Professor Kenneth Gibb: Debating a housing delivery agency for Scotland

Emergencies Require Action

Scotland is in a housing emergency, as are 14 of its 32 local authorities. Each instance also carries with it a Housing Emergency Action Plan response. Also, the Scottish Housing Investment Task Force has had its recommendations accepted by the Government to boost investment across the housing system. Meanwhile, affordable housing need is estimated to have grown by 50% in Scotland to 15,000 homes a year for the coming Parliamentary term.

It was in this context that the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) launched a housing evidence manifesto in December 2025. We called for a new housing agency, widely supported across the housing sector, to help tackle market failures and enhance housing land delivery and otherwise accelerate housing supply across the country. We were also commissioned by Shelter Scotland to undertake a project looking at the case for, specific design and implementation features of such an agency.

More Homes Scotland

Then, on January 22, 2026, the First Minister announced that there would be a new national housing agency (More Homes Scotland) ‘with a focus on simplicity, scale and speed to enable the delivery of housing of all types, helping to meet housing need across Scotland’. Talking to the Government the same day, Shelter Scotland offered to use the research project as advice and commentary to support the new agency. This was taken up enthusiastically by ministers and officials. The research team agreed to generate a briefing paper by the end of February based on sector-wide interviews and secondary analysis of previous Scottish housing agencies, as well as current practice in England and Ireland. Further project work will follow but this briefing paper was published earlier in the week and hopefully makes a useful contribution to the debate.

The timescale has been challenging in this work because of the coming Scottish election and the shortly arriving election period which starts at the end of March. The plan is that the Cabinet Secretary will provide an update to Parliament before Holyrood stands down for the election, so this narrowly shaped what was possible to do with our briefing paper. We now know that the intention is for officials to put the main effort into design of the agency between June 2026 and end March 2027, so that the agency can then launch in 2027-8 and be fully operational by the beginning of financial year 2028-29. Formally, the agency is being designed in partnership with COSLA and the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB).

The briefing paper is not the place for dwelling on our own author perspectives on the way ahead; rather we have tried to synthesise what a wide range of the housing sector have to say about what we know so far, and what their requirements are of its powers, functions, governance and role within the wider housing system. We have been able to cluster the key questions arising so far about the agency and we hope that helps clarify the key design questions.

We were struck that there were issues around which there was a degree of consensus, as well as a series of fundamental, what we call spectrum choices along a continuum, but which once decided significantly shape the options for other design questions. We also identified several important trade-offs in what Government wants to the agency to do and achieve.

Consensus Themes

• The agency concept is welcomed in a context of shortage, rising need, and emergency – all of which requires sustained transformative action.
• Agency focus is critical for purposes, powers and accountability.
• What are we trying to fix? Presumably, market and organisational failures.
• Land markets, support construction i.e. SMEs, unlock finance and help provide infrastructure.
• The agency’s work needs to be effective in both urban and rural contexts.
• Outside of well understood system failures, there was a sense to leave well-functioning markets well alone.
• Land interventions would likely include – land assembly, land trading, aggregating sites, using novel ways to bring serviced land forward that can facilitate mixed tenure development.
• Learn lessons from previous Scottish agencies and from what works in England and Ireland (and why it works).

Spectrum Choices

• From a governance point of view, for instance to what extent it is distanced from government, the form the agency takes should follow its function and should be focused around its priority goals.
• Decisions made about spatial shape of the agency (national-regional-local) will be important strategically and operationally to how the agency is best designed.
• The agency will work closely with local authorities, SNIB and the Scottish Futures trust – how will this variable geometry work and how clear will demarcation between the agencies be. Will the agency act as a co-ordinator?
• To what extent will the agency play a market intelligence and research role?

Trade-offs

• How one trades off simplicity goals with complex reality will also be important. Simplicity (a direct, clear mission on a small, focused set of goals) versus complexity (housing systems are often quite complex and this can be equally found at site level as at housing market area level).
• Incentive structures must be recognised and aligned to individual and organisational needs in the service of agency goals and in terms of relationships with other partners.
• There is also a question of the relative focus on all tenures versus supporting social and affordable supply delivery specifically.
• The balance between a clear focus on priorities versus expanding or altering that set of priorities in the light of when salient facts and market contexts change. When is it valid to do so and when mission creep?

There is much more in the briefing paper, but this helps give a flavour for what are quite tough public policy design issues. We will be doing more reviewing and holding events where we will test these ideas out more. We will do so once we have heard the update from the Cabinet Secretary. We hope to have a final report out around the time of the election in May.