One criticism of Edinburgh Council’s plans to spend its tourist tax windfall was that in trying to satisfy competing demands the result was a thin spread of allocations which satisfied no-one.

With a finely-balanced political make-up, horse-trading was inevitable and one of the early moves was to use the revenue, expected to rise to £50 million a year by 2030, for affordable housing. It was always contentious because the legally necessary link with improving the visitor experience was not immediately obvious, but its proponents argued that as tourism activities needed lots of lower-income staff needing somewhere cheap to live, investing in housing would therefore benefit tourists.

It became clear that just allocating cash to the council’s housing revenue account wasn’t going to wash with the law underpinning the visitor levy, but not to be beaten, officers were instructed to come up with a scheme to allocate homes specifically to workers in tourism-related activities which might meet the legal test of being spent only on tourism projects.

So at public expense, council staff have spent the best part of a year consulting with agencies, trade associations and unions to design a system and the resulting bureaucratic hotch-potch will be presented to the housing, homelessness and fair work committee this Tuesday.

The aim is for just short of 500 homes, but the initial plan is for only 111 mid-market rent homes specifically for tourism workers. But according to the council’s most up-to-date Edinburgh by Numbers report, in 2025 some 36,000 people were employed in accommodation and food services alone, so 111 home represents accommodation for just 0.3 per cent of........

© Herald Scotland