THIS bill will change renting forever, but there is still a long way to go to avert the housing crisis
Yesterday, the Scottish Government published what must be the most hotly-anticipated housing bill in decades. In it, on the back of an enormous campaigning and lobbying effort by the Living Rent Campaign, was a commitment to introduce provisions for rent controls.
The bill outlines plans to scrap short-assured tenancies and the no-fault grounds for eviction. These laws, introduced by Thatcher in the eighties, meant tenants in Scotland have some of the worst protections from eviction anywhere in Europe.
This is, without a doubt, an enormous victory for the campaigners who have spent the last year up and down the country gathering consultation responses and petition signatures, marching and demonstrating outside dodgy letting agents, building links with trade unions and the workers’ movement, meeting and lobbying with MSPs and MPs, forcing the issue of poverty and insecurity in the private rented sector high up the agenda of Scottish politics, and comprehensively winning the argument that the market has failed and is incapable of delivering secure, affordable housing.
The Living Rent Campaign has built a coalition of organisations representing more than a million people behind their call for rent controls, and made waves within the SNP, Labour, Greens and RISE, Scotland’s new Left alliance. It is hard to imagine the First Minister announcing what she did without the enormous efforts of tenant activists in every corner of the country.
But while this bill is a huge step forward, there is still a long way to go.
The provisions in the bill for local rent controls in so-called “rent pressure zones” do not go far enough to tackle the exorbitant cost of renting. In order to stop tenants being forced into poverty, we need to bring rents down – not just limit the rate at which they go up.
Secondly, rent controls aren’t just about cost. There are parts of Scotland where rent isn’t comparatively expensive, but where there do exist chronic issues of poor quality housing.
Rent controls linked to quality, such as exist in the Netherlands, are the most efficient way of forcing up standards, by giving landlords an immediate financial incentive to make repairs.
It would be letting down the hundreds of thousands of tenants in sub-standard accommodation to miss this opportunity to do something about it.
Finally, tenants need the right to contest any eviction orders in court.
Illegal evictions are far too common in Scotland, and if we want the protections in this bill to have the intended effect, tenants need the legal right to challenge their landlords and letting agents where necessary.
That said, and while we will continue to campaign to improve the bill, this is an enormous step forward for private tenants in Scotland and we have come a long way. The argument has been won that the free market is unable to deliver secure, affordable housing.
The Scottish Government has been right to listen to the voices of the hundreds of thousands of tenants who are struggling over the well-funded voices of some of the organisations representing landlords in Scotland.
But if we want this bill to truly protect tenants from unfair evictions and unaffordable rents, we need to be bold and go further.
Gordon Maloney is an organiser of the Living Rent Campaign
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