Some 600 senior figures from the country’s home building sector met in Edinburgh yesterday on Friday where they heard from the new Chairman of industry body Homes for Scotland Doug McLeod.

Building on initiatives already taken by the Scottish Government, such as the introduction of the National Housing Trust and New Supply Shared Equity with Developers scheme, the theme for the organisation’s Annual Lunch (sponsored for the fifth year by Bell & Scott), was “a new dawn for housing models”.

In his inaugural address, McLeod, who is also Regional Director for Scotland of Barratt Homes, summarized the three main issues affecting the industry’s recovery as mortgage availability, affordable housing delivery and over-regulation.

With the current banking and wholesale finance markets still continuing to present major difficulties in terms of the amount of funds available for mortgage lending, he said that it was vital that new forms of mortgage products, such as Mortgage Indemnity Guarantees, were brought to market as quickly as possible.

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Referring to reductions in public funds to support new affordable housing, McLeod said: “Home builders have assisted through the extensive use of shared equity to help those with low deposits. They have increased part-exchange as an incentive to unlock sales and have even tried ‘rent to buy’ schemes to bridge this gap in the short term, but some of these schemes are expensive. They come at a heavy cost in terms of cash lock-up and we all have limits that we require to operate within.”

Posing the question “what happens when these wells start to run dry?”, he called for bold and visionary steps to aid recovery with all parties both public and private working closely together.

“New models”, he said, “using tenure neutral policies and structured innovative ways which allow the private sector to deliver affordable housing under its own direction, as a legitimate part of the mix of homes in a given market area, must be part of a new affordable housing formula. This will provide the certainty we as home builders require to allow developments to proceed.”

In closing, McLeod revealed that many builders were now unable to deliver starter homes or smaller properties due to a decade of ever increasing supplementary planning requirements and increasingly complex building standards that have cumulatively now “gone a step too far”:

He pointed to Homes for Scotland’s alternative Low Carbon Homes route map, which he described as “twice as effective for a tenth of the cost” of future regulation as currently proposed, and called for focus to turn to funding and delivering improvements to the existing inefficient housing stock.

(GK)