SCOTLAND FOR SALE?
How public land is sold to housing developers
Investigation finds £1million penthouses built on land we once all owned. By Jamie Mann
SCOTLAND’S public land is being sold off to housing developers building luxury homes and sidelining local people, we can reveal.
Several communities told The Ferret they were misled or ignored by housebuilders and public bodies on development plans.
Developers also allegedly breached planning rules without consequence, while councils scrapped local plans – including a healthcare hub for the elderly – to allow for new developments, sometimes on greenbelt land.
Nearly £70 million of land was bought from Scotland’s councils, universities and NHS boards by CALA homes between 2014 and 2019, according to data obtained by The Ferret through freedom of information law. This amounts to 12 per cent of the £500m of public land sold in recent years.
Areas where hospitals, schools, nurseries, clinics, community centres and libraries once sat were bought up by private firms such as CALA, Robertson, Westpoint, and Expresso.
While land has been used for mid-market and affordable houses, luxury homes and penthouse complexes worth up to £1m have also been built on sites which once were publicly owned.
Housing charities warned that the need for affordable homes “has never been greater”, while campaigners said The Ferret’s investigation highlighted how “ingrained the privatisation agenda remains”.
New wave of developments
THE Ferret’s ongoing Selling Off Scotland investigation found that developers were behind nearly all the largest recent public land transactions, many of which led to luxury developments in and around Edinburgh and Glasgow, most commonly built by CALA.
The biggest public land sale saw CALA buy the University of Strathclyde’s Jordanhill Campus in Glasgow for nearly £33m in 2018. It built 400 luxury homes ranging from £409,000 to £899,995.
The development sparked a row with local parents, who accused nearby Jordanhill School of striking a “cash-forplaces” deal with CALA, as reported by The Herald. The school reportedly changed its admissions policy to include the new addresses in exchange for a £1.6m gym built by CALA.
The Jordanhill Families For Inclusion group told The Ferret that parents on the school’s board later voted out the deal. In another large public land transaction, the former Middlefield special needs school site in Glasgow was sold to Westpoint Homes for £8.2m in 2019. The developer used the land, which sits within the Glasgow West Conservation Area, to build 63 luxury apartments, penthouses and duplexes, with prices ranging from £405,000 to £735,000.
In 2017, Glasgow City Council sold land at Park Quadrant next to Kelvingrove Park to property firm Expresso for £5.7m. The resulting luxury development received hundreds of objections from locals who wanted to keep the green space.
The Park and Woodlands Heritage Group argued locals were not consulted and that its own proposal for public gardens was scuppered by the council. The council said its application “was invalid for a number of reasons’’ and claimed the group had not addressed the proposal’s issues.
Engineers behind Expresso’s plans were later investigated for allegedly misleading the council’s planning committee with fake letters of support. The Association for Consultancy and Engineering, which investigated Woolgar Hunter and Atelier Ten, said it does not “share the outcomes of disciplinary investigations publicly”. The Ferret contacted both engineering firms but did not receive a response.
CALA also bought public land at Bearsden and Newton Mearns in East Dunbartonshire and part of the old Glasgow Victoria Infirmary, for a collective £11.7m. All sites are now luxury homes and apartment complexes.
Public interest ‘ignored’
ARCHITECT Malcolm Fraser said The Ferret’s investigation had revealed “an underlying transfer from the public to the private realm of good, well-located sites and sturdy, well-crafted buildings, to be replaced by shoddy newbuilds”.
He added: “Meanwhile, the old sites, if in leafy areas, are snapped up as glam apartments, sometimes by offshore and Far East absentee investors … or, if lessleafy, left to moulder until maximum public regeneration funding is screwed out of us.”
Planning Democracy, a Scottish charity which campaigns for an inclusive planning system, said when public land is sold, it “chucks away the community power that goes with it”.
The consequences “are rarely measured or calculated into the equation, the replenishing of depleted coffers being the main aim of the game,” said founder Clare Symonds.
Ms Symonds argued that “a public interest test” must be passed before land is sold off.
Shelter Scotland warned that the need for affordable housing “has never been greater”. It is calling for the new Scottish Government to build at least 37,100 social homes over the next Parliament. “We were already dealing with a housing emergency before coronavirus hit,” said a spokesperson. “And, if we don’t act, things could get a lot worse.”
The Ferret’s investigation had revealed that “land and public assets are being sold off on a massive scale”, said Scottish Labour’s housing spokesperson, Pauline McNeill. “We need to invest in growing our public assets, including building more social homes to deal with our housing crisis.”
Kim Long of the Scottish Greens argued that large developers were “too often given free rein on public land, threatening public assets and destroying much-needed green spaces”.
She said: “What’s worse, communities are still sidelined in decision-making far too often.”
But a CALA spokesperson said: “The development of publicly-owned sites typically involves land that has been determined as no longer required or fit for purpose to the seller, following a strategic review by the relevant Government body.
“A robust procurement process follows, to ensure the maximisation of funds to the public body. This results in the provision of much-needed new homes, through the transformation of vacant sites, often on brownfield land, and the preservation of historic buildings.”