London (Parliament Politics Magazine) – As part of the UK’s green energy targets, more than 1,000 new homes will be built across northern Scotland.
SSEN Transmission, a subsidiary of the electricity company SSE, has marked a deal with local councils and housing associations in the Highlands to support at least 1,000 new properties as well as the refurbishment of current, unoccupied ones. The group, which has a monopoly on building and strengthening the electricity grid in northern Scotland, intends to spend £20bn by 2030 to channel power from fresh offshore and onshore windfarms to be created as part of the UK government’s actions to decarbonise the electricity supply.
Who benefits from the new housing initiatives?
It expects to hire thousands of workers across the Highlands, the Outer Hebrides Orkney and Shetland – areas mourning from depopulation driven by an inexpensive housing crisis. That will peak at a workforce of about 5,000 people in 2027 and a substantial number of those will need new homes. SSEN Transmission stated it would fund the building of those houses by guaranteeing long-lease residences as a “pathfinder investment mechanism”, the majority of them developed as affordable homes for local people.
Alongside other “accommodation villages” employing temporary housing, it also expects to refurbish empty homes and to renovate derelict possessions, handing those over to local councils and social owners after its workforce has left.
Rob McDonald, SSEN Transmission’s managing director, stated: “This is a significant and
an innovative contribution to addressing the housing challenges in the north of Scotland, and it also demonstrates how we can work in partnership to develop imaginative proposals that will deliver new homes and act as a template for other developers.”
Moreover, the policy, which has been accommodated by Scotland’s housing minister, Paul McLennan, and local council leaders, follows calls from the UK government and is expected to bring in new regulations on how the energy industry shares the profits from renewables with local people.