Scots wha hae

Speculation has been rife over the past few weeks that housing minister John Healey is about to publish his offer to English councils on how to wind up the much-reviled housing revenue account.

Chief housing officers in the 200 or so affected authorities will have enough on their plates trying to strike a deal over the £18 billion of housing debt to think much about what their council might look like in future. But a glance north of the border might just help them to see a possible version of themselves in a few years’ time.

The 32 local authorities in Scotland do not have the same centrally-managed HRA subsidy system and do not have to operate within a regime where rents are centrally controlled. They have recently struck a deal with the Scottish Government that allows them freedom from other targets and to spend much of their funding as they see fit. A number of Scottish councils are also taking advantage of the £25,000 (rumoured to be rising to £30,000) that is available from Holyrood, and supplementing this with land and prudential borrowing to build council housing.

Does any of this sound familiar? It might not bear the ‘localism’ tag of the south, but as a vision of what could be possible, English authorities should take heart.

The fact that Scottish councils are masters of their own destinies has also inspired officials at the Scottish Government. Not content with helping councils to build once more, they are hatching plans for a National Housing Bank and National Housing Trust, which will lever in private sector cash in conjunction with prudentially-borrowed council cash to build even more homes.

Scottish housing associations may be suffering as a result of the pressure on grant rates available to them, but creative schemes like that in East Lothian, where the council has lent funds to a local association to build homes, shows that there can be room for everyone.

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