‘Reaching the Parts Other Grants Don't Go?’ Supporting Self-provided Housing in Rural Scotland

Abstract

Ensuring that rural areas of the UK have sufficient affordable houses in reasonable condition has long challenged policy makers. Previous research shows that rural housing has demand characteristics and faces supply constraints that have proven difficult to balance. The paper reports on the reasons why an innovative subsidy has achieved some success in overcoming barriers to provision in rural Scotland. It is argued that the subsidy has boosted effective demand and tackled a major supply constraint, namely land availability. Empirical material is drawn from a systematic evaluation of the mechanism. The paper concludes with reflections on its implications for the wider literature and for rural housing provision in the evolving financial and political context.

Keywords:

• Housing supply
• housing policy
• rural
• self-provided housing

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express particular appreciation to Fiona Wager, who conducted qualitative interviews with RHOG users. They wish to acknowledge the assistance given by research participants, including RHOG agents and users and the experts and stakeholders who formed the advisory group or took part in interviews. They also acknowledge the role of Communities Scotland as funder of the original research and the useful comments of the journal's anonymous referees.

Notes

¹ Communities Scotland was abolished in April 2008 and grants are now administered by the Housing Investment Division of the Scottish Government's Housing and Regeneration Directorate.

² Whilst sale prices have, on average, been 25 per cent lower than equivalent second hand housing (Pawson et al., 1997), making them more affordable, they still remain out of reach of many rural households, particularly those searching for social rented accommodation.

³ Across Scotland, the tenure houses only about 7 per cent of households, but in some rural areas (such as in the Cairngorms, Satsangi et al., 2006b) it houses about three times that proportion.

⁴ The vernacular term for private landowners.

⁵ Crofts are small agricultural landholdings, subject to special legislation beginning with the Crofters' Act, 1886. This legislation was largely a response to the complaints and demands of tenant families who were victims of the Highland Clearances.

⁶ Approximately translated as ‘Western Isles Housing’.

⁷ Cottars historically had more limited access to land than crofters.

⁸ The Western Isles are located in Inverness-shire and Ross and Cromarty, two of the seven crofting counties; the others are Argyllshire, Sutherland, Caithness, Orkney and Shetland.

⁹ The authors are indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for this point.

¹⁰ Compared with over 50 per cent in France, Italy, Germany, Austria and Belgium.

¹¹ Highland figure is from Communities Scotland database of 788 transactions held nationally which does not allow disaggregation to former District level. Skye and Lochalsh figure is from dataset collated for all Scotland by Inverness Office containing 530 transactions disaggregated to District level.

¹² It is striking, for example, that in May, 2009 the HSCHT website was able to advertise over 30 plots for potential RHOG applicants in 12 rural communities, mostly in batches of one or two plots in each community. Available at http://www.hscht.co.uk/old_site/news/rhog.html (accessed March 2010).

¹³ £1.9 million from a budget of £530 million in 2008/09 (Scottish Government, 2010).

¹⁴ Interview data also suggested that appreciating the scale of work involved deterred many people from pursuing a RHOG. However, there was no evidence that the quality of any RHOG housing delivered suffered.