Government house completion statistics do not paint the whole picture

I WAS surprised to see you simply parrot Housing Minister Kevin Stewart’s false suggestion that 18,182 new houses were “finished” in the year to June 2018 (“Fifth more affordable homes built in the past year, figures reveal”,

The Herald, December 12).

Such a figure ignores the 20,000 plus new homes that may be occupied, but which are not formally adopted (source – my FOI requests over past years). Yes – maybe half of these will progress through the Road Construction Consent (RCC) adoption process. But that’s still more than 10,000 new home owners facing long-term adoption issues.

Increasingly, it serves councils not to adopt new roads, drains and street lighting to save a few bob. The volume house builders also save by cutting quality. So it’s the new house purchaser who gets a raw deal, with a long-term reduction of five percent to 10%in the property value.

The Law Society of Scotland doesn’t even require solicitors to check if the estate has actually been adopted. The Scottish Government statisticians have declined to move to have accurate figures.

The question is how long are people in Scotland going to accept tiny new homes (the UK has some of the smallest size houses in Europe), built wastefully at low densities (typically 20 per hectare rather than 30)? Why isn’t the “Glasgow” or “Fife” Standard (for social housing) applied to all new houses?

Perhaps because some Scottish minister is fixated on numbers, and not on quality.

Dave Sutton, Architect,

Douglas Gate,

Cambuslang.