By Kenneth Gibb, University of Glasgow/UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE)

Housing features strongly across the six manifestos that have been published. That’s not surprising: the Scottish government has nationally declared a housing emergency and the government last autumn produced an action plan which includes a four-year plan to spend £4.9bn, if re-elected, to build social and affordable homes. Fourteen of Scotland’s 32 councils, more than half of the population, have also declared emergencies, often to do with being unable to meet housing demand or to be compliant with the specific statutory meeting of homelessness need.

The last parliamentary term has also seen much housing policy activity, including a widely welcomed long-term strategy, Housing to 2040, which was ambitious and wide-ranging, but in practice hard to implement. There were also unanticipated deep cuts to the capital budget for new affordable supply, the long journey to the delivery of the Housing Act at the end of 2025 (covering extending homelessness prevention and proposing new rent control areas with exemptions for affordable rent and build to rent). 2025 also saw the publication of new estimates of affordable housing need (co-authored by CaCHE) suggesting increases of 50% for the next parliament compared to 2021-26. Scotland also had a rent freeze followed by caps of 3% and then 6% on existing private tenancies from 2022-24. While ostensibly helping private tenants during the cost-of-living crisis, it also led to rents shooting up in the uncontrolled new tenancy sector, reduced housing mobility and deterred investment in build to rent.

The SNP have embraced the UK government’s plan for a high value council tax surcharge (or mansion tax) and will launch their own if re-elected. They also brought in the IFS to examine council tax revaluation (the first since 1991) and other possible modest reforms. However, the chances of anything material happening still seem on balance unlikely.

CaCHE produced a document in December about how evidence on housing might shape the new government’s priorities (Gibb and James, 2025). Its main arguments were clustered around four areas: rebooting the affordable supply programme; tax reform and governance innovation, calling for a national housing and land delivery agency; land market and planning and infrastructure reform; and sharper focus on homelessness prevention, improving homelessness outcomes and investing in housing support. The paper also defended Scotland’s strong homelessness rights.   

Housing in the manifestos

There has been a flurry of government proposals, should they be re-elected:  a month after our evidence manifesto the government announced a new national housing agency (More Homes Scotland). They are consulting on accelerating housing supply with planning permission. We’ve seen the proposed return of the First Home Fund (£10,000 interest free equity loans to first time buyers). They propose a first refusal of purchase to sitting tenants when a landlord sells up. They want to progress tenement reform to create ownership associations, among several proposals.

The other five major parties have now launched their manifestos:

• Labour: 125,000 new build total requirements over five years, a dedicated housing bank proposal, planning reforms, help for tenants to save up for deposits (through affordable rent for working families), alongside a homelessness delivery unit to eradicate rough sleeping.
• Conservatives: will abolish LBTT, reverse rent controls, deregulate building regulations, stop the building safety levy system, redirect net zero funding to housebuilding and associated infrastructure, and create a brownfield development fund. They support a preventative approach to homelessness and would implement the ‘ask and act’ provisions of the new act.
• Greens: they want to build more homes, especially social and affordable, and provide a list of ideas to promote housing quality and housing’s net zero contribution, as well as policies to support eradicating homelessness. Striking policies include help for councils to reject new purpose-built student housing, social landlords to have first right of refusal on former RTB properties that come to market, and a statutory target to eradicate homelessness by 2040.
• Reform: includes the populist and controversial return to local connection for homelessness applications to “restore community cohesion”. They also want to use pension funds to fund social housing and to reverse the regulation of the PRS for all new tenancies. Reform will also phase out LBTT and join it up with business rates as an annual property tax (but nothing on the future of council tax other than to waive current planned increases). They also propose a rent to buy model for young people and, overall, building 15,000 homes a year for the life of the parliament.
• Lib Dems: will replace Housing to 2040 with a new data-driven holistic housing strategy. They have a series of homelessness initiatives such as a guarantee for young people and a greater focus on prevention. They will also build 125,000 homes including 10,000 for key workers and want to develop a series of net-zero new towns.

Taking them together there’s considerable party crossover in terms of their proposals, but we also see divisions which reflect different positions along a pragmatic v ideological spectrum, as well as some quite well-developed versus other quite high-level ideas. There are also one or two leftfield proposals, including some pretty odd ones as well.

What’s not being talked about and what might be more developed? Whole system – seems to be code for all tenure and a nod to the multilevel governance challenges of a devolved Britain, where devolved nations don’t ‘own’ the fiscal framework or key benefits like local housing allowance. From what I see and have heard in the ongoing debates and hustings, I’ve not uncovered evidence that any of them are really serious about thinking in systems, or actually working through what it means to be genuinely preventative and deal with the specifics of housing and homeless systems.