It’s hard to deny that unlocking £1 billion of investment for the Edinburgh city region, as promised before yesterday’s Budget, would be a good thing and the leaders of the six councils involved will be disappointed that the Chancellor only announced negotiations, not a deal itself .
As with the Glasgow deal before it, the cash is for infrastructure projects that must benefit the whole region’s economy and be agreed by all of the councils. Inevitably, many of the schemes will be transport-related like new park and ride facilities and railway stations that would be good news for people living in areas West Lothian, Midlothian and Fife.
Demand for housing in Edinburgh is continuing to grow and is only being held in check by tougher lending conditions and a slowing at the top end of the market as John Swinney’s land and buildings transaction tax kicks in.
But it won’t stay like that for ever because, using 2011 census data, the National Records of Scotland forecasts that Edinburgh’s population will be 619,000 by 2037; the fact that more of us live alone because we settle down later, split up more readily and live a lot longer than our forebears means the demand for more homes, whether bought or rented, will only go one way.
Yet the answer in Edinburgh has largely been to avoid the long-term issue, pander to whichever anti-development pressure group happens to be squawking the loudest and leave the hard decisions to the Scottish Government.
Traffic congestion commonly kills off housing plans and in some areas it’s understandable. According to traffic analysts INRIX, two of Scotland’s most congested stretches of road are the two main western routes into Edinburgh, the A8 through Corstorphine and the A90 from Crammond, respectively 73rd and 74th in the UK gridlock league.
But one of the reasons the capital’s main arteries are so sclerotic is precisely because the city has failed to keep pace with housing demand and has essentially outsourced its population expansion to neighbouring authorities. Dunfermline, Dalgety Bay and Broxburn are towns on housing steroids but most of the employment opportunities are in Edinburgh so it is no wonder the traffic on the western approaches only gets worse.
In the east, the new Shawfair district on the site of Monktonhall Colliery centred around a station on the new Borders rail link, with one train every half hour, will provide 4,000 new homes in Midlothian.
Edinburgh City Council hoped to meet housing demand by the redevelopment of disused industrial land on the Forth Waterfront at Granton, a new district with the same population as Dunfermline, but it was sunk by the banking and property crash.
The tram line was key, the theory being that people would want to live there because modern transport would whisk them to work, which would generate demand for the houses, and the builders would happily fund the tram costs. But the builders disappeared when the bank cash tap was turned off as the tram project descended into chaos. The route through Granton was axed and no tram still means no Waterfront.
Maybe it can be revived, and with more than five million journeys in 2015 even the sawn-off line is, in passenger terms, a success story. But councillors see it as political suicide.
At the same time, the planning department is setting its face against building on any greenbelt land because of a perverse interpretation of new Scottish Government guidelines for measuring housing land supply that no longer includes “marketability” and can be based on what “could” be built, not what is expected or practical.
Now councils can put every scrap of contaminated scrub into their estimate of effective supply, even though effectively no houses are going to be built. At the stroke of a pen Edinburgh’s planners are claiming they have an over-supply of housing in the pipeline because they can include thousands of unbuilt flats in Granton.
Any application to build on land not already designated for housing, which is every blade of grass on the greenbelt, can be rejected on the basis that demand is already being met, even if it’s not. This is the argument being used by Edinburgh City Council to block a housing estate being built on fields near the city by-pass at Liberton.
So is the answer to use a city deal to extend the trams? Not if the other councils see no benefit for them. But railways and park and ride schemes, if they produce more houses and council tax payers, are a different matter. And for Edinburgh’s vociferous conservation lobby, urban sprawl is fine as long as it’s somewhere else.
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