Meeting of the Parliament 21 January 2016
As a member of the ICI Committee, I am pleased to be able to take part in this debate. Clearly, I support the bill’s general principles, but I have a few issues with the bill that I want to raise with the minister.
As we have heard, the private rented sector is a very significant sector, with 330,000 Scottish households and around 85,000 children. Significantly, 120,000 of those households are in poverty, so it is important that we discuss that issue today. The Chartered Institute of Housing has said:
“There should be no circumstance where a person or family can lose their home without reason.”
Within the short time that I have, I will cover three areas in which I have a particular interest: tenants’ rights; rent pressure zones; and an issue from my region around farming housing.
On the bill’s handling of tenants’ rights, the introduction of a less intimidating and less adversarial tribunal system rather than a court system is to be welcomed. However, I would encourage more in respect of the tribunal’s powers with regard to reasonableness, which is a very important test. The current proposals would grant the eviction of a vulnerable tenant who has a month’s rent arrears after just three months; personally, I would support an extension of that period to six months, and would support the tribunal having more discretionary ability to adjourn cases and monitor vulnerable tenants’ progress case by case. Perhaps the minister would kindly comment on those key issues when she winds up.
Further, should a tenant be evicted by a landlord on false grounds, which obviously involves breaking the law, the current penalty, as we have heard, is a maximum and not definite sum of three months’ rent. Compared with the £50,000 penalty that a landlord can face for falsely renting with an HMO licence, that seems to me to be unbalanced and not proportionate.
Turning to the issue of rent, I warmly welcome the changes that the bill proposes of allowing rent to be increased only once during a 12-month period, which will bring stability to both tenants and the market. The proposal to introduce rent pressure zones has been met with mixed reactions, but I support the bill’s proposal on that. Local councils, which would trigger the measure, are best placed to assess whether a zone should be an estate, village, town, city or, indeed, the whole local authority area. The zone would restrict rent increases to the CPI plus 1 per cent for sitting tenants. I raised a technical point on that with the minister earlier, to which she responded.
I would contend that rent pressure zone policies are not the only tool in the toolbox. I refer members to best practice around the world in that regard in places such as Stockholm, San Francisco and Amsterdam, where rent increases also tend be linked to increases in the quality of housing, which makes a lot of sense. Generally, the evidence that I have heard from across the sector is that there is consensus that the biggest issue in Scotland concerning rent is the lack of available social and private housing. For our report, the ICI Committee heard, as the convener said, that in certain German cities rent pressure zones are effective because they have double the number of properties available compared with the number available in the average Scottish city.