Justice for Scotland’s tenants is impossible while pandering to landlords

“Murderer! Thief! How can you take the last penny out of a poor man’s pocket?”
“I have to – I’m a landlord.”
– The Producers (1967)

THIS article will allow me to pay my rent.

By now, I suspect my esteemed editor knows that when a fresh pitch of mine arrives in his inbox, it is motivated not just by the urge to elevate our Discourse with some elegant polemic, but also the need to once again plug a rather desperate hole in my finances. The good folk at the Department of Work and Pensions do their best, of course – it’s just unfortunate their calculations fail to account for my decadent habit of eating food.

I found my current flat in 2022 after six months spent, shall we say, ‘without fixed address’, following my previous landlord’s decision to sell my last one. My notice to quit – the sort of the thing, the Scottish Association of Landlords promised not long before, its members would only employ as a “last resort” – was dispatched as soon as the landlord was legally able, a single week after the expiration of a temporary and loophole-laden eviction ‘ban’ the Scottish Government grudgingly imposed during Covid’s first wave. I guess he needed the money.

Until I found a new berth within Edinburgh’s famously forgiving and affordable rental market, I relied upon the charity of family and friends; poetically, the home of one of the latter overlooked Stockbridge, a district of the capital with a history of note to anyone afflicted by our ongoing housing crisis.  

By the 1840s, the overcrowded and disease-ridden tenements of Edinburgh’s Old Town were being described without hyperbole as ‘chambers of death’. Recession, however, delayed the building of new housing stock until 1860, so demand rapidly outstripped supply for the city’s exploding population of poor migrants. In response, the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company was formed by seven stonemasons after a strike saw construction workers in the capital barred from employment. The ECBC sold shares to these disenfranchised artisans at £1 apiece, and with the first £10,000 raised, put them to work building their own homes, any of which required a deposit of only £5.

The ‘Stockbridge Colonies’ still exist, though their purpose has changed somewhat. When one of them went on the market in 2022 – described in the listing as “an adorable one-bedroom property” – it demanded offers over £285,000. It’s fair to surmise unemployed labourers are no longer at the front of the queue.

The fate of the Stockbridge Colonies is a reminder that in cities such as Edinburgh, everytime anything imperils the maximisation of profit which may be extracted from land and property, all necessary measures will be taken to ensure these threats are crushed. Affordable home ownership must remain a fantastical impossibility for all but the very few, so that the majority remain at the mercy of the landlord class. Housing reform, of the kind the ECBC’s founders fought for and in which many still earnestly believe, does not take place in a vacuum from these interests, and no progress will be made by pretending otherwise.

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ON 1 April, temporary protections introduced by the Scottish Government preventing rents from being raised over 12% of the existing monthly rate came to an end. As with the eviction ban before it, the SNP treats temporary restrictions on rent like those people who buy fruit but never get around to actually eating it – as a source of unearned virtue, even while watching them expire. 

The development prompted much rejoicing from the nation’s landlords, who to hear them tell it are a persecuted and demonised minority, unloved and unappreciated, whose howls of self-pity have been increasingly tortured ever since the now defunct co-operation deal between the SNP and the Scottish Greens raised the apocalyptic prospect of rent controls.

Take a glance at the array of industry organs reverently devoted to the interests of Private Rental Sector profiteers, and you will find it repeated again and again, like a Lovecraftian chant: Rent controls cause rents to rise… Rent controls discourage investment… Rent controls shrink the housing supply… In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming, and must pay 70-80% percent of his monthly income for the privilege… For some reason, this litany never gets around to addressing why those tenants who do enjoy rent controls are curiously resistant to giving them up.

Prominent among these voices is David Alexander, CEO of the letting agency DJ Alexander, who for reasons I cannot fathom enjoys a regular column in the Scotsman newspaper – which is kind of like employing John Gotti as a crime correspondent, albeit less entertaining – wherein he will offer his thoughts on housing policy and the Promethean torment of Scotland’s benighted landlord class.

Urging the Scottish Government to remove any trace of rent controls from the Housing (Scotland) Bill before it comes into force, Alexander last month wrote: “It is only by allowing market forces to return to delivering normal service that we will have a rental market with greater stability, ensuring sustainable growth in the future.”

Whenever landlords offer some unsolicited pearl of advice on how the market could be massaged into a condition more amenable to tenants – building new housing, tax relief, and other measures which mysteriously always involve action being undertaken by anyone but landlords – we are expected to believe these exhortations comes in good faith. But why, as Nick Bano asked in last year’s superlative Against Landlords, would landlords and developers “somehow act against their own interests by producing enough surplus housing to bring down the average price”?

Rent controls, we are told, only serve to drive up rents; in order to prevent this, it is therefore vital that landlords have the unfettered ability to… drive up rents. Any suggestion that they might do so out of sheer rapacity is clearly a libel; landlords are but helpless instruments of the market, and the market is a beast which must be fed, groomed, pampered, but never, ever caged or tamed.

The nonsense of this fiction was most recently demonstrated last week in the National, which reported that out of 866 applications to Rent Services Scotland from April 2024, in 490 cases (56.5$%) landlords attempted to hike rents above 12%, despite the Scottish Government’s ostensible restrictions. 

Research from the Scottish tenants union Living Rent (of which, full disclosure, I am a member) further revealed that on 36 occasions, landlords sought to raise rents by over 50%, with one Falkirk landlord even seeking an increase of 121%. With any barrier to this kind of plundering now gone, Living Rent national chair Ruth Gilbert warned: “Landlords are about to have a field day.”

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THE Guardian last week revealed that senior Tories have held private talks with major landlords to plot means of thwarting the UK Government’s proposed Renters’ Rights Bill, which would in its current form prevent landlords from taking more rent than the amount that the property is listed for, force them to carry out essential repairs within fixed times periods, and ban them from issuing ‘no-fault’ evictions – tyranny in action, to be sure.

The bill itself is of even weaker sauce the Scotland’s Housing Bill, which is a reflection on the weak-willed government from which it emerged. In January of this year, following calls from Greens, independents and the haggard remains of the Labour Left that rent increases be capped in line with either inflation or average wage rises, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner diligently read from the script and repeated the mantra that “rent controls restrict housing supply, which does not help anyone”.

Landlords, being constitutionally incapable of happiness or satiating the pecuniary hunger that gnaws at them from the inside out, were nevertheless outraged that the bill might limit the amount of rent that they could demand from tenants in advance, arguing that such measures would make landlords unwilling to rent to tenants with little credit history. National Residential Landlords Association policy director Chris Norris commented: “In the end, those who will suffer most are those the government most wants to help.” You see, if students or those without steady work want a roof over their head, it’s only fair that these famously affluent demographics be expected to fork over half a year’s rent up front.   

In August last year, the buy-to-let mortgage broker Commercial Trust, though gratified by the Starmer government’s dismissal of rent controls, bristled at reports indicating it may take inspiration from France and implement hardship tests which would – quelle horreur – “significantly impede landlords’ ability to evict low-income tenants”, and vowed to “keep an eye” on such ominous rumours.

Landlords have long suggested that, if they are forced to accept any regulation or reform to the hustle which, as Adam Smith put it, “allows them to reap where they never sowed”, they may simply sell their properties, take their ball and go home – not so much a warning as an implied threat. Amusingly however, the Guardian reports that shadow housing minister Jane Scott complained to one private meeting – including, among others, representatives from the property group Get Living, Dexters estate agents and the NRLA – that she was having some trouble finding any evidence of such a mass migration as a result of the new bill. Walking away from an endless source of money for nothing may not, it turns out, be as easy as landlords have claimed. 

Not everything must bend in accordance with the market’s whimsical malice however, as anyone currently in receipt of housing benefit will be all too aware. In October of 2024, the UK Government confirmed that the maximum amount of housing benefit that can be claimed would be frozen for another year, meaning that housing benefit – as determined by the increasingly Kafkaesque Local Housing Allowance, which is now so outdated it might as well be wearing parachute pants and a bootleg Bart Simpson shirt – has not accurately reflected rises in rent since 2013, with the Tories keeping it frozen for seven out of the intervening 12 years.

As a result, according to research from Crisis and Health Equals, fewer than three in every 100 private rental properties in England are affordable to those on housing benefit. An estimated 440,000 UK households with children reliant on benefits cannot cover the cost of their rent, with that number expected to rise by an additional 90,000 families by March 2026, leaving roughly 925,000 children affected by the shortfall in housing support. 

This is far from unknown to the Scottish Government; in January, Scotland’s Housing Minister Paul McLellan wrote to the UK Government calling for LHA rates to be unfrozen and to ensure that they permanently meet the 20th percentile of local rents. As such, neither McLellan nor the Scottish Government can claim ignorance of the likely disastrous consequences of allowing the rent cap to lapse with nothing to replace it until the Housing Bill comes into force, not least because it is clear the landlord lobby will do everything in its power to gut the legislation into toothlessness before that can happen.

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ON 7 April, the Scottish Government – perhaps belatedly aware of how well the potential unexpected doubling of their rent might play with the voters – announced it had lodged an amendment to the Housing Bill, which would see tenants living in rent control areas have any rent rises capped at a maximum of 6%; if approved, this would apply to both rent increases both during and in between tenancies. The development was cautiously welcomed by Living Rent, whose chairwoman Aditi Jehangir nevertheless pointed out that the formula suggested locks in increases above inflation. 

Few can claim more credit than the activists of Living Rent making rent controls in Scotland a serious possibility and keeping them on the agenda, and few have been more vocal about the fact that, since the provisions of the Housing Bill will not be implemented until 2027-2028 at the earliest (one of the most enduring myths about the Scottish Parliament is that it is in the habit of rushing through legislation; in reality, the passing of new legislation in Holyrood typically occurs with all the precipitation and promptitude of a pedalo on a lake of custard). This will allow Scottish landlords to circle the wagons and squeeze their tenants for everything they can get before the spectre of new regulation descends.

Nevertheless, as is the case with similar tenants’ rights organisations across the world, there is a limit to what we can expect from them. This is through no fault of their own – due to the paucity of radicalism in our elected chambers, groups like Living Rent have been forced to pick up the slack, applying pressure outside of parliamentary politics while at the same time remaining beholden to its legalist limitations.

Until the Housing Bill takes effect, the landlord lobby will undoubtedly take steps to defend their interests – fearmongering over change, polluting the public discourse, currying favour and bullying politicians – because they know precisely how good they have it and are loath to give it up. It is therefore reasonable to wonder if the obstacles they represent might only evaporate when their business is made intolerable – in other words, if being a landlord became just as miserable as landlords like to pretend.

In his 2020 book How to Blow up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm compares the climate movement’s massive, globe-spanning protests with their decidedly minimal success in affecting change, concluding that “the ruling classes really will not be talked into action.” Instead, he proposes strategic, targeted property destruction – “intelligent sabotage” – on a scale that would seriously threaten the sustainability of those industries endangering the planet’s future.

If both the climate crisis and the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that there is no disaster so great that it will persuade the vested interests of capitalism to help those who suffer under it unless they are compelled to do so. 

Here, we may also draw on the lessons of trade unionism: until the day comes when the perspectives of government and industrial syndicalism are one and the same, the goal of organised labour is to engineer circumstances where not acceding to its demands is untenable for both employers and the state. By the same token, we should perhaps explore how to create an environment where the tolerating our unsustainable housing system becomes impossible at all levels of society. 

To those who consider such proposals unrealistic or unworkable, I can only say this: landlords endure and prevail because they recognise who they are fighting, and they do so while abiding by as few rules as possible. It may be time we did the same.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check that my rent hasn’t tripled while I’ve been writing this.