Recent announcements and consultations from the Scottish Government indicate it’s serious about accelerating housebuilding across the country. Could the forthcoming More Homes Scotland agency bring together the necessary housing ‘puzzle pieces’ to create a truly integrated programme for housing and enable rapid, large-scale development?

By ‘pre-packaged development opportunities’ I mean bringing together land, planning, finance, and delivery across a construction programme into coherent development packages that make it easier to build homes quickly, especially for the non-profit sector.

In Scotland, as elsewhere, there are several programmes, initiatives and efforts to solve housing issues. In both countries that I have had the privilege of working in (Canada and Scotland), these efforts, even when representing increased funding and political attention, have failed to turn the housing tide and deliver on new housing targets or improve affordability.

Despite ongoing efforts, both countries are left wrestling with very similar challenges: how to increase housing supply quickly, with constrained financial and human resources, while ensuring homes remain affordable in an increasingly costly construction landscape.

At the moment, housing policy efforts in both nations rarely work in a coherent, joined-up way. Instead, initiatives operate in isolation: one programme unlocks inexpensive land for development (like Canada’s Federal Lands Initiative), another offers (often administratively burdensome) access to financing mechanisms, while others focus on fast-tracking planning approvals or scaling up MMC (a fairly recent development on the Canadian front).

Each one of these pieces of the housing ‘puzzle’ is important, but unless they’re coherently combined, the vision for rapid housing development will not become a reality.

When rolled out in isolation, these programmes rarely remove (or sufficiently reduce) the many barriers to new housing development at pace and scale, especially for non-market organisations.

Making affordable land available is important. But access to land (even affordable, public land) does not address issues of financing, or material costs, or planning delays, or prohibitive upfront costs for design and preparing funding applications.

So, should prospective developers find themselves happily in possession of a developable parcel of land on a long-term lease they still need to find suitable finance, pay up-front costs for design, secure planning permissions, and manage a construction programme through to completion in the context of rising material costs and labour market shortages.

Positively, Canada has recently moved to a more integrated approach. The federal government has established Build Canada Homes, a national agency designed to bring together several elements of housing delivery that previously sat in separate programmatic siloes.

On the surface, at least, Build Canada Homes is considering how to put more pieces of the housing puzzle together. The agency aims to combine access to public lands, flexible financial initiatives, while upscaling modern methods of construction and facilitating large portfolio housing projects. The intention, especially for construction innovation, is to reduce risk, increase productivity and make it easier to build affordable homes at scale.

Established housing initiatives in Canada usefully account for other puzzle pieces (like the Housing Design Catalogue, or Housing Accelerator Fund, which aims to speed up approvals processes and reduce red tape).

Given Scotland and Canada share many of the same housing challenges and are both looking to rapidly expand supply, there may be valuable lessons to be learned from Build Canada Homes (both in terms of ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn’t’) as Scotland’s own housing agency launches. Could More Homes Scotland play a pivotal, leadership role in connecting Scotland’s housing puzzle pieces?

Could More Homes Scotland design an integrated programme where a housing provider, particularly a non-market provider, can make a single application to access a development opportunity, where common barriers have already been addressed? Public land is identified by the agency, then assembled and made available at an affordable cost (long-term lease).

Alongside it, a pre-set pattern book of housing designs is provided, for which planning is expedited. Similarly, financing for identified developments, perhaps via the Scottish National Investment Bank, is also pre-approved for successful applicants. Going one step further, such a programme could also consider mechanisms to upscale offsite, volumetric construction and create joint procurement models to help reduce construction costs and timelines for its developments.

If designed well, More Homes Scotland could facilitate a truly integrated programme for housing delivery. It could identify where homes are most needed, strategically assemble developable public land (like the Federal Lands Initiative), coordinate infrastructure, develop a national housing catalogue (with expedited planning attached), reform and distribute innovative financing for developments.

Rather than focusing on individual policy interventions (like tax levers or affordable housing funding programmes), More Homes Scotland could play a vital (and currently absent) facilitation role, bringing together land, planning, design, and finance to truly enable new housing development at pace and scale.