Scotland’s Housing
The Scottish Government have just released the Housing results from the 2022 Census, which contains lots of interesting statistics on Scotland current households.
One of the most startling statistics is that 851,100 households owned their homes outright – an increase of nearly 30% on the 2011 figure. This number has been driven up by Scotland’s ageing population, with around two thirds of householders aged 65 and over living mortgage-free.
The number of privately rented homes in Scotland has increased by almost 10% in a decade, and over the same period the number of households in social rented properties, such as council or housing associations, dropped slightly (by 2.1%).
The latest figures from the 2022 census showed that there were 887,600 households in rented accommodation in Scotland, whilst 1,564,341 households owned their property, and so Scotland had an approximately 2/3 to 1/3 split between households who owned their home compared to those that rented.
As to who owns the properties in Scotland, the overall rates of home ownership were relatively similar to 2011 across all age groups:
Looking at the type of accommodation in Scotland, almost a third of households were living in a tenement or a purpose-built block of flats (813,500).
The next most common accommodation type was detached houses 600,700 (23.9%) closely followed by semi-detached houses 584,800 (23.3%). As you will see from the above image, the number of households in flats has barely changed over the last 10 years, with the increased number of households being accommodated in detached and semi-detached houses, which will have formed the bulk of the new build properties from housing developers.
There were also some big changes in people living in communal accommodation with the number of people in student accommodation or halls of residence increasing by a massive 68% – up 22,600 – in line with rising numbers of people studying in Scotland.
The report also shows that although the number of older people in Scotland increased, the number of people living in care homes has fallen by 14.5% to 30,800, which may be as a result of the Scottish Government moving towards supporting older people to live independently at home.
The above image shows these changes which reflect changing social dynamics over the last decade.
The Housing Report is the 5th of 7 reports on different topics from the census to be released. The last 2 reports will include information on education, travel to work, and health and disability and will be published in September and early October 2024.