Communities need to be enabled to shape their own housing futures
In order to make this a reality, both the Scottish Government and communities need to reclaim governance of housing systems from global credit markets, and government needs to end subsidising the financialisation of real estate at the expense of affordable housing programmes.
The International Labour Organization is a specialised agency of the United Nations which deals with the world of work. In 2002 it adopted Recommendation 193, its key instrument for promoting co-operatives, which provides a framework for renewed growth of the co-operative movement.
To date, the Scottish Government has not fully implemented this Recommendation; we call on the next Scottish Government to work in partnership with the UK co-operative movement to create this framework for co-operative growth.
Leading a Co-operative Housing Renewal in Scotland
CCH Manifesto 2026
Co-operative and Community Led Housing
Scotland has been at the forefront of creating innovative co-operative solutions to community housing needs for nearly two hundred years; whether through the pioneering actions of Robert Owen at New Lanark, the community transfers that created fully mutual housing co-operatives like West Whitlawburn Housing Co-operative, or students taking the lead at Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative.
Today, housing co-operatives come in a variety of different forms, from Registered Social Landlords providing hundreds of homes, to equity-staircasing models of mutual home ownership, to student housing co-operatives, to individual groups of people setting up single property shared living models. In all these models, co-operatives empower tenants and members to shape and control the homes they live in; they reflect the views of those people and think beyond just meeting housing need to providing mutual support and actively improving the quality of life for tenants and the wider community.
There is considerable empirical evidence which demonstrates such benefits are widely and successfully delivered by Scottish housing cooperatives into local communities.
However, without constructive support at a national level, the expansion of new housing co-operatives will continue to face barriers of entry and the environment in which our existing co-operatives operate will remain in a state of survive, not thrive – all at a time when the Scottish Government is looking to introduce its first Community Wealth Building Act.
The recommendations made to enable co-operative and community led housing solutions to play a central role in a rebalanced Scottish housing market are laid out in this document.
They are fundamentally based on the need to introduce supportive legal, regulatory and financial systems that enable people to develop cooperative and community led housing solutions for themselves and their communities.
The Scottish Government
should:
1 Recognise the unique legal form of cooperatives and, as in many other European countries where co-operative and community led housing is more prevalent, legislate for a bespoke form of co-operative tenure.
2 Support the creation of appropriate structures to enable the co-operative and community led housing sector to group its asset base and leverage it to fund the development of new homes, the retrofitting and refurbishment of existing residential properties, and the repurposing of redundant office and retail premises for residential use.
3 Extend the activities of the Scottish National Investment Bank to enable:
- community land trusts to buy existing residential properties, in particular from people struggling to afford individual home ownership at challenging interest rates, and hold them in perpetuity for community benefit;
- the co-operative and community led housing sector to assemble, through a small number of enabling developers, the debt finance needed to build new homes at scale through offering capital market support through guarantees and/or cash or asset backed endowment.
Community Land Ownership
4 Extend the provisions relating to land tax exemptions that apply in England to all forms of co-operative and community led housing liabilities for Land and Buildings Transactions Tax (LBTT) in Scotland and support the development of appropriate financial structures that allow for multi-stakeholder investment models to be created.
5 Promote new forms of community led housing such as cohousing and mutual home ownership as an alternative to unaffordable individual home ownership options for younger people, and to institutional or private sector care homes for older, asset owning people.
6 Enable students to form student housing cooperatives and to access an affordable alternative where they are not open to financial exploitation and poor landlord service options.
7 Change taxation, regulatory and planning systems to re-establish housing as a social aim rather than as an investment product and enable the co-operative and community led housing sector to work in partnership with local authorities through access to the Public Works Loan Board and by the creation of a presumption in favour of co-operative and community led initiatives in public land disposal and the planning system.
Scotland has led the way in enabling communities to take control of vital land resources; however, the last ten years has seen a plateauing of community land ownership. Public opinion in Scotland continues to strongly support further land transfers and the Scottish Government should continue to support communities to take control of land assets.
The recommendations made to build on the successes of the Scottish Government in transferring control to communities through land transfers are laid out here. They are fundamentally based on extending reforms relating to land use, ownership and management to enable co-operative and community led housing solutions to the challenges of sustainable development, environmental protection and depopulation.
The Scottish Government should:
8 Embed a public interest test for all land transfers and create a presumption in favour of co-operative and community led initiatives in public land disposal and the planning system.
9 Update the Community Right to Buy by implementing the findings of the 202526 review and deliver change on vacant and derelict sites, including underused office and high-street retail premises.
10 Enable communities to shape their own land-based outcomes by investing in capacity building, education and knowledge sharing with other European countries, and by enabling communities to access a wider range of supporting resources, training and community led specialist support.
11 Require local authorities to identify and transfer underused land to communities to provide locally based housing, food growing, energy generation and employment opportunities, and to streamline planning processes for cooperative and community housing projects where barriers currently exist.
12 Enhance the Scottish Land Fund to ensure that it continues to be key to driving land reform and maintains its real value as land and other prices increase.
13 Create a dedicated fund for retrofitting older buildings, in rural and urban locations, to make available environmentally sustainable options for revitalising buildings and increasing Scotland’s housing stock.
14 Increase protections for co-operative and community led housing for local residents by introducing local taxation and registration powers for local authorities, and a national regulation scheme for second and holiday homes.
Can Co-operative and Community Led Approaches Help to Fix
the Market?
Yes, they can!
There is a rich mix of co-operation in housing and of approaches to funding them including grant and debt financing, personal equity, ethically based loans, loanstock and community shares.
Scotland’s established models like fully mutual housing co-operatives, management co-operatives, student housing co-operatives, and community self-builders, and newer approaches like community land trusts, cohousing schemes and mutual home ownership projects, all have a role to play.
Whether it’s a group of students coming together to set up affordable and democratic alternatives to profit-led student accommodation, young people pooling their resources to find alternatives to
unaffordable rental and ownership markets, older people craving alternatives to commercially-driven retirement developments; people across Scotland want co-operative and community led approaches to meeting their housing needs.
Now they need their government to get behind them and support them in shaping a better housing future for all.
