DURING a year of industrial action on a scale not seen in 30 years, workers and tenants have stood united on picket lines across Scotland. 

Solidarity between trade and tenants’ unions has never been more vital, and the emergent cross-union power located in our communities must be seized.

As Scotland’s Tenants’ Union, Living Rent is building working-class power from the ground up. Structured around a model of local neighbourhood branches, our work focuses largely on housing. 

Members defend each other against evictions, rent hikes and issues of disrepair where we live, while developing knowledge and negotiating skills which can be used to build mass campaigns and legislative demands.

Living Rent’s leverage at Holyrood has been built through sustained organising for local community wins, often in tandem with trade unions. 

The union’s branch-level campaigns have tackled everything from resisting closures of libraries and community halls to restricting short-term lets in local authorities. 

Last year’s temporary investment in Glasgow’s cleansing services came off the back of cross-union organising between Living Rent and the GMB Glasgow cleansing workers. 

In the face of Glasgow City Council austerity and divide-and-rule tactics from council leaders, tenants and workers stood shoulder to shoulder in a set of joint demands, and we won. 

The strength of the union’s organising model lies in its ability to balance the local with the national, and those comrades feeling jaded by any service model structure should take strength from Living Rent’s approach. 

It is through this grassroots organising and campaigning strength that a system of rent controls will be won by 2025, as per the Scottish government’s existing commitment. 

It is up to Living Rent to shape the detail of those controls, and we are demanding a points-based system which brings rents down and ties them to the quality of the property, not the tenancy. 

We know that the vast majority of people in Scotland support rent controls — including homeowners — and have a collective investment in bringing Living Rent’s vision to pass for the public good.

This month the so-called “rent freeze” ended in Scotland, being replaced with a cap of 3-6 per cent in the private sector. Given that social housing rents usually rise in April, the emergency legislation was clearly never designed to benefit social tenants. 

Current Scottish government guidance requires only that social landlords do not increase rents beyond inflation, and as a result social tenants have been subject to unaccountable “consultations” to rubber-stamp increases of up to three times the cap in the private sector. 

With the spiralling cost of living and mass disrepair across both the private and social sectors this cannot hold. 

The Scottish government must use its existing powers to create a housing system for the benefit of the people, not landlords and property developers. 

However, while temporary and partial, it must be noted that the emergency legislation represented a real break with the status quo, and provided temporary relief to many tenants during an acute period of crisis. 

Though minor, it was a fundamental transfer of power from landlords to tenants not seen in several decades, and we must take strength from the agenda-setting work of our union.

As we continue to collectivise around industrial battles for pay justice and fight for the future of our public services, we cannot lose focus on the huge inequality borne from our broken housing system. 

With rents having risen an average of 35 per cent in Scotland over the past decade, a rent freeze or cap does not go far enough. We need rents to come down.

While we work towards rent controls, Living Rent is simultaneously developing a strategy for mass public housing. We want to decommodify housing and reverse decades of harm inflicted on the working class through schemes like buy to let and right to buy, local authority stock transfer, and mass demolition of social housing to make way for “mid-market” rents which serve to further inflate the private sector and socially cleanse our cities. 

Key to the development of this strategy will be strengthening our links with trade unions and building a unified movement around the housing crisis. 

Living Rent has no truck with asking nicely through a process of mild-mannered lobbying; our power will continue to be built on the streets. In neighbourhoods from Aberdeen to Castlemilk, Orkney to Dundee, we must stand together as workers and tenants to take power back. 

In your workplace join your trade union, and in your community join Living Rent.

Ruth Gilbert is Living Rent’s national campaigns officer. For more information about the campaign and to join up visit www.livingrent.org.