Rent Controls Put Tenants First

As of today, Scotland’s private tenants are no longer protected from extreme rent increases as the Scottish Government ends its system of rents controls in favour of letting landlords maximise their profits again.

Not that this was a protection for some, whose landlords tried to illegally increase rents anyway – banking on getting away with it in a sector that the Government refuses to adequately regulated.

The private rented sector in Scotland is out of control and is harming not just tenants but everyone else who cannot access social rented homes for lack of supply and cannot buy a house because of prices being driven up by “buy-to-let” deals and because the high private rent they are often currently paying prevents them from saving up a deposit.

Common Weal advocates for a system of points-based rent controls similar to that seen in places like the Netherlands where the maximum rent a landlord can charge is discounted from the market rate based on the quality of the home and its state of repair. If landlords wish to maximise the return on their investment, then they are forced to maintain their houses in good order and to retrofit them to meet rising energy efficiency standards.

Crucially, rent controls cannot simply be an inflation-adjusted cap on the amount that rent can rise the following year but must recognise that rents in some areas are already too high and must be actively reduced.

Further, we wish to see better transparency measures such as the Landlords Register including additional information such as the rent being charged in each property owned by the landlord and tenants being given the ability to see the rent being charged in properties near them. Both of these would ensure that tenants are not subject to discrimination due to migrant status or any other reason.

Rent controls are ultimately only a short to medium term fix for the housing sector. Our policy paper Good Houses For All shows the blueprint for what must come while they are put back in place – an expansive plan of building extremely high quality, energy efficient homes for social rent at a scale that allows the social rented to move away from the “housing of last resort” that the Thatcher era turned them into and return them to the first choice of housing for many. This would actively force the private sector to increase quality and reduce costs to compete and would break the stranglehold the landlord lobby has over our housing sector and, apparently, our democracy itself.