One hundred years ago this November, a crowd of more than ten thousand converged on the Old Sheriff Court in the Merchant City in protest at rising rents. The Glasgow Rent Strike march was made up mainly of women, whose men were away at war, and among one of the great surprises of that otherwise dark year was that the court decided against rapacious landlords in their favour. The resulting Rent Restriction Act became a template for fairer housing until Margaret Thatcher abolished it in 1988. Since then, the situation of renters in Scotland has grown steadily worse, with increasing numbers obliged to rent from the private sector. More than half of these dwellings fail the Scottish Housing Quality Standard, and landlords are slow to make improvements or repairs.
The government recognised such problems in last week’s Private Housing (Tenancies) Bill, which offers greater powers to tenants, and imposes a limit on arbitrary rent increases and evictions. But as a hard-hitting new report shows, considerably more still needs to be done to protect the country’s growing numbers of tenants, many of whom are living in near or absolute poverty. A Living Rent for Scotland’s Private Tenants, published to mark the centenary of the Rent Strike, and produced by Common Weal and the Living Rent Campaign, makes sobering reading. Asking the government to enact a five-point plan for a living rent, it shows Scotland’s private rental accommodation to be among the worst quality, and least secure in Europe. And as in 1915, it highlights the existing inequality that rapidly rising rents make worse. Since women still earn substantially less than men, and many others faced with escalating rent bills are young, immigrant, or non-white, social gulfs are deepening along all too predictable lines.
It is a Dickensian situation, which is unacceptable in our supposedly enlightened age. An initiative, such as the new social housing project announced yesterday by Justice Secretary Alex Neil, is warmly to be welcomed, focussing as it does on the needs of the most vulnerable, at the bottom of the rent ladder. This sector is far too often overlooked. But 1000 affordable rented homes is only a fraction of what is required to make the rental market fair, and of a standard we would all be prepared to live in. We have been promised 20,000 affordable social homes for rent by the end of this parliament. But such a start, a century in the making, seems like a very slow response to a very big problem.
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