ON WEDNESDAY last week, as the media fixated on the Covid inquiry, the Scottish government quietly announced their plans for what will happen to tenants after the rent cap.
 
As of April 1, tenants will no longer have a 3 per cent rent cap. Instead, the Scottish government has suggested incredibly modest adaptations to the rent adjudication service, a system by which tenants can challenge their rent increases.

However, just as before, this system leans heavily on market rents as a fair metric despite Minister for Tenants Rights Patrick Harvie insisting in January last year that going from the rent cap to “open market considerations” would create a “damaging cliff edge” for tenants.

This, to put it simply, enshrines in the solution the very problem it seeks to fix and will ensure sharp increases push tenants to the edge. As one tenant responded: “This is the signal for me that I’ll have to leave the city I love.”
 
The unregulated, cut-throat open market is a ludicrous tool to use to measure what is affordable for tenants. In the workplace, the “free” open market led to child labour, no weekends, dangerous working conditions, and no minimum wage. We now all know that we need regulation to protect workers — yet in housing, there is no such recognition.
 
The open market has seen rent in Scotland increase by 61 per cent over the last 13 years. In the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the crisis is far more acute, with rent increasing 82 per cent and 91 per cent respectively, nearly double inflation (47 per cent). Even with the rent cap, over the last year new market rent in Scotland increased by 14 per cent, rising to 22 per cent in greater Glasgow.
 
These increases are not happening in a vacuum. Our wages have stagnated or fallen in real terms and all our other costs have risen. As a result, tenants throughout Scotland are being forced to choose between eating and being able to make rent, or else face being forced from the places they call home.
 
Make no mistake, the Scottish government’s shift back to “the market” as a tool to control rents has not come out of the blue.

Throughout the rent cap, landlords have been organising with a three-pronged strategy: sue the government, raise rents (and blame the rent cap as the cause for this), and finally peddle myths about the rent controls left, all in an attempt to shore up their lucrative reign.
 
We sadly can’t stop them from suing the government (though they did lose). And the government right now is refusing to tighten the regulations that tenants need to stop landlords just raising rents. So instead, let’s focus on dismantling some of the most outrageous myths landlords spread.
 
The central argument that landlords put forward is that rent controls damage supply and will therefore increase rents, harming tenants.

Their argument goes that, faced with poor returns on their investment, landlords will have no choice but to sell up, reducing the number of homes available to rent and forcing up rents due to the competition for homes.

But a closer look at both the evidence and the argument does not back this up. Though data from letting agents Hamptons supports the claim that landlords are selling, 12 per cent of all house sales last year in Scotland were by landlords compared with 9 per cent of total sales across Britain, they fail to say who is buying these properties.

Rather, what the landlord registry is showing is that if there are relatively fewer landlords, landlords now have more properties, leading to an actual growth in the number of properties available to rent.

To be clear, the Scottish landlord registry shows the number of properties available to rent today has increased since the announcement of the rent freeze in September 2022, something that data from City Lets also confirms. Not quite the exodus that landlords claim.
 
Evidence highlights the simple theoretical flaw of the “supply” argument. Sold houses aren’t disappearing, bricks and mortar don’t vanish: landlords are either selling to a person or family who will live there — or to another landlord.
 
And why would they sell? Scotland has some of the highest “rental yields” — money gained in rent compared to the amount invested in the property — across Britain.

Furthermore, a rental property not only brings in income through rent, it is also a valuable asset and over time landlords profit from the increase in value of the property.

So much for landlords struggling to make ends meet and have no other option than to sell. All the evidence shows a very resilient profit margin, in a context where most people have faced rising living costs.
 
Landlords’ focus on supply rarely addresses the fact that the private-rented sector has not been a driver of the wider supply of housing.

The doubling of the private sector in Scotland over the last 20 years has mostly come from the privatisation of more secure tenures, not the result of new buildings. Statistics from a few years ago had the number of new privately rented flats coming from new builds at fewer than one in 10.
 
There is, though, a reason that the supply argument is pushed hard by developers and landlords — it’s an opportunity for them to make loads of money. This is partly through land banking, where developers buy land, often receive planning permission, but then never use that permission and sell the land again years later.

There aren’t great estimates for the amount of this going on in Scotland, but it’s reasonable to assume it isn’t massively different to the situation down south — where more than 400,000 homes with planning permission are going unbuilt by developers.
 
Another, perhaps more concerning reason the supply argument is the one favoured by developers and landlords, is because it skirts around the issues of power, control and regulation.

They know that if we simply build loads more private flats, without changing any of the patterns of ownership or usage, it will mean a huge windfall for them.
 
And if we’re to take them literally, let’s do a quick exercise of speculation. In their system, increased supply will lead to decreased demand, and therefore lower rents. So if they are fine with tenants paying lower rents, why not do this now, through regulation?

This useful exercise highlights just the hypocrisy of landlords’ arguments. The “myth of supply” is a useful cop out that they don’t have any responsibility to do and can use it as a magic way to get away from looking at their profits and abuse.
 
As for their concern about a decrease in supply leading to an increase in rents which in turn harms tenants, their sympathy appears to be more coercive than actual concern.

Rents do not rise of their own accord, landlords are choosing to increase rents, if their concerns about the poorest being hit most by rent controls, they could simply not increase rents.
 
But what about the landlord’s costs? Are they not experiencing a cost-of-living crisis too? Firstly, most landlords are not experiencing a mortgage crisis as most landlords own their flats outright.

Those whose mortgages have increased on their flats should accept that their investment, just like any investment, comes with risk. If they are struggling, they can sell their asset. Already struggling tenants should not be the ones who shoulder that increased burden.
 
Ultimately, these arguments, like all the arguments made by landlords, demonstrate a fixation with maintaining the status quo. But the status quo is not working for tenants. Our rents are out of control and our homes are mould-ridden or falling apart.
 
Living in quality homes that we can afford should not be too much to ask. Landlords have shown time and time again that they can not be trusted to behave fairly and keep rents affordable.

The government needs to shift from focusing on keeping landlords happy to building more affordable housing for all and legislating to introduce strong, water-tight rent controls that bring down rents. It’s time that we stopped listening to the whinges of people whose profits are fine, and focus on people who are genuinely struggling.
 
Rufus Bouverie is the communications officer for Living Rent — Livingrent.org.