Mull community trust completes 14 homes for key workers after six-year campaign

Fourteen families moved into new homes above Tobermory on Friday, the first affordable housing built on Mull since 2009 and the product of a six-year campaign by islanders who watched their teachers, nurses and ferry crews leave for want of somewhere to live.

The houses, on a sloping field at Baliscate on the edge of the town, were built by the Mull and Iona Community Trust at a cost of £3.9m, with land gifted by a local farming family and funding from the Scottish Land Fund, the Rural Housing Fund and £310,000 raised on the island itself through a share offer and a run of ceilidhs.

The tenants were chosen under an allocation policy that gives priority to people in jobs the island cannot do without. Among the first to receive keys were a primary teacher at Tobermory High School, two nurses at the island’s community hospital in Craignure, a CalMac deckhand, a vet and a couple who run the island’s only fire appliance between them. Rents are set at 25% below market rate, with a three-bedroom house at £640 a month.

“I have been a nurse on this island for four years and in that time I have lived in a caravan, a hotel staff room and a friend’s spare bedroom,” said Catriona Maclean, 31, who moved into one of the two-bedroom homes with her partner. “Every winter I asked myself whether I could do another one. Now I can stop asking.”

Mull has about 3,000 permanent residents and, according to the trust’s own survey, lost 180 long-term rentals to short-term holiday lets between 2019 and 2025, a third of the private rented stock. The island had 1,140 registered short-term lets in August. The high school has struggled to fill two teaching posts for three years because candidates could not find accommodation, and the hospital has run with agency staff housed in a hotel at a cost of £1,100 a week.

The trust’s chair, Douglas Hendry, said the project had taken so long because every stage, from the water supply to the single-track access road, had to be solved on an island where a cement lorry comes on the ferry. “We lost a year to the pandemic and another to a water main that turned out not to exist where the map said it did,” he said. “But the hard part was never the building. It was persuading agencies on the mainland that 14 houses matter as much here as 400 do in Paisley.”

Argyll and Bute council, which has declared a housing emergency, said the scheme was a model it wanted to repeat on Islay, Coll and Tiree. A spokesperson for the Scottish government said the island’s short-term let licensing scheme, in force since 2024, had “slowed but not reversed” the loss of homes.

The trust has already bought a second site, at Salen in the middle of the island, and hopes to begin building 10 more homes there in 2028. Its waiting list stands at 96 households.