15th May 2009
By David Scott in Edinburgh
An overcautious approach to planning is preventing the provision of much-needed housing in Scotland’s rural areas, MSPs have warned.
Members of the Scottish Parliament’s rural affairs and environment committee called for a challenge to the widespread view that rural areas should not be built on.
It proposed a range of measures to ease the position. These included giving local authorities powers to increase council tax rates on second homes in rural areas to levels above the standard rate for privately owned houses.
In a report published on May 7, the committee found that there was ‘an overcautious planning culture in much of rural Scotland that has effectively entrenched a presumption against development, including housing development in many areas’.
The report follows an inquiry by the MSPs into obstacles stopping people in rural Scotland from finding affordable housing to rent or buy.
A committee spokesman said members believed the planning system was burdened by ‘a centuries-old belief that the countryside should be protected from development’ and that this was exacerbating a serious shortage of housing in rural areas.
The MSPs called on the Scottish Government to extend the principles of ‘pressurised area status’. This currently gives councils powers to restrict the right to buy scheme for social housing in areas where the local housing market is under serious pressure.
Committee convener Maureen Watt said: ‘Fundamental to the overall approach taken in this report is that many more houses need to be built in rural Scotland.’
She added: ‘It is also clear from the inquiry that more needs to be done to give local authoritiesmore powers to deal with pressures caused by a lack of rural housing in specific geographical areas.’
