More than 1,000 new homes are expected to be built across northern Scotland linked to a £20bn investment in grid infrastructure needed to meet the UK’s green energy targets.
SSEN Transmission, a subsidiary of the electricity firm SSE, has signed a deal with local councils and housing associations in the Highlands to fund at least 1,000 new properties as well as the refurbishment of existing, unoccupied ones.
The proposal, described by the industry body RenewableUK as “unique and novel”, follows mounting anger in rural areas about the modest financial benefits many communities that host windfarms, overhead lines and electricity substations receive from those projects.
The company, which has a monopoly on building and maintaining the electricity grid in northern Scotland, plans to spend £20bn by 2030 to channel power from new offshore and onshore windfarms to be built as part of the UK government’s efforts to decarbonise the electricity supply.
It expects to employ thousands of workers across the Highlands, the Outer Hebrides and Orkney and Shetland – areas suffering from depopulation driven by an affordable housing crisis. That will peak at a workforce of nearly 5,000 people in 2027 and a significant number of those will need new homes.
SSEN Transmission said it will fund the building of those homes by guaranteeing long-lease tenancies as a “pathfinder investment mechanism”, the bulk of them designed as affordable homes for local people.
Alongside other “accommodation villages” using temporary housing, it also expects to refurbish vacant homes and to renovate derelict properties, handing those over to local councils and social landlords after its workforce has left.
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Rob McDonald, SSEN Transmission’s managing director, said: “This is a significant and 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.”
The policy, which has been welcomed by Scotland’s housing minister, Paul McLennan, and local council leaders, follows signals from the UK government and is expected to bring in new rules on how the energy industry shares the profits from renewables with local people.
The proposals highlight significant disputes about the definition of community benefit.
James Robottom, the head of policy at RenewableUK, said ministers should be cautious about imposing fixed rules on community benefit because that raised questions for other big infrastructure projects, and could stifle creative ideas.
He said SSEN Transmission’s proposals were the most ambitious and innovative community benefit plan he had encountered. “What this demonstrates is the need for flexibility, in working with the community and understanding what the wider community needs,” he said.
Torcuil Crichton, the Labour MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, the Western Isles, and a member of the House of Commons energy committee, said that while these homes were welcome, it was important to distinguish between the benefits from building new infrastructure and sharing in the long-term profits it then generated.
“We should all have a share in the wealth of the wind, which is going to be produced around our coastline,” Crichton said. “The wind belongs to no man.”
