This week, Homes for Scotland is highlighting the vital role that the country’s SME home builders play in helping to meet the housing needs of our local communities. This follows recent publication of a comprehensive piece of independent research which found an alarming reduction in activity in this key sector, with the proportion of new homes sold by those building between three and 49 homes per annum having fallen from around 40 per cent in 2017 to less than 20 per cent in 2023. It also revealed that the number of SME home builders being dissolved in recent years has significantly increased.
In the context of what is now a nationally recognised housing emergency and a time when 28 per cent of Scottish households (693,000) have been identified as being in some form of housing need, such data should be ringing alarm bells through the top tiers of both the Scottish Government and local authorities. Why should they care? And, perhaps even more importantly, why should wider civic society care? Because we have to address the shortfall of +100,000 homes that has accumulated since 2008 - when SMEs were delivering more than twice as many homes than they are now. Because over one-third of housing delivery in rural and remote areas, often more challenging from logistical and market perspectives, is where many SME developers efforts are focused.
Because SMEs are also crucial to unlocking brownfield sites (a priority for the planning system), accounting for over 90 per cent of such de.