Scotland’s houses are crumbling around us

New statistics from the Scottish Government reveals that more than half of Scotland’s houses do not meet minimum standards of quality and state of repair.

Image Credit: Trevor Littlewood, CC BY-SA.

This week I had planned to write an article about the recent publication by the Climate Change Committee focusing on its recommendations around adapting buildings for climate change. The way we used to design houses for a colder, dryer climate with fewer hot and cold extremes is simply no longer sufficient but there is also a challenge with applying a one-size-fits-all approach to policy across the UK.

As we’ve seen just this week, the south of England is sooner going to be regularly seeing 40C summers while Scotland is likely to still only see absolute maximums in the low 30s. While the latter is still too hot (I basically cease to function above about 25C), the engineering challenges of keeping houses cool in an occasional 30C heatwave is very different from keeping them cool in a regular summer high of 40C.

Scotland’s houses need to be adapted, and they need to be retrofitted to limit the damage they continue to do to the environment (Common Weal is still engaging with the Scottish Government to shape policies such as the PassivHaus-equivalent energy efficiency regulations and the National Housing Agency).

But on Tuesday, the Scottish Government published some data that changed my focus entirely. It’s not that we don’t need to have that conversation about appropriate adaptations or that adaptations are no longer needed, but that a lot of these adaptations may need to happen at the same time as or after critical repairs are done to the houses just to bring them up to current standards.

The headline figure is stark. More than half of Scotland’s houses, 55 per cent of them, fail the Scottish Government’s basic housing quality standards. Twenty-eight per cent of them fail the legal “Tolerable Minimum” standard and could therefore be deemed not fit for human habitation.

The Scottish Housing Quality Standard was designed in 2004 with a view to applying it to social rented houses. The idea being that this should be the minimum standard of repair and of the provision of amenities delivered to social housing tenants. This standard could be set at a level higher than the minimum legal limit as a means of trying to drive up standards as a whole across the housing sector but also in recognition that because Scotland and the UK sold off and deprioritised social housing as a means of providing houses, those who remain in social houses now are often more vulnerable to poor housing provision than owner-occupiers.

This dataset does not apply the SHQS only to social housing though, but to all houses in the survey. It shows though that if the goal really was to drive up standards across the sector, then it has failed. As said, the average failure rate across all houses in Scotland is 55 per cent. Amongst social houses alone, it’s only(!) 41 per cent, but for houses that are owner-occupied, 60 per cent of them fail this quality standard. For private rented houses, it’s even worse at 62 per cent.

The minimum Tolerable Standard (TS) is even more stringent. Where the SHQS demands provision of services including a decent standard of kitchen and bathroom, the minimum Tolerable Standard can be met with services like a basically functioning indoor toilet and a working sink in the kitchen delivering potable water.

Nevertheless, 28 per cent of Scotland’s houses fail to meet this standard. Just 10 per cent of social houses fail the MTS (reflecting the regulated legal duty of local authorities to provide decent housing), while 24 per cent – almost one-in-four – private rented houses fail the TS (reflecting perhaps that the legal duty placed on private landlords is not being enforced nearly as strongly as it is on social houses). Meanwhile, 36 per cent of owner-occupied houses appear to fall below the legal minimum standard for habitation. Local Authorities technically have the power to mandate owners to undertake repairs, to repair them on behalf of owners or to condemn the house entirely but, in practice, these powers are rarely invoked.

There is a caveat in the private rented figures though. For many local authorities in Scotland, the data on the SHQS and TS failure rates for private rented houses are not available due to lack of responses to the survey. This perhaps makes sense. If you were a private landlord and you owned a house that was in bad need of repairs that you, the owner, weren’t carrying out, would you tell the Government that you were still renting it out despite that?

The local authority with the best(!) housing on the list is West Lothian where only 42 per cent of houses fail to meet the SHQS. The worst is neighbouring East Lothian where 66 per cent – two houses in every three – fail the standard. This is almost a paradoxical result given that East Lothian scores substantially higher than the West on deprivation metrics but again this perhaps makes sense in light of local authorities being better regulated than private landlords or owner-occupiers.

“It’s not enough to fit loft insulation and bolt solar panels onto a house with a leaking roof and call it a day”

There are still huge data gaps in this study. The total survey only covers around 2,500 houses across Scotland meaning that if the survey contacted a completely different set of houses each year, it would take over a thousand years to survey every house. This isn’t normally a problem for statistical surveys when considering the nation as a whole but it does run into problems when breaking the data down by Local Authority (only 299 houses were surveyed in Glasgow, only 11 in Orkney) and it becomes statistically useless when breaking things down even further within those local authorities (the two social rented houses and the single private rented house survey in Na h-Eileanan Siar are possibly not representative samples of rented housing on those islands).

Scotland needs far better data on subjects like this if we are going to form decent public policy – especially when so much of that policy is likely to be delivered by local authorities. They need to know what houses are like in their patch and so a limited national-scale survey simply isn’t good enough. Perhaps the Scottish Government will finally get around to adopting its own policy of launching a Scottish Statistics Agency to help fill data gaps like this.

But this is a bigger problem than data gaps. There are obviously serious failings in Scottish private rented regulations if so many landlords are renting out badly repaired homes that we can see it in the stats even just from the landlords brave enough to admit it. And there are even deeper problems – perhaps linked to inequality and deprivation, perhaps linked to the poor build quality of British houses built by profiteering developers – that mean that owner-occupiers are struggling to maintain their houses, never mind upgrade them to meet climate and energy efficiency standards.

A lot of this isn’t the fault of owners. They mostly weren’t the ones who built the houses either long before the climate emergency became as urgent as it now is or who built them to such shoddy standards that they are now barely surviving beyond the lifetime of their first mortgage. Therefore, owners cannot simply be dumped with the upfront costs of repairing and then upgrading their homes. If they could, they would have done so already. It’s not always about the money. Working out what you need is a specialist skill. Finding the traders who can do the work is another one. Inspecting and auditing their work so they don’t just leave you with even more problems is another one again.

Common Weal has advocated that the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to get Scotland’s houses climate-ready is not to just to ramp up standards and hope that owners will spend their own money to keep up, but to enact that national-scale public works programme to get everyone’s houses up to where they need to be. The issue that these statistics bring into focus is that it’s simply not enough to fit loft insulation and bolt solar panels onto a house with a leaking roof and call it a day.

Every house in Scotland needs to be surveyed prior to this public works upgrade and where repairs are needed, these need to be included in the package. And yes, this needs to be a public works project even for owners who can ‘afford’ to pay for the repairs and upgrades – we can take the money back in taxes later.

But this kind of strategic thinking on housing does not appear to be something that the Government is doing. The two housing policies announced since the election have been the folding of the role of a dedicated Cabinet Secretary for Housing into a broader remit within Social Justice (which could be played to advantage if housing policy is itself dedicated towards the goals of social justice rather than merely inflating house prices for the purposes of boosting corporate profits and capital accumulation) and to announce an equity loan fund which will almost certainly inflate house prices to boost corporate profits and capital accumulation. As we briefed last year, there is very little evidence that First Homes Fund will help the kind of people who couldn’t afford to buy a home without the loan.

This is not the first time that Swinney has announced a policy without evidence. Last year, we revealed that he had absolutely no evidence to back up his claim that increasing the Scottish Child Payment would incentivise mothers to stop working. That attitude cannot be allowed to carry through to housing policy too.

Housing is foundational to the entire economy and our entire society. With Scotland’s climate rapidly changing, the very buildings we live in need to change with it. But before we can even do that, or at least as we embark on that job, we need to fix the houses we have. Everyone deserves a decent roof over their head. According to these statistics on the state of repair of Scottish homes, far too many people in Scotland don’t have one.