The Right to Adequate Housing must extend to Rents too

The Herald today highlights that tens of thousands of families are in dire need of support as the private rented sector pushes them into desperate poverty or even homelessness while at the same time the fund set up by the Scottish Government to help such renters during their self-declared “housing emergency” is critically underspending with less than 10% of its capacity being taken up each year.

While we’ve celebrated the Scottish Government’s approach to right-based legislation around housing, we’ve consistently done so by saying that the “right” alone is not enough.

We’ve advocated for a “Four-Rs” approach to such legislation whether it applies to housing, children, care or anything else. In summary when it comes to housing specifically these are:

Rights: The right to something like adequate housing or the right to be protected from something like homelessness defines the baseline of minimum expected provision – the ultimate floor below which no-one in our society should fall. This is the part that the Scottish Government accepts and has adopted.

Responsibilities: However, with every right must be asked the question “Who goes to jail if my right is breached?”. When the Scottish Government declared the housing emergency, what this mostly achieved was to pass responsibility on to Councils which were immediately informed that they were now in breach of the law despite the only material change between one day and the next being the passing of said law that they were now breaching.

Resources: The protection of rights requires resources to uphold – these include capital and finance but also staff such as housing officers to support families in need. It also requires houses. A good part of the housing emergency has come about because housing is now seen not as a place to live but as a place to profit from. This is especially true in the private rented sector where high rents suck resources away from poor families and prevent them from better improving their own living conditions or act as a barrier to getting a home in the first place. As the Herald’s article points out, only 8% of private rented housing in Scotland are rented at a price similar to social rented housing.

Relationships: This is essentially the question “Who do I call to protect my rights?”, which isn’t quite the same as the question of responsibility. If you were threatened with losing your house today, what would you do to prevent it? This is where the network of people like housing officers or other advisors that can help families access support funds or more adequate housing come in and even if they exist and are sufficiently resourced, if you somehow can’t get access to them, everything else falls apart.

The right to adequate housing has often been seen as the very most basic level of support to get people who are already homeless off the streets and we have seen in Scotland the effectiveness of programmes like Housing First at preventing that but the problem of a lack of adequate housing goes deeper than this and will not be solved without tackling the problem of the private rented sector. Landlords will not fix this. The private equity firms standing behind many large rental firms will not fix this. Inadequately resourced Local Authorities will not fix this. Scottish Government funding pots designed merely to shovel more money into the wallets of landlords will not fix this.

We need a proper system of rent controls – one capable of bringing already high rents down to affordable levels rather than merely promising more above-inflation rent increases forever. And then Local Councils need to be be resourced sufficiently to be able to do things like bring vacant housing into the social housing stock (there are more vacant houses in Scotland than there are homeless households) and then, longer term but just as important, Councils need to be enabled to buy land cheaply using their compulsory purchase powers and use it to build new social housing at a scale, a quality and a price that simply out-competes the current private sector.

The housing emergency is real and the right to not be afflicted by it is a positive step from the Government but actions mean more than words and if all a right does is penalise Councils for not being able to protect our rights then our rights are nearly meaningless. The solution is long-term, but it is achievable and every new social house made available to a family that previously worried about how they were going to pay rent to a landlord that just increased said rents again is a step along that road to a country where we can all say that we have the right to adequate housing and feel truly protected by it.