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SCOTLAND’S tenants are facing a wave of intersecting crises this winter. Three local authorities have now declared a housing emergency, and others will swiftly follow if the Scottish government offers no strategic response this week. Ahead of the Scottish Budget and with councils having nothing left to cut, Scotland’s tenants need to see bold solutions to the housing crisis and an urgent expansion of social housing through buy-back, compulsory purchase and action on empty homes.
Last month the Scottish government failed to name a crisis acutely felt across the country, as a Labour motion to declare a housing emergency was voted down in the face of rising homelessness and out of control rents. With the current private rented sector rent cap due to expire on April 1 2024, and no further protections yet announced ahead of the implementation of more robust rent controls by the end of this parliament, Scotland’s tenants now face an uptick in evictions, community displacement, and rising levels of poverty.
Always temporary and partial, the current 3-6 per cent rent cap offered some much-needed protections for those tenants renting privately in existing tenancies. However, the cap has never applied between tenancies to “new market” rents. As a result, rents in Scotland have continued to rise in line with the rest of the UK.
With landlords incentivised to use “legal” grounds for eviction to break tenancies — and to hike rents in line with the volatile market — rents in Scotland have risen an average of 14.3 per cent this year. These loopholes must be closed under a robust system of rent controls, but with the housing Bill delayed the details of the Scottish government’s “permanent” approach remains to be seen. ScotGov’s Minister for Tenants’ Rights, Patrick Harvie has promised to “bridge the gap for tenants” at the end of the rent cap, a vague sentiment of little comfort to tenants facing the mounting emergency this winter.
To pile crisis atop crisis, those awaiting results of asylum claims in Glasgow this winter are facing swift eviction due to Home Office fast-tracking to clear their backlog.
In early January, Mears, the FTSE 100 private company contracted by the Home Office to house asylum-seekers in Scotland, will have justification to evict up to 1,400 of its tenants with seven days’ notice.
This fast-tracking, although welcome, will leave tenants with one week to find alternative accommodation in a city with a housing and homelessness emergency already acutely felt, with homelessness caseworkers at breaking point, and a universal credit system not fit for purpose.
Living Rent, Scotland’s tenants’ union, is demanding that Mears halt evictions for anyone with refugee status, while creating a task force to support tenants with benefit applications and securing alternative housing. Mears, an FTSE 100 company bolstered by public funds, can certainly resource this.
In the face of this brazen extraction of public funds to inflate the salaries of Mears’ management, local authorities continue to haemorrhage money into the private rented sector to meet demand for temporary accommodation.
In Edinburgh alone £82.5 million was spent on temporary accommodation — often poor quality and dangerous — during 2021/22 alone.
This is not just a housing and homelessness crisis; it is a crisis of vision and political will.
Tenants need to see bold action now, not when it is convenient around election cycles. We need mass building of homes for social rent, not so-called “mid-market” or new supply shared equity, but public housing genuinely affordable to working-class people.
Alongside building we must see local authorities provided with more funding to compulsorily purchase empty homes. With 23,000 tenants currently on housing waiting lists in Edinburgh, Living Rent has recently campaigned and won a pledge from the council to bring 60 per cent of void council properties back into use by October 2024. This crisis requires a mass response of similar urgency, with local authorities given the leverage to spend-to-save as a response to the housing emergency which benefits the people of Scotland, not private-sector chief executives profiting from mass misery.
Ruth Gilbert is a trade union organiser and Living Rent’s national campaigns officer.
You can join and support Living Rent here: livingrent.org/join.
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