Nearly one in three private rental flats are uninhabitable - there must be inspections

The findings are stark and need little commentary. In 2017 Common Weal published a report called Alienating, insecure and unaffordable: Living in Scotland’s Private Rented Sector. It's findings painted a picture of private rental in Scotland which was dominated by young people in overpriced, poor-quality accommodation where they stay for only short periods of time where they develop little connection to the community.

It is now eight years since we published that report and today we learn that things have got sharply worse. When we published that study about five per cent of private rental housing was below a 'Tolerable Standard', a technical standard defined as a property 'not reasonable for a person to continue to live in'. Quite unbelievably that figure is now 27 per cent.

This is difficult to understand. How is it feasible that nearly one third of all of Scotland's private rental accommodation is assessed as being not of a standard where it is reasonable for a person to continue to live in that property? This sounds like an assessment of housing in a developing nation in the global south, not a wealthy European nation.

There are many businesses where customers rely on the physical presence of the business to receive its services – we need a restaurant to eat in, a bar to drink in, a theatre to watch a show in, a shop to shop in, a hotel room to sleep in. When we are in these premises we are only as safe as the environment is, and these can be environments with significant health risks.

We therefore have extensive inspection regimes for these buildings and rigorous health and safety standards. We do not ask these business owners to take a quick look round their kitchen to 'check there are no rats' and then leave it at that. That would be, give or take, more onerous than the current regime for landlords.

At the moment there is an inspection of the landlord, not the properties owned by the landlord. The only real duty on local authorities is to keep a register of landlords to ensure that those landlords are 'fit and proper people'. 'Fit and proper people' are supposed to follow guidelines on housing quality but in reality are entirely free to rent out substandard properties if they want.

There are virtually no inspections and there is little or not real route for complaint or arbitration on the part of tenants, who are in an insecure position anyway. There are supposed to be obligations on environmental performance placed on the landlords as well but landlords lobbied successfully to have those suspended during Covid.

The Scottish Government is talking vaguely about the new rent controls linking price levels to quality. That is exactly what Common Weal and Living Rent called for in our paper on The Rent Controls Scotland Needs. But this is all but meaningless without a proper inspection regime or without a powerful regulator working on behalf of tenants.

The reason that this one industry is granted such enormous leeway in its operation is largely down to one factor; the scale and nature of the lobbying that takes place by landlords. From the late 1990s onwards almost any financial manager would tell almost anyone with moderate means to get in on buy-to-let – because with government refusing to push down rental prices and all-but promising permanently-rising house prices, it was basically free money.

The class of person who operates at the management and decision-making tier in public policy is exactly the category of person who has made significant extra money like this – at least 11 senior civil servants have registered interests as landlords. Meanwhile 24 MSPs make money as landlords, just short of one in five in the parliament.

In reality, policy has been set and managed by the landlord class for decades now and they have been very generous to themselves in basically exempting themselves from inspection regimes and blocking any serious repercussions or consequences from renting properties which are not fit for habitation.

The private rental sector spends a lot of time trying to persuade the public that it is providing a public service but it isn't. The above problems simply don't occur in the social housing sector where there are much more rigorous inspections. Other nations rely much more on social housing and much less on private rental. That should be our ultimate goal.

To achieve that we need to stop managing the private rental sector as if it is primarily a means of gaining a second income for the upper middle classes. We need to invest in social housing and we need to stop eliding 'affordable' and 'social rental' which mean completely different things.

But until we achieve that, private rental housing must be treated like any other business which places the health and safety of its customers in their hands – we need a significant inspection regime, a proper means of complaint and arbitration and real consequences for substandard landlords.

Read our assessment of insecure housing here and our proposals for proper rent controls here.