How will we know if More Homes Scotland is working?

More Homes Scotland could represent one of the most significant changes to Scotland's housing system in a generation. At a time when the country continues to face a worsening housing emergency, bringing strategic coordination, resource, and focus to housing delivery is both welcome and necessary. 

But simply creating a new delivery agency cannot be the end of the conversation. It should only be the beginning. 

Alongside deciding what More Homes Scotland will do to tackle Scotland’s housing issues sits an equally important question: how will we know if it’s working? 

The success of housing policy is often measured in simple output-based terms: the amount of money spent and the number of homes built. While these are important measures, they tell us very little about whether interventions are achieving their intended outcomes. 

Is housing affordability improving? Are we reducing rates of homelessness? Is public investment delivering the greatest possible impact? These are different questions, and they require different approaches to policy evaluation to answer.  

This need to distinguish between both policy delivery and evaluation and outputs and outcomes, sits at the heart of CIOB's latest discussion paper, How will we know if More Homes Scotland is working?  
 
The paper considers how independent policy evaluation could strengthen housing governance as More Homes Scotland begins its work, exploring the example set by the Canadian National Housing Council (NHC). 

The NHC was established alongside Canada’s National Housing Strategy to provide independent advice on how housing policy is performing over time. It commissions research, monitors outcomes, draws on academic and industry evidence and incorporates the expertise of people who have experienced homelessness and housing insecurity. In doing so, it provides government with an ongoing, holistic evidence base to understand what’s working, where challenges remain, and how policy should evolve. 

Scotland's housing system is distinct, with its own legislative framework, institutions, and policy priorities. As such, the report does not necessarily suggest that Scotland should replicate the Canadian model wholesale. Instead, it argues that there is value in considering one of its underlying principles: that delivery and evaluation are different functions, and that both are essential to effective policymaking. 

Institutions like More Homes Scotland must be able to move quickly and strategically, allowed to focus on delivery and implementation. The NHC’s lesson for Scotland is that housing systems are complex, long-term, and continually evolving. Therefore, it is imperative that capacity exists elsewhere within the system to evaluate whether More Homes Scotland’s interventions are improving housing outcomes, identify emerging challenges and, crucially, to support continuous policy learning. 

Outcomes-focused policy evaluation and learning matters now more than ever: public finances remain constrained, housing need continues to grow, and governments face increasingly difficult choices about where to direct limited resources. In this context, understanding which interventions deliver the greatest impact is not simply a matter of accountability. It is fundamental to ensuring scarce public funding is used as effectively as possible. 

Helpfully, Scotland is not starting from scratch. The country benefits from a strong housing research community spanning academia, professional bodies, the third sector, and industry. Valuable evidence is already being produced. What’s currently missing is a clear mechanism for bringing existing evidence together and embedding it within housing governance as policy develops. 

More Homes Scotland has the potential to become an important new institution within Scotland's housing system. Giving it the space to focus on its core mission of coordinating and accelerating housing delivery, while ensuring ministers have access to independent, ongoing evaluation of housing policy, would strengthen both the agency itself and the wider housing system. 

Effective housing delivery in the face of significant challenges depends on governments being willing to learn, adapt, and refine policy over time. If More Homes Scotland is to help transform Scotland's housing system over the long term, we should ask not only how it will deliver more homes, but how we will know whether its efforts are making a lasting difference. 

The full discussion paper is available on the CIOB website. If you'd like to discuss these proposals or the role of evaluation in strengthening Scotland's housing policy further, I'd be happy to continue the conversation at jfleming@ciob.org.uk. 

This article is sponsored by CIOB

www.ciob.org