Why £50,000 island bond is a gimmick

ALOT of lives and outlooks changed in the past 18 months and if we are indeed emerging from dark days, it would be as well to look for opportunities rather than wander back into a false assumption of business as usual.

There is no more clear-cut example of why this makes sense than rural housing, because the fall-out is already happening before the eyes of anyone who looks in an estate agent’s window. The more scenic the area, the higher the roof that prices have gone through.

Remote working is no longer a minority proposition while a second home has become more attractive to anyone who can afford it.

The impact on local housing markets is to price out the very people communities depend upon for their sustainability.

Months ago, I suggested this evolving scenario created an opportunity for Scottish Government intervention.

Things can be done in an emergency that might come up against resistance in normal times. So here was the chance to attack one of the great enigmas of Scottish society – the shortage of rural land for house building.

One thing Scotland is not short of is land.

Yet vast tracts are run as private fiefdoms, outside the reach of public policy. Until that is cracked, Scotland’s rural communities are fighting with at least one hand tied behind their back.

With demand for rural housing soaring, the need for legislation which will force landowners – regardless of status or nationality – to yield land for housing sites or smallholdings is overwhelming.

It is a matter public policy should decide and, thereby, enrich the lives of thousands who – now more than ever – want to live, work or raise families, in rural environments.

Nothing, of course, has happened. The kind of interventions in the land market that were deemed possible a century ago are far too radical today.

But doing nothing is not a neutral act when the effect is to make it ever more difficult for the lifeblood of communities to be kept flowing through availability of houses to live in.

I tend, by background and place of residence, to discuss these issues in terms of island or crofting communities. That allows them to be marginalised, so let’s be clear. Most of rural Scotland is not made up of islands or land under crofting tenure. Far more consists of untouchable private estates controlled by a rogue’s gallery of owners, the last of whose interests is in opening them up to people who want a change of lifestyle or just to remain in their own communities.

Even within the Highlands and Islands, the distinction between crofting and non-crofting land was created 140 years ago and remains untouched to the present day.

It was based on a double jeopardy. If an area had been so effectively cleared that there were few people left, it was not included in the Crofting Acts and continued as an empty, private fiefdom. It is extraordinary that Scotland still takes that distinction for granted, without question or challenge.

The Scottish Government has announced a gimmicky scheme to offer people £50,000 bonds to live on islands. It is spread over £5 million, 93 inhabited islands and five years.

So, each year, perhaps on St Andrew’s Day, are we to have a lottery to decide which 20 lucky applicants will win a £50k bond?

As a policy to address serious issues it is an irrelevant joke.

In contrast, most houses which have allowed people to remain in crofting areas were built through the Crofter Housing Grant and Loan Scheme, which was not too radical for the politics of 1956 when it was created.

Applicants were paid realistic sums and contributed their own labour to build the house. Job done and it was reputed to be the cheapest form of housing to the public purse.

Like every good idea that worked, it has been allowed to shrivel and decline, the loans abolished and the grant element cut to the point that uptake last year was only 53 across the whole Highland islands.

Five years ago, the Western Isles Council put forward its own variation to address the haemorrhaging of population from rural communities. They asked for flexibility to use part of the housing allocation from Edinburgh to create a revolving fund which would provide capital grants, allow for own labour, recoup through “rent equivalent” payments and after 15 years leave people as owners of their homes, in the places they wanted to live.

This was far too radical for the then housing minister, Kevin Stewart, who knocked it back. Social housing meant social housing and if it did not look like a mini-housing scheme, it couldn’t be social housing.

The concept is now being revisited and we wait to see if anything has changed in the Edinburgh mindset.

Crucially, that kind of scheme does not need to be confined to a crofting area or island. It has equal application in any part of rural Scotland where there are people who want to live in a good environment or stay in their own communities and will work hard to make that possible.

Should government not be the enablers?

Of course, none of the above can apply without access to land – and that is the issue which, over vast swathes of rural Scotland, remains wholly unaddressed. Doubtless, that too will be somebody else’s fault.

One thing Scotland is not short of is land. Yet vast tracts are run as private fiefdoms, outside public policy’s reach