SCOTLAND

Scotland

Scotland

Change in Participation of Scotland in Housing

Introduction

The Scottish National Party led Scottish Government has identified household poverty as a key focus for its anti-poverty strategy. The government's 'Solidarity Target' seeks to both increase wealth and increase the share of total income gained by the bottom three deciles (Hague 2005). The ability to demonstrate the advantages of policy divergence within Scotland, relative to the other parts of the United Kingdom, is central to the government's aim of gaining support for increased powers for the devolved government. This paper seeks to provide evidence on one aspect of the government's anti-poverty strategy: the degree to which Scotland differs from the rest of the UK over levels of entrenched poverty. The paper demonstrates that not only does Scotland have greater entrenched poverty but that the changes in mobility since the 1990s have impacted on Scotland to a lesser degree than the rest of the UK.

Discussion

This paper assesses the efficacy and relevance of local landscape designations in Scotland as landscape management tools. Local landscape designations are a generic term applied to landscapes designated by local authorities for reasons of their rarity, representative ness or variety. Yet they remain neglected in research and policy evaluation and as designations sit uneasily with the rationale of the European Landscape Convention. Using interviews with housing officers, development plan policy analyses and spatial data a critical assessment of their operation is undertaken (Hague 2005). Tensions between individual liberty and collective social justice characterise many advanced liberal societies. These tensions are reflected in the challenges posed for representative democracy both by participatory democratic practices and by the current emphasis on (so-called) responsible participation. Based on the example of 'community' housing associations in Scotland, this paper explores these tensions. It is argued that the critique of responsibility may have been over-stated, that, in particular, 'community' housing associations offer the basis for relatively more inclusive and effective processes of decision making than council housing, which relies on the traditional processes and institutions of representative local government for its legitimacy.

We conclude that local landscape designations are not meeting their full potential and argue for a more collaborative, management orientated, community-led focus on economic development, amenity and landscape enhancement set within wider rejuvenation of the landscape agenda.

This paper looks at the behaviour of private landowners in rural Scotland in relation to housing supply, particularly renting and low-cost housing. The theme is one that has received relatively little research. (Jenkins 2001) In consequence, the paper is set in the context of two rather broader traditions in the literature of examining investor/ developer behaviour and of studying rural social structure. The paper presents and analyses data from a national study of landowners' views and attitudes to housing supply undertaken in 1999-2000. Its principal findings are that the motivations of this key group of suppliers are rarely as simple as assumed in some conventional analyses, and in some important senses may be counter-intuitive. It is argued that non-pecuniary motives are critical in understanding ...