COULD rent controls ease the financial straitjacket on the Scottish Government?

The anniversary date slipped by without a merited fanfare. November 17 marked a hundred years since one of the key events of the Glasgow Rent Strikes. One hundred years ago an army of housewives and workers – led by the spirited socialist Mary Barbour – marched on the Sheriff Court.

Their demands? An end to evictions and controls on the escalating rents impoverishing the urban poor. The court that day was set to judge 18 tenants for non-payment of rent. The act of defiance, replicated decades later in the non-payment of Poll Tax, had to be stamped out by the authorities.

But the social opposition was too great. This was an age of revolution and the sight of women and workers united – across Glasgow’s religious and gender divides – put the fright into the establishment. The charged tenants were set free. Within a month, the wartime government crumbled. Rent controls were introduced in the first measure of its kind in Europe. Historian James Smyth celebrated the agitators, claiming that they “may well have been responsible for the most successful example of direct action ever undertaken by the Scottish working class”.

Scottish society has transformed in that century and – despite the hopes of some – does not now have the same revolutionary fervour that once brought Army tanks to George Square. When Nicola Sturgeon praised Barbour’s efforts from the room of Govan’s Pierce Institute named in her honour, she did so amid cooler yet concerted calls for rent controls.

For more than a year now, Barbour’s great-grandchildren have pursued a persistent campaign to reduce the cost of Scotland’s high-cost, low-quality private rented sector.

In a small victory, the Scottish Government has opened the door to targeted rent controls in high-pressure areas as part of the Private Tenancies (Housing) Bill. Without the efforts of the Living Rent campaign, it’s unlikely that this breakthrough would have been achieved.

The bill – similar to the SNP’s moderate land reform proposals – can still be strengthened if ministers, advisors and their lawyers are bold. Even if full-scale rent controls – on the Dutch model – can’t be achieved in the current bill, then the Scottish elections provide a platform for such a manifesto commitment to be made.

The case for rent controls, I believe, can be made beyond the need for affordable housing and a more equal society. It’s the potential economic savings across devolved budgets that make the strongest case for expanding a system linked to the quality of housing.

Incentive-based rent controls – where landlords can increase rent based on the quality of housing – would provide a private financial self-interest to improve heating, ventilation and insulation. The potential impact on the nation’s health would be huge.

Polling by the housing charity Shelter found that 48 per cent of private tenants lived in a property with mould; 44 per cent raised problems with damp. The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health linked poor housing to increased cardiovascular and respiratory diseases as well as anxiety and depression. Poor housing, for these reasons, is responsible for increasing pressures on the NHS at a time when public resources are increasingly stretched.

High rents also push tenants towards homelessness, and the expensive process of reallocation and care provided by council authorities. With such services at the brunt of austerity cuts, any measure which reduces both the instances of homelessness and the cost of rented housing would lift a burden off the back of local government.

A third budget – although not yet allocated to the Scottish Government – is the billions of pounds used in Scotland as a landlord subsidy: Housing Benefit. Rather than prop up an ailing system of overcharging, rent controls would reduce the public money currently used as a private sector stopgap.

The SNP now have greater resources at their disposal than at any time in their history. That staff resource should initiate a full economic analysis of the cost savings to devolved budgets from a national policy of rent controls.

It is exactly the type of ‘preventative spend’ policy that fits into a wider need for healthcare reform. Just as Tory cuts will bite even deeper into Scotland’s budget, any measure that could save hundreds of millions of pounds over a full parliament should receive serious consideration.

A century ago, Glasgow’s women – through strikes and protest – dragged the establishment to deliver rent controls. Their instinct, in the midst of an imperial war and deep poverty at home, was for financial survival. Today, the threat we face is to our welfare state and the freedom of those who depend on it. To that end, delivering rent controls can be renewed as a mission for our own age.