Meeting of the Parliament 30 September 2025
I have struggled with this housing bill because I have wanted to engage with it, but every time I have tried to engage, it has proved difficult.
At the stage 2 amendment stage, the relevant committee met on the same day as the committee that I am on, so I was unable to attend most meetings, although I managed to attend on a few occasions to try to speak to some amendments. However, the amendments that I did manage to lodge and that were debated and agreed on at the committee stage were promptly reversed when it came to stage 3. That is really hard to take when a member has worked hard on a bill.
I have also found it hard to be in the chamber and hear, in line with a point that Willie Rennie made, all landlords of rented accommodation being tarred with the same brush. I am not embarrassed to say that I am a landlord and that I provide good-quality houses for long-term homes—I do not do short-term lets. During the course of this meeting, we have heard landlords being described as “wolves” of the private sector, being accused of a lack of concern and being said to weasel their way out of things. We have heard about grotesque and ludicrous rents, but that is not something that I recognise in the sector that I have worked in for 30 years. In 99 per cent of cases, landlords want to provide a home and to have a long-term relationship with their tenants, because those relationships make it easier for everyone. They allow the house to be well looked after and the landlord and tenant to come to an agreement on areas where there may be issues. I am bitterly disappointed when I hear that sort of language about landlords being used in the Parliament.
I remind Ms Chapman, the member who used that language and who is here, that there are something like 300,000 private rented properties across Scotland. However she might view landlords, they help by providing homes for individuals who cannot afford to buy their own homes. This Parliament has made legislation in the past about rent increases, and I think that that has worked in most cases.
I must also allude to the fact that I lodged 69 amendments during the course of stage 3. I did that because I thought that they were necessary, so to hear comments about them being unnecessary, not appropriate or not the right approach to take, and to hear others say that they “cannot commit today” or “might talk later” or that they “support the principle” but cannot agree to the amendment actually makes a mockery of the process. I am in the chamber to try to make the bill better, but I do not think that I have managed to do that in any shape or form.
I say to the cabinet secretary that she should remember the results of a survey carried out recently by Safe Deposits Scotland and published while we were here this afternoon. That survey found that 33 per cent of landlords want to get out of letting properties—that is 100,000 houses that would be taken out of the rented sector. Some in the chamber would argue that those would become homes that people would be able to buy, but only 62 per cent of those homes would go into private ownership and not all would be affordable for the people who need to rent properties.