Towards a Public Interest Led Approach to Development
By taking on more of the risk in land promotion, the public sector can enable developers to worry less about securing land and focus more on building houses and creating better places. To do this we propose:
1. Establishing a new recyclable fund to support the creation of a network of ‘place pioneers’ – an ambitious programme of affordable housing delivery utilising repurposed publicly owned property assets in town centres and privately owned housing stock in remote rural communities.
2. Empowering local authorities to designate Regeneration Partnership Zones to help speed up the redevelopment of land in fragmented or multiple ownership by creating an opportunity for landowners and public authorities to share the long-term uplift in land values.
3. Introducing new approach(es) to land value capture to ensure that uplifts in land value arising from public investment in infrastructure and land remediation can be captured effectively and invested in place-making.
4. Creating a new public land agency, empowered and resourced to ensure that a steady supply of development-ready sites is brought forward at the right time and in the right places to meet Scotland’s housing needs.
5. Introducing a new transparency obligation that would require options agreements and conditional contracts over land to be disclosed on a public register and for summary information on this to be published on a regular basis alongside a regular statistical bulletin covering land sales prices.