Highland Housing Challenge partnership makes positive strides

At today’s meeting of The Highland Council (Thursday 26 June 2025), Members received a progress report on the partnership approach and important successes since declaring a Highland Housing Challenge in November 2023. 

Since establishing the ambitious Highland Housing Challenge, important successes included:  

• A call for sites delivered 250 sites, with a potential 25,000 housing units which will support delivery against the target of an additional 12,000 houses over the next 10 years. 

• Realising our 24,000 target for house building over the next 10 years will achieve investment of £3bn into Highland – ensuring a secure and sustained programme of building over this period.  

• Agreed an approach for identifying and progressing masterplan consent areas to accelerate building across Highland.  

• Established an integrated property service which will support accelerating the pre-application processes for developments. 

• Working with Scottish National Investment Bank, good progress is being made in establishing a new public/private joint venture model. 

The solutions to addressing the Housing Challenge are complex and interdependent. It has been identified that actions are required across three critical areas: -  

• Increasing land – housing cannot develop without a sufficient pipeline of sites and critically sites in the right locations to meet both need and demand. This therefore requires sites across the whole of the Highland area.  

• Increasing finance – different sources and models for finance are required beyond the current planned building programme. It needs to maximise funds derived from investment to the area, increasing the affordable housing programme and seek solutions to addressing the exceptionally high costs of building in some rural parts of Highland.  

• Increasing developer capacity – this includes building confidence within the existing development sector, attracting new partners and types of building to the area and addressing the challenges to build eg grid capacity.  

• Strengthening and growing the construction sector is critical and therefore workforce skills and capacity is a critical area for focus. 

Housing & Property Committee Chair, Cllr Glynis Cambell Sinclair said: “Housing is a crucial issue in the Highlands, and we will continue to work and develop partnerships with stakeholders, landowners and developers to secure our target of 24,000 new builds over the next ten years. 

“There is huge potential for investment in the area. Across the Highlands and Islands as a whole, the potential investment pipeline is estimated to be over £100bn, supporting over 114,000 jobs in construction and a further 18,000 operational and maintenance jobs by 2040. 41% of the investment is estimated to take place in Highland. 

“With opportunity comes challenges. We recognise the complexities, and we need to work together to secure the best outcome for the Highlands. Increasing housing is the catalyst for economic growth, employment opportunities, regeneration of our town centres and rural villages and to assist in reversing depopulation.  

“A key feature of the Action Plan is engagement with the Scottish Government, to address significant obstacles to progressing development. The Scottish Government have been extremely supportive of the Highland approach, as evidenced in the attendance and comments from the Deputy First Minister and Housing Minister at the Highland Housing Challenge Summit held in late 2024 in Aviemore and our more recent Seminar in Inverness.  As we move forward, we do so with optimism and excitement about collectively delivering more homes in Highland.” 

The full report can be found here (Item 7).