Accelerating home building in Scotland: a consultation on incentives and penalties to speed up housing delivery

Annex A

Summary of the four consultation options

Option 1: Introduce fiscal measures to tackle inactivity or slow build-out.

• Applying a relief or supplement to taxes such as the Scottish Building Safety Levy (SBSL) or Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) where development is, or is not, built out to an agreed timeframe.
• Applying a tax on land which is allocated in LDPs, but which has not been brought forward in a planning application as per the programming submitted when the LDP and its Delivery Programme were being prepared. Consideration will need to be given to sites where there is no clear route to delivery or commitment to programming.
• Applying a tax on sites which have planning permission, but where there is no activity on site or progress is evidenced to be unreasonably slow.

Option 2: Monitor build-out rates and intervene where these are unreasonably slow.

• Extend existing reporting requirements, to require a build-out statement/schedule and annual reporting of development progress (a “development progress report”) to planning authorities. This could support preparation, or review of housing land audits and LDP delivery programmes.
• Link these powers to cease planning permissions after an agreed or national fixed deadline, or where the planning authority considers progress to be unreasonable.

Option 3: Reduce procedural time and costs for SME developers.

• Enable application of a clearer proportionality framework, and reduce procedural time and costs for SME developers. This would involve increasing the granularity of the development hierarchy in order to draw out the specific circumstances in which the planning process for smaller sites could be varied.
• On smaller sites a range of measures could be deployed. For example:
  • Building a process, through legislation, for fast-tracking applications on smaller sites.
  • Reviewing and rationalising requirements in policy for smaller sites to allow developers to bring forward applications more quickly and at a lower cost. A rules based policy could sit alongside NPF4, setting out a simplified set of policy tests for very small and small sites to meet.
  • Advice could be provided on planning application information requirements, setting clearer and more streamlined expectations nationally.

Option 4: Diversify the housing outputs from deliverable land.

• Develop existing policy requirements to shape how sites are appraised and selected for allocation in LDPs, and how delivery expectations regarding diversity of housing type and tenure are then specified.
• Require a diversity of housing types and tenures on sites above a fixed size threshold.