Increased Residential Capacity and Occupancy in City Centres

Tender description

A consultancy team is required to support the Council in exploring policies to address the barrier of high land values in city centres impeding residential development, particularly around social and affordable housing. The areas looked at should include; - Investigate possibilities of increasing Strategic Housing Investment Plan (SHIP) funding to support further housing development, targeted in and around city centres. - Investigate mechanisms, such as Housing Grant, to increase confidence for councils and social housing bodies to take on challenging sites. - Consider mechanisms by which we could jointly increase in brownfield development in city centres and adjacent neighbourhoods that help build demand for city centre uses. - Investigate tools which could equip local government to have flexible planning policies and legislation to support and/or incentivise mixed-use development. - Investigate opportunities to facilitate grant funding to improve public spaces to raise land values and residential demand – e.g. Mayfield in Manchester. - Consider broader use of weighting scoring systems - e.g. London’s linkage of public transport accessibility scores to permitted housing density. - Define clear ways to ensure that capital funding for city centres and other goals (e.g. housing, education, health) supports neighbourhood regeneration and/or creation. The consultancy team will require experience in housing, economic development, local regeneration, property and planning and an ability to do this work across Scotland’s seven cities. The main areas of work will be: - Quantifying existing city centre residential market for each of the cities - Identifying constraints and opportunities - Specific measures and geographical opportunities to facilitate residential growth - Looking at good practice - Analysing policy issues and trends - Producing a series of outputs that are short, medium, and long term which address the issues listed previously The Council invites quotations for consultancy services to undertake research and development activity on the broad issues of. -Increasing residential capacity and occupancy in all/each of the seven Scottish city centres. - Reducing the amount of vacant and derelict land and property in all/each of the seven Scottish city centres A list of desired outcomes has been identified by the seven cities through the Scottish City Centre Recovery Task Force, which will shortly release the final report of the work undertaken in the past 18-24 months. These outcomes should underpin the findings and recommendations that will be delivered through this contract. The findings should include: (i) consideration of the policy, regulatory, legislative and investment options required to generate a mix of tenures, house-types and price points, and a mixed economy of city centre housing (ii) consideration of the adaptation of legislation, policy or process to simplify Compulsory Purchase or Compulsory Sales Orders as well as a response to the need to build capacity at local authority level to carry these out that favours the acquisition of brownfield sites over greenfield. 1.2 Background 1.2.1 The Scottish City Centre Recovery Task Force (SCCRTF) was formed in 2020 to coordinate the response to the pandemic and to look at how the seven Scottish cities could best recover from it. As part of the five-year plan, seven workstreams were identified by city leaders to be most important for the successful recovery of city centres. This commission relates to Workstream 1 and Workstream 3. Workstream 1: Increased residential capacity and occupancy in city centres Workstream 2: Smaller city centre carbon footprint Workstream 3: Reduction in the amount of vacant/derelict land and property Workstream 4: Increase in city centre entrepreneurial and start-up activity Workstream 5: More revenue raising opportunities for local authorities Workstream 6: Reduction in oversupply of retail, and increase in consumer offer Workstream 7: Faster and more agile planning decisions Glasgow City Council will be the lead authority on Workstream 1. Stirling City Council will be the lead authority on Workstream 3. 1.2.2 The overall objective of this commission is to develop a suite of evidence-based options and recommendations which respond to the key policies, strategies, opportunities, and constraints, and focus on measures that will lead to an increased and more balanced population and options for a reduction in vacant and derelict land.