Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2019
As other members have done, I thank the minister for making time for the debate and the Scottish Government for providing some critical funding that oiled the wheels of the work behind the scenes of the debate.
I thank Ben Macpherson, who is not here—presumably he is busy with other things. It was during his members’ business debate in January 2018 that the proposal to establish a cross-party working group was first made. Like Daniel Johnson, I very much enjoyed engaging with the group. We grappled with some quite complicated questions, but nevertheless it was very worth while.
I also thank the wide range of members, including landlords, factors, surveyors and council officials, who contributed substantial time and effort in analysing, discussing and researching the issues and developing papers. I particularly thank Euan Leitch of the Built Environment Forum Scotland who provided the secretariat.
The fact that it was called a working group is important; the group actually did some serious work on a vitally important area—the governance of tenemental property. Like other members I am sure, I have a regular stream of constituents who have complaints about common repairs and the difficulties of securing on-going maintenance.
Although I no longer own a home, I owned a tenement flat until 1996 and the stress of organising repairs, which involved threats of violence against me by neighbours, led me and five other residents to sell up. I know many other folk who have faced similar situations. When we talk about people’s mental and physical health, the stresses that can arise as a result of living in an environment that is not appropriately governed are real.
The issue is not a new phenomenon. In the past, most of the tenements were owned by landlords and occupied by tenants, so the landlords were responsible for maintenance and there was not such a variety of responsibility. Nevertheless, most of the properties in Glasgow and Edinburgh have been here for a century at least and in some cases more than 200 years. With proper maintenance and refurbishment, they should last many more years, but they have not had that proper maintenance. Although we have systems in place and some improvements have been made—as the minister alluded to—we still face a very challenging situation. In short, Scotland has allowed a major part of its infrastructure to fall into disrepair as the result of a failure to develop the modern governance arrangements that are prevalent in most normal European countries.
As Graham Simpson said—I am sorry, I should have thanked him at the beginning for convening the cross-party working group—the working group made three key recommendations on building inspections, compulsory owners associations and building reserve funds. It also laid out a proposed timetable for delivery.
As Daniel Johnson alluded to, and as I have mentioned before, at the heart of the issue is the fact that we treat domestic property as an exclusively private interest, despite the fact that a third-floor flat enjoys support from the second floor and shelter from above. The lifespans of tenements in the city should be measured in centuries. In that light, such properties are part of the public infrastructure of our cities, just as the streets, the sewers and the utilities are. In that public infrastructure, there are the private interests of the owners and occupiers for the time being. It is their essentially short-term private interests—typically they last for 10 years, or 20 years at most—that too often prevail and have frustrated progress on the issue in the past. Those interests can frustrate the necessity of undertaking regular maintenance.
I would like us to frame the debate clearly as one that concerns the public infrastructure of our urban realm, rather than private property. Let us also agree that owners have responsibilities as well as rights. Those responsibilities need to be laid out well in advance and signposted. In that regard, it is important that we move from the broad agreement of the working group to a high-level political agreement to implement the proposals.
The proposals that are set out in the report have cross-party support. We can build on that and agree a programme of work to deliver them.
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