Scotland’s Housing Bill Comes Due at a Decade Low

Scotland completed 17,057 new homes in the year to June 2026, the lowest total since 2015 and 11% down on the year before. Starts fell 2% to 15,543, the weakest figure since 2013.

Those counts, issued on 29 September 2026 by the Tackling Child Poverty and Social Justice Directorate, arrived more than a year after Professor Duncan Maclennan CBE told ministers that housing had been parked in social policy and left out of the growth machine.

Completions Fell to 17,057, the Lowest Since 2015

Official figures show 17,057 new build homes were completed across private and social housebuilding, 2,123 fewer than the previous 12 months. The government’s own all-tenure ambition was a 10% rise on the July 2024 to June 2025 baseline. The outturn was an 11% fall.

Private builders finished 13,574 homes, down 7%, and started 11,842, down 8%. Private starts were the lowest since 2013. Private completions were the lowest since 2018, leaving aside 2020 when pandemic rules stopped sites.

The social sector finished 3,483 homes, down 25% and the lowest since 2007. Social starts rose 26% to 3,701, from the weakest base in the series, and remained 48% below their 2020 peak. Add the two sectors and the arithmetic is blunt: 13,574 plus 3,483 is 17,057.

YEAR TO JUNE 2026, NEW BUILD

The Affordable Housing Supply Programme, which mixes new build with off-the-shelf purchases, completed 6,772 homes, approved 6,649 and started 7,143. Approvals were up 42% and starts up 34%, both from a low base, with approvals the weakest since 2010 in the comparison year. Of those AHSP completions, 76% were new build and 25% were purchases of existing homes.

Two Hume Reports Called Housing Economic Infrastructure

Maclennan, emeritus professor of urban economics at the University of Glasgow and a former board member of Scottish Homes from 1989 to 1999, wrote the David Hume Institute’s first paper in this series, published on 12 May 2025. That first Hume Institute housing warning said inadequate supply, weak affordability and poor spatial planning were capping productivity, widening inequality and stretching regional gaps.

On 28 September 2025 he and researcher Jocelyne Fleming followed with Prosperity Begins at Home: Disruptions to Improve Scotland’s Housing System, part-funded by CCG (Scotland) Ltd. The briefing said housing takes a quarter of household spending and supports 10 to 15% of jobs, yet is still handled as leftover social policy. Current output aims of 25,000 to 30,000 homes a year were, they wrote, unrealistic without a change in planning, land, labour, infrastructure and finance.

Housing makes up a quarter of household spending and supports up to 15% of jobs. Without systemic reform, the housing polycrisis will worsen, locking young people out of homeownership and holding back Scotland’s prosperity.

Professor Duncan Maclennan CBE, Emeritus Professor of Urban Economics, University of Glasgow, David Hume Institute briefing, 28 September 2025

He added that if politics does not change housing, left-behind places and younger Scots “at the brunt” of that squeeze will change politics. Susan Murray, director of the Institute, said Scotland has come through housing crises before only by making large shifts, and that “business as usual, with a few small tweaks, will not deliver the change that is needed.”

Maclennan’s line on a housing polycrisis will worsen was the diagnosis. The 17,057 figure is what the system then produced.

After Scottish Homes, Housing Drifted Into a Welfare Silo

The Institute’s papers keep returning to a machinery problem. Scottish Homes, the national housing agency, was wound up in 2001. Communities Scotland, which took on housing and regeneration, was brought inside government on 1 April 2008. Maclennan later wrote that from that point housing policy lost direction and was treated as a spending silo rather than as a set of regional systems that shape growth, wellbeing and climate work.

The latest completion release still sits under social justice, not the economy brief. That is the institutional version of the argument in the Hume papers: homes are counted next to child poverty, then asked to carry labour mobility, net zero and productivity without the tools of an infrastructure programme.

FROM EMERGENCY TO A DELAYED AGENCY

1. May 2024: The Scottish Government declares a national housing emergency.
2. 12 May 2025: The first Hume paper, Prosperity Begins at Home: Scottish Housing Policies for Faster, Fairer Economic Growth, is published.
3. 28 September 2025: Maclennan and Fleming publish the disruptions paper, with seven system shifts.
4. 22 January 2026: First Minister John Swinney announces More Homes Scotland, to start in 2027-28.
5. 31 March 2026: 19,004 households sit in temporary accommodation, with 10,715 children.
6. 29 September 2026: Completions for the year to June 2026 are published at 17,057.

Four out of five Scots, Maclennan has written, still find a home through the market. Neglect of planning, finance and regulation, he argued, left that market speculative rather than a stable route into savings. Homeownership has been falling for more than 20 years, with younger buyers facing high deposits and flat wages. The private rented sector grew after 1999, then shrank after tax and rent-control changes, so supply fell while rents rose.

Record Numbers Wait in Temporary Accommodation

Homelessness statistics for 2025-26, published on 22 September 2026, show the social-policy silo under load. At 31 March 2026, 19,004 households were in temporary accommodation, up 10% from 17,240 a year earlier. Children in those rooms numbered 10,715, up 5% from 10,180.

HOMELESSNESS, YEAR TO 31 MARCH 2026

• Open cases: 34,964 households were still in the system, up 10% from 31,873.
• Applications: 41,443 households applied, against 41,246 the year before.
• Time in limbo: Closed cases that used temporary rooms spent 237 days there on average, three days less than 2024-25 but well above 175 days in 2017-18.
• No offer: Local authorities recorded 21,800 instances where temporary accommodation was not offered, up from 16,460.

Households reporting they had slept rough the night before applying rose from 2,464 to 2,949. Maclennan’s briefing split homelessness into cases driven by a simple lack of an affordable home and cases compounded by health, addiction or abuse, and said both still need supply. He set “functional zero” as the test: rare, brief, and not repeated.

The same papers said people are stuck in the wrong homes in the wrong places, unable to reach jobs that match their skills. Rural planning, the May 2025 report argued, has stripped some localities of younger and skilled workers because thin markets were never planned for. That is the growth cost that never appears on a homelessness return.

Why the 110,000 Affordable Homes Target Is Slipping

Ministers are still committed to 110,000 affordable homes by 2032, with at least 70% for social rent (77,000 homes) and 10% in rural and island communities. By the end of June 2026, 36,518 affordable homes had been counted toward that target: 28,286 for social rent (77%), 5,248 for affordable rent (14%) and 2,984 for affordable ownership (8%). That is just over a third of the way, with 73,482 still to find.

SPICe, the parliament’s research body, wrote in August 2026 that only 32% of the target had been completed by the end of March 2026 and that, on then-current approvals and construction, meeting 110,000 “appears to be unlikely.” That verdict used the March stock of 35,368. The June count is 36,518, not a change of path.

A separate, smaller number sits in the budget. In January 2026 Swinney pledged up to £4.9 billion over four years, including a record £4.1 billion of public money, to support about 36,000 affordable homes in that window and a place to live for around 24,000 children. The draft 2026-27 budget put £926 million into the Affordable Housing Supply Programme, the largest allocation since records began in 1989. That 36,000 is a four-year funded slice. It is not the 36,518 already delivered toward 110,000, and it is not 110,000.

The government says that from 2007-08 to 2024-25 Scotland averaged 14.4 affordable homes per 10,000 people, 45% higher than England and 69% higher than Wales. Relative success against other UK countries does not close a domestic gap against a 110,000 target, or against a 25,000 to 30,000 all-tenure range Maclennan already called unreachable on the present system.

What More Homes Scotland Is Meant to Do

On 22 January 2026, at a 90-home Wheatley Homes site in Wallyford, East Lothian, Swinney confirmed a new national housing agency. More Homes Scotland is expected to start in 2027-28 and be fully working in 2028-29, subject to the election. Its brief is large affordable schemes, rural and island housing, land assembly, infrastructure to unlock stalled sites, and closer work with the Scottish National Investment Bank, which the Bank’s chief executive, David Ritchie, said had already put more than £130 million into housing.

Swinney said Scotland faces a housing emergency and that many people, young Scots in particular, cannot find a home they can afford to rent or buy. The agency, he said, would mean less duplication, more expertise and investment that goes further.

First Minister @JohnSwinney and Housing Secretary Màiri McAllan have set out plans for a new agency to accelerate house building across Scotland.

More Homes Scotland will provide new homes more quickly and more affordably for a new generation of Scots.

➡️https://t.co/q36q9KbzwH pic.twitter.com/QEqyVGrphZ

— First Minister (@ScotGovFM) January 22, 2026

The timetable is the constraint. An agency that does not operate until 2027-28 leaves at least two more winters to the same fragmented grant-and-planning machine that just posted 17,057 completions. Maclennan later wrote that More Homes Scotland is the one radical proposal on the table and that even that will achieve little without wider reform. He has also warned against simply moving a slice of the civil service into a new badge, a fate he said met talent after Scottish Homes was broken up.

That is the grown-up form of a simpler objection: Scotland is short of bricklayers, plumbers and electricians on live sites, and a new public body does not pour a foundation. The Hume papers already listed the bottlenecks as slow planning, thin infrastructure, labour shortages and fragile supply chains, and said modern methods of construction only scale with stable funding.

Maclennan’s Seven Shifts Still Await a Buyer

The September 2025 briefing, and Maclennan’s own seven-step account of it, is a delivery list, not a mood. Scotland’s 160 housing associations, he wrote, need a larger-scale, wider-role class that can do mid-market rent, rent-to-own, private finance and modular build, with smaller skilled boards and programme funding instead of project bids.

THE SEVEN SHIFTS IN THE HUME PAPERS

• Infrastructure status: Put housing at the centre of productivity, growth and climate strategy, not at the edge of social policy.
• Supply: Treat 25,000 to 30,000 homes a year as unreachable until planning delays, land, labour, materials and infrastructure are fixed.
• Ownership routes: Tie first-time buyer support to new supply so subsidies do not just lift prices.
• Rents: Grow social and mid-market homes, reform Local Housing Allowance, and reset private-rent rules so capital can enter without stripping tenant protection.
• Homelessness: Expand Housing First, pair it with public health, and aim for functional zero.
• Tax: Review council tax, land and buildings transaction tax and housing wealth so the system stops rewarding scarcity.
• Governance: Build an infrastructure, housing and planning ministry, combined strategic housing authorities aligned with regional economic partnerships, industry-led regional supply councils, and a stronger Scottish Futures Trust on five-year housing-infrastructure deals.

Calum Murray, director of CCG (Scotland) Ltd, said the research gave a practical framework and that the task now is to use it in policy and on sites. Murray at the Hume Institute said the series would go on to land reform and the planning system, and to who has to deliver.

Until those shifts are taken up, the next completion release will be produced by the same directorate, the same grant programme and the same local planning queues. More Homes Scotland is scheduled after that. The 17,057 homes already built in the year to June 2026 are what that wait cost.