Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2019
I, too, begin by reeling off a list of thanks. I thank my fellow members of the cross-party working group. Taking part in such a group has been genuinely refreshing. It has worked in a very constructive way and certainly without any hint of party-political partisanship.
I thank the Government for making time for the issue to be discussed. The issue is serious, but it could easily be dismissed as technical or not necessarily as important as I believe that it is. I thank Euan Leitch, who put in an absolute power of work. Without his input, the report would not have been written. I also thank RICS, which supplied much of the wherewithal to make the report happen.
There is a simple reason why I think that the work is important. Tenemented residences and homes are absolutely core to my constituency. When we think of Edinburgh Southern, which I represent, we think of places such as Marchmont, Bruntsfield and Morningside. Those places are absolutely built on tenemented maintenance, and we need to maintain such fantastic areas and areas that we might not consider to be tenemented. As we have heard, the buildings range from post-war local authority-built houses to subdivided mansions. All those types of building—that rich seam of different types of homes—are tenemented. We need to maintain them not just because they are nice buildings—many of them are—but because they are critical to our country.
As Graham Simpson pointed out, housing is infrastructure. However, it is our most fundamental form of infrastructure. We are talking about the very homes in which we live. Housing is critical.
The minister and Graham Simpson set out some of the details. Before I set out some of the context, I acknowledge that Andy Wightman established the concept of housing being infrastructure. That is critical. Although housing is infrastructure, we must recognise the context in which the debate is taking place. We are seeing something of a housing crisis on many counts.
We are seeing a crisis of availability. Huge numbers of people in the city of Edinburgh have to live in temporary accommodation for far longer than they should have to. On affordability, too many people find themselves priced out of the housing market or simply find that housing costs take up a disproportionate amount of their wage. There is also the issue of sustainability. I was glad that the minister made points about the environmental sustainability of our housing and the need to invest in that for those reasons.
Those are the reasons why housing is so important. Maintenance is critical to housing for all those social goods, because housing underpins so much wellbeing in this country.
There is a clear public interest in taking forward measures such as those that are set out in the report. It is important that we preserve our housing stock and invest in it for future generations. It is not just the people who live in the houses now who will benefit from investment; future generations who will live in those houses will, too.
That is why we need legal recognition of the reality of tenemented housing. People do not own individual bits of property that are completely distinguished from other people’s property; in effect, they are co-owners of a single building. That fact is not currently recognised in the law, and that needs to change.
Over and above those points, there is a fundamental point of public safety that we need to recognise, which Graham Simpson alluded to. In the city of Edinburgh, there are huge numbers of roof falls every month. Between 2014 and 2018, the number of roof falls almost quadrupled. The 78 roof falls in Edinburgh, including 53 masonry falls, rose to a total of 254 roof falls and 179 masonry falls in 2018. Roof falls can be lethal, and they have been lethal in the past.
The proposals are not simply things that it would be nice to have and which would make lives a little bit better, although they would do. They could potentially save lives. The proposals have already been outlined, but we need building checks to make sure that the buildings continue to be safe and habitable, because preventative spend is much more cost effective than spend that is required when the damage has already been done.
We need owners associations so that people have the structure and the entity through which they can make collective decisions—