‘Collaborative approach’ called for to boost house-building

Although Orkney is said to need 1,600 homes in the next decade, one local construction boss says that the time taken for planning approvals has reached what seems like the slowest in 50 years.

To tackle the setbacks that are slowing down companies such as his, Orkney Builders’ managing director Stephen Kemp is calling for a “collaborative approach” to streamline the process, and get home-building back to the rate it once was at.

Calculations by Mr Kemp show that, between 2011 and 2019, his firm finished a house on average every eight days they worked.

“During the last decade, we were handing over houses very steadily,” he said.

Currently, though, this is far from the case, as the company is sitting at around half of that level of output so far in this decade.

Mr Kemp explained: “We’ve got the same number of folk working for us now, the same plant and equipment and other resources, but we’ve diverted a large portion of our house-building resource elsewhere in recent years, because there isn’t the same level of affordable house building activity being demanded of the sector locally, and it’s also very hard now to get our own affordable housing developments moving at any pace.”

Asked about the pace of Orkney Islands Council’s planning process, a spokeswoman for the local authority said that a recent performance report “actually shows that we consistently perform better than the Scottish average when it comes to timeliness of decision.”

For the full feature, pick up this week’s edition of The Orcadian.