Meeting of the Parliament 23 May 2018
It is with huge pleasure that I stand to speak in this debate after Graham Simpson, Ben Macpherson and Andy Wightman. I am sure that others from the working group will be speaking, too. Indeed, we may be forming the world’s geekiest boy band: we might not be pretty to look at, but we are all singing in harmony on this issue. I apologise for the bad joke.
Housing is a hugely important issue, and, as he opened the debate, Graham Simpson was absolutely right in two regards: he set it in the context of wider housing issues and the scale of the maintenance and repair that need to take place. All too often, the housing debate is dominated by definitions and sees people splitting hairs between one form of housing and another, citing telephone numbers without any regard for levels of demand or the level of housing need.
As a point of historical principle, Labour members view housing as a right. That is part of Labour’s legacy and history, and it is an important part of our future politics. The market-based thinking around housing, which views it simply as a commodity, has failed. While incomes have largely remained flat, rent—especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow—has risen by almost a third in the past decade, and the amount of mortgage-owned property has fallen by a quarter in the same period. Rent is outstripping incomes and housing poverty is a very real issue. The opportunities and expectations that people might have had a mere decade ago are becoming no more than dreams for all too many.
If we view housing as a right, we must also accept Andy Wightman’s language and view it as public infrastructure. There should be a sense of common as well as private ownership of property. We must also recognise the issue of mixed tenure and occupancy. Over the past few decades, the picture has been about not just tenement living in the traditional sense but a wide variety of different properties. Critically, within those properties there are multiple forms of ownership and tenure. There may be council tenants, owner-occupiers and private tenants, and, with the proliferation of small private landlords, the issue of maintenance becomes hugely problematic.
There is a real case for change, and I welcome the fact that the working group will be looking at the issues that Ben Macpherson set out very well. The concept of individualised ownership in the way that people own tenemented properties does not take into account the fact that they are collective owners of a building. There is a sense of common ownership of a single building that is not captured in the law, yet that is the fundamental point that needs to be captured and addressed in law.
I thank the tenement action group, whose work has been a positive starting point. It supplied the working group with a list of seven key points that it would like to see addressed. Those range from simple things such as having the contact details for all the owners in a stair available and freely shared—the identity of owners is publicly available but the means of contacting them is not—to issues around sinking funds and debt recovery. It is critical that we go from a situation that is more about enabling owners to get compensation and make arrangements for common repairs on a one-off basis to a situation in which there is on-going preventative maintenance. That is what we need to see.
My time is up, although I could go on for much longer. Fundamentally, we need to see a change in the law, as the matter is far too important to ignore. Our housing belongs to us all and we need to make sure that it is properly maintained.