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The Scottish Government's attempt at regulating rents has failed utterly - here's a quick explainer:
In 2016, after a massive campaign by Living Rent, the Scottish Government introduced "rent pressure zones" (RPZs) - ostensibly to control runaway rents in the private rented sector (PRS). At the time, they claimed they had "introduced rent controls" - they had not.
The most obvious problem with RPZs is that councils have to apply to the government to introduce them. But in order to do that, they have to provide a level of detail that simply doesn't exist, and that councils have no way of collecting.
When Edinburgh City Council - an SNP coalition, so this wasn't some partisan attack - commissioned a feasability study, the Scottish Government told them they wouldn't help them collect the data. It would be extremely easy for them to - so it's a political choice not to.
Lots of other countries - Ireland, for example - collect rent data. And landlords here have to register every three years - so it would literally be another column on a spreadsheet to make them also register how much they're charging. There's no excuse really.
But because of this, no council has been able to introduce a RPZ, though several have explored it. By that measure alone, they've been an utter failure - more than four years after they were brought into law, not a single RPZ actually exists.
But beyond that, RPZs wouldn't really help at all - that's why Living Rent haven't been pushing to make them more easy to implement. There's three main reasons:
1) The minimum cap that could be placed on rent increases within a RPZ would be inflation + 1% + something else. But that is way too much! Rents are already unaffordable, and rent controls should first bring them down - there is no justification for above inflation increases.
2) In big parts of Scotland, PRS housing is chronically poor quality - every second privately rented home fails the government's own quality standards. Rent controls in other places are a seriously powerful tool to improve quality, but RPZs explicitly do not touch that.
It's a huge missed opportunity, because the various - costly - incentives for landlords to make improvements simply aren't working, and tenants suffer horrendous conditions because of it. We regularly see people going months without heating or hot water, for example.
3) RPZs would also only limit increases *within* a tenancy - so that if you move out, the landlord can hike it up as much as they want. This means there's a financial incentive for them to evict you. There's also evidence that while it *might* help people who stay long term...
...more vulnerable tenants who only stay for relatively short periods (average length of a tenancy in Edinburgh is 18 months) would not only not benefit, but could actually end up worse off, as landlords increase rents more in between tenancies to compensate for caps within them.
But either way - this kind of limit-within-tenancy-only does nothing to actually slow the rate of rent increases in the long-term, it just makes the increases kind of more 'jaggedy'.
So the Scottish Government have created something that doesn't work at all, even by their own measures, and wouldn't help even if it did. That means we've had five wasted years of tenants being forced further into poverty by unaffordable and ever-increasing rents in slum flats.
It is utterly inexcusable, and the pandemic has only exposed just how bad the problem is. As parties finalise their manifestos for May, we simply cannot allow another 5 more years for renters to be thrown away. We need proper, strong, nationwide rent controls - now.
hint hint @KevinStewartSNP
