Housing campaigners call on Edinburgh council to close 'loophole' which encourages developers to build luxury student accommodation
‘What we need is affordable social housing across the city’ - Gordon Maloney
Housing campaigners have staged a demonstration outside the City Chambers, calling on councillors to halt new "luxury" student accommodation developments in Edinburgh.
Activists from tenants union Living Rent held a "block party" in the quadrangle, serving up rice and dahl, while a full council meeting was going on inside.
They claim purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) developments are unaffordable for students and take up land that should be used for social housing instead.
And they want the council to change the rules which currently allow most PBSA developments to avoid the requirement placed on other housing developments to provide a specified element of affordable housing.
Gordon Maloney, chair of Living Rent Edinburgh, said Labour, Green, Lib Dem and SNP councillors had pledged in March to do everything they could to oppose new PBSAs, but six months later nothing had changed.
He said: “This council are proud of themselves for being the first council in Scotland to declare a housing emergency - but Edinburgh's tenants don't need declarations, we need action.
"We're here to remind the council we've not forgotten their pledge from March and that these student housing developments are still making the city's housing crisis worse."
And he accused the council of siding with “multinational developers and student housing profiteers who obviously don’t have the interests of our communities at heart”.
Living Rent says latest available data shows that there are 31,589 households on Edinburgh’s social housing waiting list; that 61 per cent of households with at least one working adult live in poverty; and that rent outgoings are 43 per cent of the average salary.
Meanwhile, the number of PBSA bedspaces in Edinburgh - average rent £1,200 per month - has more than doubled from 7,350 in 2005 to 21,632 in March 2025, with another 7,004 beds in the pipeline.
Mr Maloney said: “It often feels, when you look around, like the only housing going up is luxury, expensive student accommodation. That accommodation is bad for the students - it’s extremely expensive - and bad for the community. What we need is affordable social housing across the city.”
And he said the council’s current planning framework was skewed in favour of PBSA developments.
“If you're a developer and want to build a block of normal residential properties, there's all sorts of criteria you need to meet, and crucially you’re required to build affordable housing.
“But a loophole in the city's planning framework means that student housing developments, so long as they’re below a certain size, are exempted from that. What that means is it’s more profitable for a developer to build that sort of housing rather than the sort of housing that we actually need.
“That's crazy - and what’s so frustrating about it is it's the council's doing. They're in the middle of developing the new council planning framework, they must close that loophole and level the playing field so there's not an incentive to build the wrong sort of housing.”
Housing convener Tim Pogson said it was not a case of having to choose between student accommodation and affordable housing. “We can have both - and this council is building more affordable housing than ever before. Last financial year we built more units than ever and we’re going to break that record again this year.”
He said there had to be legally defensible grounds for refusing PBSAs and many developments had been refused consent by the council, only to be granted on appeal by the Scottish Government.
Cllr Pogson said the council’s current planning policy required only PBSA developments which were over 0.25 hectares to provide an element of affordable housing, but changing that to apply to all PBSAs was “a perfectly good proposal” which he would support in principle.