Peter Murrell has somewhere to stay in Edinburgh— thousands do not

I digress, but the housing shortage dominates a whopping 783-page “Evidence Report” which will form the basis of Edinburgh’s development blueprint for the next 14 years, and goes before the planning committee for approval next week.

Its publication reminded me of when I was involved in the last one, helping to set up two local consultations into housing proposals in my ward, neither of which has come to fruition. One was early in my time and a sharp wake-up call to the realities of grass roots politics – a church hall packed with angry people who felt their community’s identity was about to be torn from them.

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It seemed common sense to me that the dilapidated Meadowbank Stadium needed to be replaced with something more practical and manageable, but that’s not how the locals saw it, and they let me know in no uncertain terms.

They were proud that the stadium had hosted two Commonwealth Games and weren’t ready to accept a like-for-like replacement would become a giant millstone round Edinburgh Council’s neck like Sheffield’s now demolished Don Stadium. Edinburgh City was certainly no West Ham or Manchester City, the occupants of the two most recently built athletics arenas, and well-connected Murrayfield sewing up the mega concert market it simply wasn’t viable.

It all went through eventually, and although the new sports centre might look more like a nuclear power station, at least it’s been open for four years. But what about the rest of the site? The arrow-shaped land between the East Coast main line and the abandoned track to Leith is to be the site of over 200 new homes, designed like traditional “Colonies” houses in a low-traffic neighbourhood, an award winning scheme produced with extensive involvement of residents and some excellent work by Glasgow-based Collective Architecture. That was over five years ago and not a brick has been laid.

Part of the blame lies in the collapse of the build-to-rent market because of the Green Party’s demands for rent caps, but the Evidence Report lays bare the extent of the problems involved in matching housing demand with supply.

It tracks housing delivery from the local development plan agreed in 2016, and in broad summary about half of what has been promised over the last ten years has actually happened. Measuring success has therefore become a glass half empty/full process. 

When the council declared a housing emergency in 2023, it identified a need for 5,000 homes just to address homelessness, never mind any other demand, but the report shows that the average annual delivery of affordable homes has been just 800. It also shows that no homes have been built on nine of the sites identified in the 2016 report, some 3,800 units.

There is no getting away from the fact that successive administrations have made unrealistic predictions dressed up as ambition. Mixing poor policy decisions with successive Black Swan events – the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now the Iran War − and the chances of honouring pledges recede even further.  

The report acknowledges the problems in prioritising brownfield sites, which might need expensive decontamination and remediation, noting “site viability and the cost of developing on brownfield sites has become a concern increasingly raised by developers.” Demanding all new buildings to be net-zero in materials and heating systems has placed extra demands on projects too and, it says, developers are resisting the “potential additional costs they entail.” Except heat pumps and Scandinavian insulation are not potential costs, but real additional expense which is ultimately passed on to the customer.

And the requirement for 35 per cent of all developments of 12 units or more has even been questioned by Labour councillor Lezley Cameron, and it too just drives up prices, and incentivises investors to look elsewhere. The result is the inability to meet  demand at pace, and the Scottish Government’s promise to deliver 110,000 affordable homes by 2032 is only an “ambition to deliver.” It’s not a commitment but political verbiage.  

Of the 18 new supposedly available sites identified in the last Edinburgh plan, as of March last year 114 homes had been built from an estimated  capacity of 16,000, a conversion rate of 0.7 per cent. Over 12,000 of them are in West Edinburgh around the tram line and near the Gateway railway station, and the only evidence of activity on the four plots is signage with futuristic artist’s impressions. No wonder Gateway’s passenger numbers only increased 1.7 per cent in 2024-25, compared to an average of 7.3 across Edinburgh’s 12 stations.

The other site I was involved with was at Seafield, but it’s not surprisingly there is no sign of the 800 homes earmarked for the coastal strip because the insurance and pension company owners of most of the land made it clear they were happy with the returns from the current industrial and retail units and had no interest in housing. Yet it’s set to be carried forward to the next edition with no hint that anything will change except passage of time.

Maybe it’s only to be expected that the same officers responsible for City Plan 2030 should stick to their guns for 2040, claiming it’s too early to tell if the last one has worked, but I’m not the only observer to reckon it was flawed from the start. The chances of the current bunch of councillors demanding a different approach − especially as the vastly experience and redoubtable Conservative planning councillor Jo Mowat has been transferred to transport – are as net zero as the plan.

John McLellan is a former Edinburgh Evening News and Scotsman editor, now director of the Scottish news publishing trade association, Newsbrands Scotland. Brought up in Glasgow, McLellan has lived and worked in Edinburgh for over 30 years, and was a City of Edinburgh councillor for the Scottish Conservatives from 2017-22.