In a speech today, MAKAR’s CEO, Neil Edgar, warned that housing cannot be an afterthought to the Green Freeport
The Highlands is planning for billions of pounds of investment and thousands of new jobs, but the process for building new homes those workers will need is not fit for purpose. That is the challenge we have put to industry and government at BE-ST Fest West 2026 today, the UK's biggest festival for a zero-carbon built environment.
Scroll down to read his full speech
The Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport aims to attract nearly £6.5 billion of investment and create more than 11,000 long-term Highland jobs. In his speech, Neil argues that the region's housing pipeline is not keeping pace, and that employers are already feeling it: some of the 27 suppliers who backed the building of MAKAR's Paradigm affordable home are struggling to recruit because of a lack of rural housing.
He asks: "Where are those people going to live? Housing is infrastructure. If we can plan the ports, the energy, the roads and the jobs, housing cannot arrive years later as an afterthought."
MAKAR has the capacity to build around 40 homes a year from its workshop outside Inverness, and a clear route to grow towards 400 with more people, shifts and regional facilities. What it lacks is visibility of demand. Scaling is only possible if small rural projects are joined into a pipeline it can plan around.
Rural communities require "two homes here, four there, and six somewhere else", says Edgar, "A pair of semis on an island will never fit a volume-housebuilder model, but two homes may be exactly what that community needs. Bring those smaller projects together into a programme, keep the packages accessible to smaller firms, and give manufacturers funded, site-ready work with dates they can plan around. That is how fragmented rural demand becomes a manufacturing programme."
MAKAR's system is designed for rural Scotland, working around single-track roads, cattle grids, hairpin bends and ferries. Its Paradigm prototype went through the workshop in one week and was wind and watertight after six days on site, with heating, ventilation and a building control inspection completed.
Neil is also urging industry that new homes be not only affordable to build, but affordable for occupants to live in, "Let's think pre-fit, and not build today what we have to retrofit with public money later," Neil Edgar said. "Move the money from future burden to current prevention."
MAKAR's Paradigm prototype, built with Scottish C16 timber and biogenic materials, has a modelled heating cost of around £6 a week averaged over the year. Early monitoring, analysed with The Data Lab, suggests it may come in below that, with a second winter of data to confirm.
Neil’s full speech and presentation:
Morning everyone.
Firstly, thank you to the chair of BE-ST - Nicola Barclay for dinner last night. French-Mediterranean — we don’t have any of those where I’m from. So, I had to try something unfamiliar, and it turned out to be quite exceptional.
Now, a house is not a restaurant booking. But sticking to ‘the usual’ could mean missing out on a better option.
In housing and public delivery, we seem to have spent years trying to remove risk completely, to the point where we have designed out the ability to deliver. And that’s what I want to talk about today.
I’m Neil Edgar, CEO of MAKAR, based in Inverness.
I didn’t come into housing through policy, architecture or even a traditional building route. I came through manufacturing and assembly. That may appear to be a disadvantage - but actually, it gives me a completely different vantage point.
I’m a practical, hands-on person. For more than twenty years I worked around the world installing extraordinary interiors, where perfection was the only option and missing a date simply wasn’t.
Every job was different, but the discipline was the same: Understand, Systemise, Simplify, Improve, repeat.
Seven years ago, I came to MAKAR. Different proposition. Same logic.
I’m not here with an academic theory or another report. I’m not going to explain MMC or introduce a new technology. I’m here with something you can walk into, measure and challenge. And I’m here, as an SME, to explain some of the struggles we face trying to build affordable housing in the midst of a housing emergency.
I’m often found in the workshop or on site with the assembly team. The Japanese call it Genchi Genbutsu — ‘go and see for yourself’. For me, that means getting close to the work, understanding what is actually happening and improving from evidence rather than assumption. There comes a point, however, where the process moves beyond our control.
People need homes. MAKAR, along with many other smaller firms, has the capability to make them. But a housing need does not automatically become a manufacturing order.
If this looked like a genuine emergency response, our workshop would be bursting. We would be adding shifts and assembly teams and our yard would be chock-a-block with houses. Those are the problems I would quite like to have. The problems I actually have are delays and pipeline uncertainty.
MAKAR has spent more than twenty years building homes with local C16 Scottish timber and biogenic materials. We have delivered well over 250 projects, mainly for private clients, and are now applying that experience, skill and knowledge to affordable housing — trying to eradicate fuel poverty at source and improve comfort and value through a fabric-first approach.
So what would let businesses like ours do more?
Paradigm is one practical example.
Get the structure, insulation, airtightness and moisture management right. Drive down the energy the home needs before adding equipment to meet the remaining demand - and we start to move the dial.
Its modelled heating cost is around six pounds a week, averaged over the year. That’s a forecast, not a measured bill. Current monitoring suggests we may come in below it, but another winter will be the real test.
The Data Lab is helping us analyse the house, and the metrics are encouraging — but, importantly, they also show us where we can improve.
That is why we measure: not to congratulate ourselves, but to learn. There are always ways to improve performance, and ultimately the aim is very simple — reduce the energy the home needs in the first place. Because the cheapest fuel you will ever buy is the fuel you don’t need.
And what about delivery?
149 days from idea to wind-and-watertight, with the heating on.
That whole journey included surveys, planning, warrant, procurement, services and groundworks — then one week through the workshop and six days on site, with the MVHR installed and a building control inspection.
We controlled the programme. The work and the decisions were aligned.
Twenty-seven key suppliers contributed time, expertise and materials. Why? Because they are also affected by the housing emergency. Some are struggling to recruit because of the lack of housing in rural areas. They believe in our direction of travel, and they believe other options should be available to the market.
Proving the building and proving the route to scale are not the same task.
Clearly, we can build it. The performance evidence is encouraging. The question is now whether we can build enough of them.
The First Minister has visited. MPs, MSPs, councils, housing associations and industry have come to see it. And we’ve had national recognition through several awards.
But recognition isn’t an order – and without a pipeline you can’t scale.
So what happens next?
That is where the challenge changes. It stops being a building problem and starts becoming a pipeline problem.
How do we move capacity from forty homes a year towards a system capable of delivering four hundred?
It takes more than a bigger shed.
But the route isn’t mysterious. It means more people, more assembly capacity, more shifts and, eventually, additional regional facilities as demand grows.
We know how to build that capacity. The difficult bit is having enough visibility of demand to justify that investment. And it isn’t only about increasing QUANTITY — it must also improve quality as we scale. The hundredth home needs the same care as the first - but it should also be better, because we’ve learned from the first ninety-nine !
We also have a responsibility to reduce cost and achieve reliable delivery dates. But we need work we can programme.
We cannot recruit people because somebody says, “We might have twelve houses for you next year — if we can get funding.”
I can plan the factory, the shifts and the equipment.
What I cannot manufacture is certainty.
I’m not asking for risk-free business. I’m asking for enough clarity to employ and train people over a period of years.
You cannot industrialise supply while leaving demand completely fragmented.
And scale in the Highlands does not necessarily mean two hundred homes on one site. For us, scale may be two here, four there and six somewhere else — if somehow we can join them together.
That is the reality of rural Scotland.
Our system already works around single-track roads, cattle grids, hairpin bends and ferries.
The point is that one construction method doesn’t fit everywhere. The delivery model must fit the place.
A pair of semis on an island will never fit a volume-housebuilder model — but two homes may be exactly what that community needs. We need the simplest route to get those homes delivered.
Bring those smaller projects together into a programme, keep the packages accessible to smaller firms, and give manufacturers funded, site-ready work with dates they can plan around.
That is how fragmented rural demand becomes a manufacturing programme.
Let me show you what that uncertainty actually looks like.
Take Lismore. Just two homes. Barely visible on a national target — absolutely transformational to the local community.
The Lismore Community Trust deserves real credit for getting the project moving. Those homes can determine whether people stay on the island, or whether somebody keeps a job locally.
From appraisal through design, planning and warrant: 189 days.
Then 409 days of costing, tendering and funding to signed contract.
That is 598 days before the build starts.
The bit we are actually employed to do? Thirty-two days for manufacture and assembly.
This is not a cost comparison. It is a comparison of elapsed programme time.
Roughly ninety-five percent process. Five percent physical build.
That doesn’t mean ninety-five percent is wasted. But we must question if the journey is working as efficiently as it could.
Delay has a cost. Material prices rise. Fuel increases. Professional fees continue. And the people who need the homes are left still waiting.
Variables get priced in. Longer programmes mean more volatility. Shorter programmes mean greater certainty — and more accurate pricing.
For Paradigm, planning, warrant and the commercial preparations ran concurrently. We reached the point where manufacture could begin in 138 days — and were wind and watertight 11 days later.
About seventy-five percent less time. That is an immediate win.
On Lismore, I want to be very clear: the timeline is nobody’s fault. It is not a lack of effort or determination. It is simply what the current process can produce.
For a manufacturer, the practical question is simple: when do I programme the next job? I can’t programme production around four hundred days of uncertainty.
Funding, design and approvals must move together from the very start, with clear decision dates and funded, site-ready projects moving into an accountable sequence.
Then the question isn’t only: how do we make the houses cheaper? It is: how do we make the whole journey quicker, simpler and more affordable?
And time is only one part of the problem. There is also what we have to get through before the workshop is allowed to start.
Through one local-authority route, around four hundred pages of contractual paperwork.
On Lismore, our contract with the community trust was just seven pages.
They are different contracts with different obligations, so seven pages may not always be the answer. But both are ultimately publicly funded routes. So, it is only reasonable to ask whether the burden is proportionate. And what does that burden actually cost?
For a small business, somebody has to read it, question it, reply to it, negotiate it and pay for advice long before there is an order the workshop can act on.
If a capable firm decides not to bid, that lost capacity never appears on the tender comparison.
Of course we need protection when a contractor or supplier fails. But are we spending so much trying to eliminate every conceivable risk that we have created the biggest risk of all — the loss of capable suppliers - to the point where only the largest companies remain able to participate, leaving smaller rural schemes without a practical route to delivery.
Simply put: the route to the work should not be harder than the work itself.
And this isn’t just a problem for MAKAR, or even just for housing.
Look at what is coming to the Highlands.
The Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport projects around six and a half billion pounds of investment and more than eleven thousand long-term Highland jobs.
But where are those people going to live?
Housing is infrastructure.
If we can plan the ports, the energy, the roads and the jobs, housing cannot arrive years later as an afterthought.
And when we build those homes, let’s change the experience for the occupier — by making them truly affordable to live in, as well as to build.
Yes, we must improve existing homes and support people with fuel bills – in the Highlands that financial pressure can be extreme. But with new build, let’s think pre-fit — and not build today what we have to retrofit with public money later.
Move the money from future burden to current prevention by putting the performance into the building from the very start.
That is why the proposed Scottish Passivhaus-equivalent matters to me. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the homes we are building — not only for us, but for our children, and for theirs.
If we are changing the standard, let’s make the change worth making. The consultation proposed 6 % carbon-emissions reduction as Good Practice and 37% as Best Practice. Our view is simple: make 37% the minimum – and if companies can improve on that, recognise it.
If we want companies to invest time, money and resource to go beyond the minimum, give them a reason: faster planning, preferential funding or another meaningful incentive.
If funders bring the programme, larger contractors coordinate the sites and infrastructure, regional manufacturers can help supply the homes, colleges train people against real work and researchers measure, analyse and report what happens, suddenly everybody is learning and pulling in the same direction.
That is collaboration - with a delivery date attached.
So, I have one ask.
If anyone in this room can help enable one real housing project where funding, planning, procurement, manufacture and delivery are aligned from the outset, I would welcome a conversation — or better still, a collaboration.
We have invited More Homes Scotland to involve us. Keeping the safeguards. Raising the standards. Removing unnecessary friction. Measuring the whole journey — and see what we learn. Can we improve on 149 days?
And don’t take my word for any of this.
Genchi Genbutsu — go and see for yourself.
Walk through our workshop. Stand in Paradigm. Question it. Challenge us.
We’re a small company on a hill outside Inverness. We don’t have all the answers, but we have big aspirations — and we’re living evidence that better-performing, healthy homes can be manufactured and delivered differently.
If a small Highland manufacturer can do that, just imagine what Scotland could do if demand, funding, procurement, skills and manufacturing capacity were properly aligned.
THAT capability already exists.
Now let’s create the route that lets it deliver at scale - together.
Thank You