07/11/2025
Full Herald piece for those who can't get past the paywall:
We need Housing but we need Nature Networks too – Stop the Sprawl
Inverness is the fastest-growing city in Scotland, with a population increase of 15% since 2001. But our national housing emergency is a challenge facing communities the length and breadth of the country, with 16,000 households in temporary accommodation, and 53,000 people classed as homeless. Some rural areas are suffering major depopulation, with housing shortages at the heart. Furthermore, research by Sheffield, Liverpool and Sheffield Hallam Universities tells us 15,000 affordable homes need to be built in Scotland every year. There has to be a massive housebuilding programme.
But we must not trample over Nature in doing so. The sprawl of our towns and cities, car-dependent suburbs replacing biodiversity-rich woodland and agricultural land, is not the answer. Further, reducing natural green spaces to insignificant slivers between housing estates removes habitats, depletes nature networks and ecological connectivity. It also shrinks the potential for our amenity use of these green spaces. which are essential not just for Biodiversity, but also for our own mental and physical Wellbeing.
The Planning Bible for our times is National Planning Framework 4 (2023). This key document is full of good principles, among them
“Compact Urban Growth. We will limit urban expansion so we can optimise the use of land to provide services and resources, including carbon storage, flood risk management, blue and green infrastructure and biodiversity.”
In practice this is a radical approach. It means reducing the footprint of The Great Build, limiting the power of developers to control what gets built, where and when. It means less sprawl. And it means nature-sensitive development with community consent. Not for developers’ convenience.
But surely people just want houses, isn’t that the bottom line? Well, the pollsters More in Common have shown that only 18% of the public support building “at any cost,” while 62% believe we need to safeguard the natural environment. Nature matters fundamentally. We need high quality, safe green spaces around us. We must respect our most precious asset – our natural capital. And this is not external to us, some kind of afterthought. “We are embedded in Nature,” as Professor Partha Dasgupta – author of the important Dasgupta Review (2021) – reminds us. Sustainable Development doesn’t just apply to sub-Saharan Africa or Amazonia. It matters everywhere. As Dasgupta urges, we need to be more considered in our engagements with Nature – “how we transform what we take from it and return to it, why and how in recent decades we have disrupted Nature’s processes to the detriment of our own and our descendants’ lives, and what we can do to change direction.”
We need Nature, just like food, potable water, clothing, a roof over our heads, clean air, a sense of belonging, participating with others in communities.
But surely homes are more important than that field over there, or those Category B trees? Well, the central obstacles to Housebuilding are not ‘red tape’, the planning process or environmental protection. They are Land Hoarding, Skills Shortages and Slow Delivery. These should be the priorities.
There is enough land, even if not always where the developers can make most profit. Across the UK, more than a million homes have planning permission but have not been built. And more land could become available, particularly for Housing, but also for social and economic benefit, especially if the public sector took the lead – and that doesn’t just mean local authorities. Have we really exhausted the potential of the Community Empowerment Act? Of Compulsory Purchase? Community Asset Transfer? The Scottish Land Commission suggests a public Land Agency. This could be transformative, in rural as well as urban and suburban settings. Even land hoarding can be addressed, with the same body’s proposal for Regeneration Partnership Zones. Instead of property being held until profit-maximisation eventually triggers development, the benefits of a long-term rise in land values could be shared between landowners and public authorities. Such land value increase usually results from public infrastructure and investment, so this is entirely appropriate.
We need to stop the sprawl. The drift, over decades, to build suburbs has been transformative - and not in a good way. As Barcelona Economics Professors Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López and Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal explain, in recent years the rate of population growth in suburbs across European towns and cities has exceeded urban centres by 27%. Any hope of compact, amenity-rich centres has been banished as the macroeconomic forces supporting suburbanisation have come to dominate: Over the past three or four decades the financialisaton of housing has become a defining feature of the UK economy. Housing has become an asset rather than somewhere to live.
We need, as NPF4 states, places that are ‘Sustainable, Liveable and Productive.’ Surveys show Scots want to be connected to Nature, enjoy engaging in outdoor recreation, and want the health and wellbeing benefits of local, accessible green spaces. Our quality of life needs us to make wise choices about our future living spaces. Let’s stop the sprawl. Let’s create compact, vibrant places to live and work, which don’t involve swallowing up every forest and field within reach, simply to maximise developers’ profits.
