Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2019
There have been a great number of speeches, and it is notable how much agreement there has been in the chamber. I do not propose to rehearse any of the arguments, but I will emphasise for the minister what I think the key points are, bearing in mind his statement planned for the autumn.
There are three simple propositions behind what we are discussing: that we should check our buildings, that we should provide owners in common with a mechanism for making agreements and coming to co-decisions, and that the people who co-own buildings should save together. Those are three simple ideas, but they are vitally important ones for maintaining our housing stock in this country.
I believe that the key issue is getting that going. I believe that, once we establish the mechanisms and set the expectation for those who own tenemented property—saying, “This is what we expect”—that will reinforce itself, the culture will change, expectations will change and things will simply happen. The question is how we get things going.
On the first point, that of building checks, we now have a system in place involving home reports. People expect to see a home report when they buy a house. I think that the same thing will become true of the tenement building check—the so-called building MOT. People will simply not be prepared to buy a tenemented property if that check is not in place. I think that, if we can establish that, it will take hold.
Likewise with owners’ associations. That is possibly the most difficult bit, but there is the expectation that they will be put in place. The Government will need to give some thought to how to make it easy for owners’ associations to be set up, whether that involves off-the-shelf articles of incorporation or publicity schemes to promote the use of such associations. Ultimately, when building works need done, if those mechanisms are available and on the shelf, the co-owners of buildings will reach for them, because that will make their decisions easy.
Likewise with sinking funds. I think that we will need to make them mandatory, and that will be difficult, but the missing shares scheme points to how that could be made to work. If such arrangements are not in place and the funds are claimed back at the point of sale, that will not be popular, but it will make things work.
There are examples from elsewhere in the world where such arrangements have been made to work—where such systems or mechanisms have been put in place—such as in Ireland, where multi-user developments were introduced in 2011 and sinking funds were established using a simple €200 per annum fee, just to get them going.
Those are the sorts of things that we will need to consider in Scotland. I think that we can, and indeed we must, as we have been here before. The Labour and Liberal Democrat Administration consulted on the self-same proposals back in 2003, but decided that they were too difficult. I do not think that we can come to that conclusion this time. Yes, it is difficult, but I urge the Government to have courage. I think that we need to, in order to preserve our housing stock.
I urge the other parties to join the consensus. If we make this policy something of common and collective interest—it is something that we recognise as difficult, so we must stand shoulder to shoulder—we will make it happen, and our housing stock will be the better for it.
16:43