Meeting of the Parliament 03 December 2014
In our previous debate on housing, I described the difficult and anxious situation facing a resident in East Renfrewshire who came to see me for advice and any assistance that I could offer. The resident was a young man with two children at local schools but whose partner had left and who could no longer afford to live in the family home.
With few priority housing points, there was next to no chance of that man getting a council or housing association property on the Eastwood side of the authority and, although he has worked all his life, a mortgage in the area was well out of his reach. I am pleased to tell members that, along with his children, he has found a private rented flat on the south side of Glasgow, which is close enough for the children to get the bus up to school, and is, more importantly, just about affordable.
How many cases like that have we all heard about over the past few years, some with far less satisfactory outcomes?
Problems with housing supply are helping to drive huge changes to the way that we live in Scotland. We are simply not building enough homes. The number of new private homes has more than halved in recent years, while the population is increasing. In terms of council or housing association property, Audit Scotland has identified a shortfall of almost 14,000 homes in the past decade alone, and there are up to a dozen local authorities in the same situation as East Renfrewshire, where the waiting list for a council house has increased over the past five years. An estimated 150,000 people find themselves in that predicament around Scotland. The fact that the number of Scots who live in private rented accommodation has doubled over the past decade demonstrates precisely how important the sector has become.
My constituent and his family landed on their feet but, for many more families, moving into a private let leaves them feeling insecure or, worse, it becomes a move into poverty. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that private renters spend 23 per cent of their income on housing, which is up from 18 per cent just 10 years ago, and that the number of families in the private rented sector who are on housing benefit has increased from 60,000 in 2008 to 97,000 in 2013.
Last year’s Scottish household survey highlighted the insecurity of tenure in the private rented sector compared with the alternative. The average length of time for someone in the private rented sector to stay at the same address is between two and three years, compared with more than 10 years in the social rented sector and 15 years in an owner-occupied home. As John Mason has pointed out, some of that might reflect choice or people in transition to home ownership but, with so many families now leasing privately, there is a danger of such instability having a detrimental effect on the more vulnerable.
There is no one solution to Scotland’s housing problems—although we clearly need to build more homes—but reform of the private rented sector should be at least part of the way forward. At the moment, many people are fearful of moving into a private let but are forced by circumstance to do so. The constituency case that I gave as an example is far from unique. As I am sure that most colleagues recognise, renting privately is the least favoured option of the majority of tenants. Similarly, many landlords are increasingly wary of renting to bad tenants who they then cannot get rid of. I do not believe that that is a sustainable basis on which the sector can develop.
Shelter’s campaign to make renting right could help tenants and landlords. It could provide stability and security for both and introduce a fairer system for resolving problems when they occur. There are plenty of examples of places in Europe where private renting is seen as a safe, affordable and desirable option; here in Scotland, on the other hand, the gap between the tenancy regime for public and private landlords simply aggravates the sense of inequality that is created by the difference in rent levels between the two. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the average private rent is 86 per cent higher than the average social rent.
The proposal is not an anti-landlord measure. Shelter has shown the way forward, and Labour has put that into the parliamentary process. I urge all members to support the motion.
15:43