is that a number of existing public bodies have powers to buy and sell land and hold land. And we think we could collectively be much more organised about how those powers, how those functions are used. Some of the research we’ve commissioned on housing over the last few years has proposed that Scotland should have a national public land agency, a national housing land agency function. And, you know, for example, we can see that operating in Ireland, in England, and actually in many countries across Europe.

Now, it would be great to be able to establish a new agency that could deliver that function. But actually, in the short term, we think we could effectively do that by using the remits of existing public bodies. Enterprise companies already have powers to hold land and then more widely, Forestry Land Scotland, for example, has powers to buy, sell and hold land and is, of course, already a major landowner across rural Scotland. So I think there’s ways to… this all comes back to collaboration, of course. There are ways to use the public sector powers and functions more creatively maybe than we are at the moment.

Jimmy Black

Now some of us who have been brought up in things like The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil or watching films like Local Hero or even reading Andy Wightman’s blogs, we have this idea, this perception that some of the problems come from landowners who won’t release land, biggest states who just simply won’t cooperate with communities to allow development to happen. What can we do about landowners who just simply won’t help?

Hamish Trench

Yes, it’s true that in some cases land ownership is a barrier and if a landowner simply is unwilling to bring land forward that can cause for you a real problem. More widely what we tend to find is that landowners are in principle willing to bring land forward. Often the barrier can be the value, the price, the economics and finance behind it and also some of the practicalities. So I think what we want to get into is a position where landownership should not be able to be a block on this.

If a landowner is willing and able to be active and bring land forward development, absolutely we should help them do that and the collaboration should come in alongside them and help deliver a really good housing outcome. But if actually landownership is the block, then of course there should be measures. So one of the things, for example, that I think is needed is for public authorities to be able to use compulsory powers more easily. As a backstop, of course, it shouldn’t be the first port of call, but there’s no question that public bodies should be able to acquire the land that’s necessary at a fair price. And if ownership is the barrier to making that happen, then of course public authorities should be able to make that happen through compulsory measures.

Jimmy Black

And of course that’s what makes public authorities terribly nervous because it sounds like quite radical land reform there. Kieran, over to you.

Kieran Findlay

In 2023, Argyll and Bute Council became the first local authority in Scotland to declare a housing emergency. More than a dozen or so have followed suit, including the Highland Council, which has termed its situation the Highland Housing Challenge. Both regions obviously have vast rural areas, so I’m keen to get both of your initial thoughts on whether you think these represent political posturing or whether these declarations are actually worthwhile. We’ll start with you, Ailsa.

Ailsa Raeburn

Yeah, thanks, Kieran. I think they are worthwhile. I think we really need to focus all of our resources, both at the national government level and at local government level, on solving this problem because we’re seeing the impacts are so far-reaching. It is about young people not being able to stay locally. But then when we see the population forecasts, and particularly the working age forecasts for Argyll & Bute and Caithness & Sutherland, where they’re forecast to lose 30 % of the working-age population between now and 2046, which will only get worse if we don’t have more houses, then think of the impact on local tax take, council tax, how are going to fund the services?

How are going to keep the schools open if we’ve got no teachers and the hospitals open and look after our old people? So the impacts of a lack of housing are felt right across society. And it’s easy for some people to sort of sit back and think, well, I’ve got a house, I’m fine. But actually, who’s going to look after you when you’re retired? Who’s going to be working in the local co-op? Who’s going to be keeping the pub open in the winter, making your life bearable in places?

So I think local authorities have now recognised the impact of a lack of affordable and accessible housing of all tenures, so not just housing for rent, and can see a future which looks really bleak. So I think they are starting to bring much more of their resources to bear, both internally and how they can organise their planning departments etc, but also putting pressure on Scottish Government to say look we need changes in national planning framework. We need, as Hamish has outlined, to reduce and remove that risk and uncertainty for developers by making developable land available at the right price so we can encourage more builders to come in.

So I think by declaring an emergency it is actually really helpful because we can now see on the ground that they are committing resources. And I think the Highland Council is a brilliant example of what they’re doing, because again, they’re looking across a whole range of different measures to support new housing development and bringing housing back into use. They were the first, together with Edinburgh, to look at the Short-term Let Control Area order. So they’re also thinking about the whole range of mechanisms that are available to them to help solve this crisis.

Kieran Findlay

Hamish, what were your initial thoughts on housing emergencies?

Hamish Trench

Yeah, I agree it does help galvanise activity and provides the political focus there to join things up because of course one of the challenges here is that we need to join all of this up right across government political portfolios to make the system work. So I think the emergency kind of declaration helps do that politically. At a local authority level, I agree there’s some really good stuff going on and Highland Council, for example, already operates a capital land fund. And just last year, they announced a significant increase, you know, more capital into that fund. And then at a national level, yeah, we’ve certainly seen more activity and more action in terms of planning reform, as well as work on bringing different finance models available. And I think all that has been driven by the emergency declaration. But of course, there is, yeah, a lot more to do in terms of keeping momentum going on that.

Kieran Findlay

Yeah, both declarations, think both councils that have mentioned Argyll & Bute and Highland have had summits since then and have been able to bring a range of parties across different kind of areas together to do that. Yeah, I agree that they are worthwhile and they’re bringing the housing into sharp focus regionally and nationally. Jimmy, on to compulsory purchase and taxation measures.

Jimmy Black

Yes, Ailsa, you seem to be enthusiastic about compulsory purchase and taxation. Taxation including council tax measures. I’m not sure about inheritance tax and things like that. Certainly national, UK national developments and inheritance tax changes in farming. I’m not sure if these impact bigger estates or not, but they must have an effect in rural areas, I would think. Just give us an overview of what you think is required to release land for housing supply.

Ailsa Raeburn

Yeah, I think it’s a whole sort of carrot-and-stick process, isn’t it? And Hamish has already touched on this, that some landowners, you know, are keen, they recognise the issues locally and want to release land, but there are barriers standing in their way of doing that. So how do we support them to do that? And that could be taxation incentives. It could be, this is, you know, quite geeky, but the reform of the, if it’s a public landowner, the Scottish Public Finance Manual. So we think about what best value looks like and best value is not just the highest receipt. So it’s trying to get people to understand that the value of land is not just the pounds and pence, but actually there could be other, either taxation advantages or other advantages, wider economic advantages.

We know that some landowners also really struggle to get staff for key work on their estates. So how can we work with those landowners to talk about, well, you if we build 10 houses, then eight can go to the community and two can stay with you for your own use, etc. We just need to be a bit more creative, I think, in some of these processes. But equally, some of the funding regimes that we’ve got and some of the taxation regimes, militate against that. So we need to think about those.

So that’s sort of the carrot approach. But again, as Hamish has already mentioned, there will be some landowners that own land which is perfect for development on the outskirts of the village so fits with the planning, community’s happy, services are there, it’s very developable but they just don’t want to sell or they only want to sell at a premium price and that’s where we need reform of the compulsory purchase legislation and the Scottish Government are currently looking at that and I think they are thinking quite expansively about what that could look like but we know as with all of these things they’ll be very sort of powerful lobby groups that are lobbying against any change at all. But compulsory purchase reform is absolutely critical because we do need a backstop if landowners aren’t prepared to come to the table on reasonable terms.

I think in terms of other taxes, then we’ve seen the Scottish Government follow other of the devolved governments in terms of raising council tax premiums and land and building transaction tax premiums on second homes and short-term lets and we think there’s still a long way to go on that because it is having an impact but not enough of an impact. So we think there’s things that could be done there. And again this is a reserved matter obviously but things like capital gains, tax reliefs, if land is sold for affordable housing then is there an opportunity there to think about the wider taxation implications for landowners?

So again, there’s no one thing that will solve it, but there’s a whole range of things that are all perfectly within our grasp, which would help move this situation along.

Jimmy Black

One of the things which I find interesting is planning. was a development in Dundee recently where the NHS wanted to build houses for private sale on land that was now redundant. The council wanted them to put in affordable housing and after a long dispute, a lot to do with the local development plan actually, the council was defeated by the reporter, if you like, government level. And so the NHS was able to secure full value for their land, I guess, by the private development. That was unfortunate. And there are other difficulties with planning as well. Some local authorities, it would appear in spite of the fact that developments on the edge of rural locations rural villages are encouraged under the new planning frameworks. Nonetheless, somehow or other, they never seem to grant planning permission.

There was a proposal, I think it was maybe one of the Scottish Land Commission’s proposals for training councils in rural areas in rural planning. So the urban planning practice wasn’t actually applied to rural applications. Ailsa or Hamish, actually Hamish, have you got any comments to add on that?

Hamish Trench

Yes, I think clearly planning reform has a huge part to play in making this happen. And that’s, you’re right, that’s not just about the kind of technical planning policies, it’s also about the culture and the confidence the planning authorities have in terms of taking the steps to deliver. And again, we can see some really good examples of this around the country. Planning authorities are used to working in a very proactive way and have the confidence and the backing and the political backing to take some difficult decisions. But of course, that’s not everywhere.

You mentioned the question of best value. And I think that’s a really good example where it can be very easy for a public authority to feel that they must obtain the highest financial value for a piece of land. And of course, particularly in the current climate and current public finances, that pressure can be even greater. But already in the rules in terms of the Treasury Green Book and the best value rules, technical as that is, it is also very clear that there’s a case to be made for public interest and for transferring value that allows something to happen.

So I think there is a real job to do to not just provide the technical advice, but provide the ongoing support really to give authorities and staff working on these issues confidence and clarity that there are ways of working creatively within the system. So that, for example, a piece of land can be transferred to an active owner at a value that’s less than the market value, recognising the value that that’s actually going to create. I suppose part of this getting back to thinking about we are creating value through these decisions, not just seeking the highest financial receipt on an individual transaction.

Kieran Findlay

One initiative that stood out to me recently was the proposed new Housing Strategy from SSEN Transmission. Essentially, the company is going to work with councils, registered social landlords and other housing organisations to identify sites or work at accommodation where the infrastructure required to support their own temporary accommodation could then remain in place and be used to support housing delivery when their projects conclude.

The company was also looking to work with councils to support local empty homes initiatives to bring vacant homes back into use. What do you guys make of these proposals? Is it typical of the kind of thinking that’s required here? Start with you, Hamish.

Hamish Trench

Absolutely, I think it’s great and it is absolutely the kind of imaginative creative approach that we need. And I think it takes us into looking at how we link this with lots of other things that are going on in rural Scotland. So as I also said earlier, there’s some fantastic economic growth opportunities at the moment, a lot of that coming from renewables, natural capital and investment. And of course, we need to be looking at how that investment and part of that investment is channelled to benefit communities. And one of the obvious routes to that is making sure that housing is created and provided, both for the short-term needs in terms of major contracts, but as the SSEN model in terms of longer-term needs.

So I think it does take us into something that’s really quite exciting about looking at wider community benefit and how we channel some of the investment that’s coming in to underpin housing.

Kieran Findlay

Ailsa?

Ailsa Raeburn

Yeah, I’d agree with Hamish. It is really exciting. It’s very forward thinking of SSEN and we have to hope that other transmission companies in Scotland look to follow their lead.

So we know from the experience of the forestry and the hydro villages in their 40s and 50s, actually these are still great places to live. I live near one now. So you can see with some creative thinking what these sites could look like and how small villages could be created, which will still be there in 100 years time. I did note though, probably over the last couple of days, there’s still a proposal for a 300-person workers camp on Skye and the locals are probably quite rightly up in arms about it.

So I think SSEN are really working hard to try and find solutions, but we need to make sure we’re not having temporary workers camps for five or six years, which the impact on the community locally would be huge. So there’s still a long way to go in thinking about the impact of these huge transmission upgrades and renewables projects. And as Hamish says, it’s placing that in the wider sort of community benefit sphere and speaking to local people and say, well, is it serviced housing sites that you want or actually is there something else that would make your community grow and thrive? But yeah, it’s a great start from SSEN and hopefully others will follow.

Kieran Findlay

Last year, Rural Housing Scotland, the charity that was dedicated to supporting rural communities and securing affordable local housing, closed its doors after 20 years of service. Just a quick word to reflect on the charity’s impact and what the loss of another rural housing champion could mean, Ailsa.

Ailsa Raeburn

Yeah, it was really sad. And we knew obviously all the directors and the people that have worked there over the years, and they’ve done fantastic work in raising the profile of rural housing. And as we were talking about earlier, the interplay it has with so many different aspects of rural life and rural sustainability, community sustainability. So yeah, it was a great shame they weren’t able to continue.

And I think it perhaps reflects this short-termism. So we have taken a short-term approach to so many things. We’ll talk about rural communities and talk about the need for rural housing and the community where I stay. know, there are one or two houses coming to the market now, but there’s never going to be any young working-age families come to live in them because the council closed the school five years ago and the nearest school is sort of 15, 20 miles away. So they closed the school for a relatively small amount of annual money and they’re now putting lots of money into trying to attract people to the area. And you think it’s that short-term view that we still seem to be in the middle of, that we need to step back and as Hamish said, think much more creatively and what the long-term impact of some of these decisions are. And I think it’s the same with Rural Housing Scotland, they were doing brilliant work in raising the profile and supporting communities and working with government to say you could make these changes, these changes.

I think linked to that is the Rural and Islands Housing Fund. I don’t know if you’re going to come on and talk about that, but that comes to an end in March 2026 and at the moment there’s no commitment to renewing it beyond March 2026. And as a result, community-led schemes are now almost stopping, even as a year away. And it’s that sort short-term thinking. You’re thinking two years’ time, we’ll be desperate to get communities building again and we’ll have to start this process again. So that’s why housing emergencies are good because it focuses everybody’s minds on the bigger picture.

But I hope we can really move away from this short-term thinking because it hugely impacts on what we can deliver over time.

Hamish Trench

Yeah, so I think just to, it is of course sad to see rural housing’s gone on to close and it really emphasises the point that’s come up through all the work that we’ve done in rural housing. One of the key messages from all sectors involved has been the need to resource the collaboration. We see local authorities with housing enabler posts in the past, for example, that have been pivotal in actually making development happen. So think right across so much of what is needed is to join up the pieces of the jigsaw and that absolutely requires the kind of coordination and enabling function to be there as a really basic starting point. So losing some of that feels like a step in the wrong direction at moment.

I think looking to the long term, of course, this needs money and we’re very aware of the proposals we’re putting forward in terms of land assembly, the role of public bodies, has a cost to the public purse. But I think we need to be really clear that that is a cost that is worth paying because making that investment really does underpin the wider system. And that’s why this is an opportunity, I think, if we come back to getting a pipeline, identifiable pipeline of land so rural communities can see a pipeline of land supply for housing stretching 10 years, 20 years ahead. That’s not just by effective planning, but by the kind of innovative finance, joint ventures, bringing the money in the finance behind it, creating a certainty for the supply sector, the supply chain in terms of SME construction sector, creating certainty for communities so they can see where and how the development is going to happen.

Bringing that land supply together really does underpin the wider system that is needed to make this work, I think.

Jimmy Black

So Hamish, one last question from me. You’ve just published this report. If you were the person writing the press release for the government responding to your report, what would you like to see in it?

Hamish Trench

I think I would like to see a message about a really active approach to public land ownership and one that is going to make housing happen.

Jimmy Black

Pretty good. Thank you very much. 

Kieran Findlay

And on that note we’ll end it there. Thanks again to Ailsa Raeburn and Hamish Trench. My thanks as always to Jimmy Black. I’m Kieran Findlay and there’ll be a new episode of the Scottish Housing News Podcast in a couple of weeks.