Susan Aitken said landowners holding on to valuable resources are hampering efforts in Glasgow to create new housing.

The council leader spoke at the SNP Conference in Edinburgh during a debate on housing and land ownership.

Aitken said Glasgow had the highest amount of post-industrial vacant and derelict land in Europe but ownership was an issue.

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She said: “ownership is fragmented” and it included hedge funds which she said: “Don’t care about the blight (it causes).

She added: “It is sitting there as a tax write-off.

“If we were able to get that land the benefits would be phenomenal.”

She said Glasgow was “Europe’s foremost post-industrial city and that over the last seven years the council has been “steadily reducing the urban blight and using it for housing an industry.”

However, she added: “A lot of the low-hanging fruit has gone. What’s left needs to be remediated. It might be contaminated by chemicals or undermined.”

She said: “It needs investment before anything can be built.”

Last week the council leader attended an event to promote the regeneration of the former Meat Market site in the east end of the city.

The land has been derelict for many years and the plan is for a community hub to sit alongside the housing that has been built on some of the land.

The resolution debated by the SNP conference called for a Housing Land Corporation to be established to acquire land primarily for the purpose of building new housing.

It could: “Compulsory purchase land at existing use value, in a manner compatible with the National Planning Framework, using a bespoke streamlined process.”

It also called for a supplementary land tax “on all ultimate beneficial owners” with holdings of more than one acre.

Agricultural land or land owned by public bodies would be exempt.