Meeting of the Parliament 23 May 2018
I thank members for their speeches so far and remind everyone that I was a councillor at the City of Edinburgh Council for 12 years. For all of that period, I chaired the council’s governance, risk and best value committee, and I spent many hours listening to evidence about what had gone wrong during Edinburgh’s tenement repair scandal. We need to learn lessons from that scandal, not just in Edinburgh but across Scotland.
Edinburgh, like other cities, has many tenements. Many of them are ageing and require maintenance, and many require safety measures to ensure the safety not just of their owners but of those who walk on the pavements. When things go wrong, it affects the wider community. As Graham Simpson mentioned, RICS has mooted the idea of there being regular health checks on buildings. We would welcome that, but it would be a challenge. Andy Wightman was right: up until the mid-1980s, every tenement in Edinburgh was checked regularly and detailed records were kept.
The issue is then what happens if the tenement is not being maintained correctly. We can have all the good wishes and aspire to tenements being kept in the right order but, unless local authorities are willing to use the correct sanctions and enforcement, we will simply end up with lots of notices being put on buildings but no enforcement or action being taken. It is not easy to enforce such measures in places such as Edinburgh, where lots of landlords do not live in their properties. Many people—particularly Adam Tomkins and Gordon Lindhurst—know much more about tenement law than I do. It is a complex area, but we need to consider new legislation, because the law is, at best, unclear.
That takes me to my next point, which is that factoring can help. The first flat that I bought in Edinburgh was a modern flat, and a factor was imposed on us. That actually worked well—the flat was well looked after and was clean and tidy, at least outside if not inside. However, that was expensive. There was no choice with our factor—it was simply imposed on us through the title deeds, but that has not been the tradition, particularly in Edinburgh. Many flats in Edinburgh do not have factors, and I sure that all Lothian and Edinburgh MSPs will have had letters from constituents—perhaps older people—who are trying to get the stairway of their flats cleaned but are not able to do that because other people will not.
Factoring is the way forward but, as I have said, the right sanctions—and the enforcement of those sanctions—must lie behind that. People must also have a choice about who their factor is, and individual flat owners must have a say in how the arrangement works rather than someone else imposing that on them.
I, too, welcome the debate and the consensus in the chamber on these issues. However, before we pat ourselves on our backs too much, I should make it clear that, although analysing the difficulties is easy, coming up with the solutions may be a lot harder.
16:25