Highlands hit by spiralling housing crisis

There is growing recognition that rural localities across the Highlands and islands are in the grip of what’s been called an “existential” and “devastating” housing crisis. That recognition is shared by politicians, with Kate Forbes, the Scottish Government’s cabinet secretary for finance and MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, commenting in the run-up to May’s election that “the very life of our communities is at stake”.

So far, however, this concern hasn’t been matched by action on the scale required to ensure community survival and renewal.

Especially in more scenic areas – Badenoch and Strathspey, the west coast and the Hebrides in particular – house after house is ceasing to be available for local occupancy. Some become second homes; others holiday lets available to Britain’s swelling number of “staycationers”.

This is greatly to the financial advantage of the owners or former owners of those properties. But the wider consequences, socially and economically, are calamitous.

Survey after survey has shown that large numbers of young people – local and incomer alike – want to set up home in the Highlands and islands. But all too often, they can’t because they can’t obtain houses to rent or buy at prices they can afford.

A generation’s life chances are being destroyed by their having nowhere to stay. Nor does the damage end there. Because of accommodation shortages, businesses are unable to recruit or retain employees. Key services such as medical practices, hospitals and care homes face similar staffing difficulties. School rolls shrink and schools close because fewer folk in their 20s and 30s means fewer children. How to counter this downward spiral? Government, it’s suggested widely, could introduce taxation and regulatory reforms to make ownership of second homes and holiday lets a far less attractive proposition.

But for all that Kate Forbes has pledged to pursue these possibilities, she’s likely to run into political difficulty – not least from the people doing very well out of existing arrangements. In a country where rising house prices tend to be seen (rightly or wrongly) as a good thing, there aren’t many electoral dividends in forcing prices down.

Much simpler in principle would be the construction of far more new housing. Some might be for rent, some for eventual purchase subject to a legally enforceable insistence on homes in this category remaining in full-time local occupancy. Something of this is already under way. Community development groups and organisations like the Communities Housing Trust, which operates across the Highlands and islands, are making heroic efforts to provide affordable homes in Gigha, Colonsay, Staffin, Applecross, Fort Augustus and lots of other localities.

There are all sorts of obstacles – for instance, with land availability and planning restrictions. But the biggest barrier is lack of the cash required to come anywhere near meeting housing need in places at risk of becoming holiday enclaves.

Where might the money come from? Could the Scottish Government rejig its approach to economic development in the Highlands and islands to make housing (without which local economies will fall apart) its number one spending priority? Could the UK Government lend a hand?

In the 1950s, when Tory governments financed the building of 250,000 council houses annually, social housing was one of Conservatism’s central objectives. Further back, in the 1920s, a Tory-dominated coalition spent huge sums on providing Highlands and islands families with crofts and grant-aided croft houses.

Could Boris Johnson and his ministers be persuaded to give today’s Highlands and islands the sort of attention given to the region by their political predecessors?

The omens aren’t good. UK ministers, after all, have refused to make the Highlands and islands a priority area in the context of their Shared Prosperity Fund – London’s supposed replacement for aid that, pre-Brexit, came from Brussels.

Time, perhaps, for the four Conservative MSPs recently returned to Holyrood from the Highlands and islands – Douglas Ross, Donald Cameron, Edward Mountain and Jamie Halcro Johnston – to mount a joint mission to Westminster to tell Tory colleagues that Mr Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda ought to give more attention to the part of Scotland these same four represent.

That would be a so-called “union dividend” well worth having.

Jim Hunter is a historian, awardwinning author and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands

A generation’s life chances are being destroyed