Scottish Housing Emergency - Do It This Way
As Homes For Scotland get's celebrity George Clarke to endorse it's new build campaign - we ask - is there a better way?
Scotland’s housing emergency isn’t a call for more concrete, it’s a call to make better use of what we already have. Last week Homes for Scotland, backed by Britain’s largest house builders, launched a campaign pressing for more “much-needed” new-build supply.
But in doing so they’ve overlooked a quicker, cleaner, already-funded solution: Scotland’s hundreds of thousands of empty homes.
Stuart Butler
According to the Scottish Empty Homes Partnership, there are currently 31,596 long-term empty homes (empty for more than 12 months) and 43,538 homes empty for six months or more and liable for council tax.
Scottish Empty Homes Partnership National Manager Tahmina Nizam puts it plainly:
“With more than 43,500 privately owned properties unoccupied, Scotland's empty homes clearly have the potential to play an enormous role in ending our housing emergency.”
“Returning empty properties to use is not only cost effective, but environmentally friendly as well. Bypassing the carbon emissions inherent in both construction and demolition projects means that the most environmentally friendly home is the one that already exists.”
“Across Scotland individuals, local authorities and other organisations are already doing fantastic work to bring empty homes back into use but fully unlocking their potential requires continued investment and strategic focus.”
“Homes weren't built to sit empty — every empty home has the potential to transform someone's life, but collectively they can make a cost-effective, and sustainable, contribution to the fight against the housing emergency in Scotland.”
In 2023–24 alone, SEHP’s network of Empty Homes Officers helped bring 1,875 of these properties back into use – the highest annual total since the partnership began in 2010. Across their lifetime some 10,889 long-term empty homes have been unlocked, often within months of an owner receiving advice and a modest grant.
Contrast that with new construction:
- Planning delays routinely stretch into years.
- Materials shortages and global supply-chain disruption make timetables unpredictable.
- Most critically, embodied carbon from new builds is vast. A recent UK study found that infrastructure adds roughly 100 kg CO₂e per m² of dwelling area – up 33 percent when counted alongside building emissions. Even a modest 100 m² home, therefore, carries at least 10 tonnes of CO₂e before a single brick is laid.
By comparison, retrofitting with energy-saving measures is a carbon win:
- Installing an air-source heat pump in a typical UK home emits around 1.56 tonnes CO₂e upfront but saves over 1.6 tonnes of operational emissions within the first year – a payback under 12 months.
- Simple insulation and air-tightness upgrades, which councils subsidise under the Home Energy Scotland scheme, can slash heating emissions by 20–30 percent in a single winter.
“Building new homes without first exhausting our existing stock is like tearing down a perfectly sound car to build a new one,”
Argues one architect familiar with the UK retrofit sector.
Indeed, at the current rate, scaling empty-homes reform nationally could yield 10,000+ refurbished homes per year – equal to many new-build pipelines, but at a fraction of the time, cost and carbon.
The Scottish Government has already invested over £3.7 million in the Empty Homes Partnership, embedding officers in ten local authorities that have declared housing emergencies.
Yet despite this success, 46,000 properties remain idle. By requisitioning vacant homes — temporarily or permanently reassigning them to social landlords — councils could solve waiting-list pressures within months.
They could also leverage existing VAT-reduction schemes for repairs, and work with community housing bodies to ensure rapid refurbishment.
Meanwhile, each new housing development adds to Scotland’s carbon debt. If Scotland is serious about net-zero by 2045, it must address embodied carbon head on – and that means prioritising retrofit.
Every empty home brought back into use is a carbon-neutral home gained.
Rather than more cement, Scotland needs a nationwide mobilisation of Empty Homes Officers, compulsory purchase powers and retrofit grants.
Let’s focus minds not on building more from scratch, but on breathing new life into the homes we already have. After all, in a climate – and housing – emergency, speed matters as much as scale.