Chamber and committees

Indeed I can. It is important to acknowledge that landlords, particularly those in the private rented sector, are not all in the same financial circumstances. Some are very large and profitable. Others, as John Blackwood said, are people who have for whatever reason, perhaps unintentionally, found themselves letting out one or two properties. Some of them will be facing the cost of living crisis and will be worried about their circumstances.

We have included versions of the existing grounds for eviction that are to do with the intention to sell or to live in a property, but the adapted versions that we are including on a temporary basis in the emergency legislation concern the landlord’s intention to do that to address their own financial hardship. We will work with the tribunal on how that is implemented.

Obviously, we do not want a landlord who would face the risk of severe debt or even homelessness to be unable to take action, so those limited and prescribed forms of eviction grounds will be included, and you can see that in the text of the bill.

What we have set in the bill is, as I said earlier to Willie Coffey, six months of rent in relation to the private rented sector and a specific figure, which is roughly equivalent to six months of social rent, in the social rented sector.

What you mean by the rent freeze period is a matter of interpretation. Under the previous legislation, a rent increase notice is the mechanism by which a landlord increases the rent. That action cannot take place inconsistent with the cap from 6 September onwards until or unless the cap is removed or changed.

The legislation has been exactly as successful as I thought it would be. When it was introduced, I welcomed the fact that something was being tried, but I was sceptical whether rent pressure zones would be enough to solve the problem.

There is a lack of data available to local authorities. We know that none of them has taken forward such a zone; the reason is that local authorities do not have the data to justify it, and they could be exposed to the threat of legal challenge if somebody argued that a zone was a disproportionate interference in landlords’ rights. As we develop our longer-term proposals for reforming the rented sector, including a national system of rent controls, we need to fill in the data gaps that exist.

If rent pressure zones had been put into practice and we had seen them work, we might be in a very different position. In my view, the bill that provided for RPZs was unlikely to be successful. RPZs were unlikely to be put into practice and therefore unlikely to reduce anyone’s rent, and that is what has come to pass.

We are now in a situation where, as I have said, some landlords are being very responsible and have tried to protect tenants from rent increases, whether during the cost of living crisis or the years of the pandemic. However—and I am sure that members from across the country are aware of this—others are imposing eye-watering rent increases. I will be far from the only Glasgow MSP who has heard from tenants who are seeing 20, 30 or 40 per cent increases, which are simply unmanageable, unaffordable and unsustainable and will not take place under this legislation.

The rent freeze measures do apply to end-of-tenancy rent increases. The central reason is that we already have that mechanism. Tenants have a right to challenge unreasonable rent increases during their tenancy and there is a requirement for increases to happen only once a year in the private rented sector and with three months’ notice. It is clear that we have the ability to intervene in a short period of time in response to the current emergency.

There is, of course, a longer-term argument, much of which was explored in the consultation on the new deal for tenants. The Government will address those questions in its longer-term legislative work on the private rented sector.

In many ways, that suggestion is slightly akin to the idea that all landlords will take the most exploitative or opportunistic approach. I do not think that that is true. The majority of landlords will obey the law and will not try to get around it and the majority of tenants will meet their responsibilities.

There is a concern that a minority of tenants might be tempted to stop paying their rent altogether, even when they can afford it. That is one reason why we thought long and hard about the exemptions from the eviction moratorium and decided, on balance, that there was a requirement to include severe rent arrears as a ground for exemption from that moratorium.

In my view, which we will discuss at length in the chamber this afternoon, tenants with rent arrears need support that is different to the interventions in the rest of the system. As the witness from Crisis said, they need direct support. Through the discretionary housing payments and the tenant grant fund, we have increased not only the amount of support that is available directly for tenants who are facing rent arrears, but the flexibility in the way that it can be offered. We will continue to look at how that might be developed further.

However, I think that the inclusion of the exemption from the moratorium will give landlords some confidence that there will not be that incentive for people to simply stop paying rent altogether. As I said, only a minority of people would ever be tempted to do that, but there will be no incentive. I think that I remember hearing John Blackwood welcome that measure as well.

I recognise that point, which has been made by some people who responded to the consultation on the new deal for tenants. If we were to try to incorporate that into the emergency legislation, we would be here a lot longer and would not have the emergency legislation in time to protect people. Some of these arguments will have to be built into the review of the existing grounds for repossession, the permanent legislation and our consideration of how we might alter that. However, your point is well made and the issue is certainly on our radar.

We will certainly keep the committee informed on timescales. If the updated research has not yet been made available, we will ensure that it is.

I think that we should all be concerned about the impact of housing policy and legislation on the housing sector and the housing systems that exist in our society. We should be concerned about provision and quality, and about people’s rights and the experience that they have as tenants. One of the longer-term goals of the Government is to close the gap in outcomes between the social and private rented sectors, because we regard adequate housing as a human right. That is the goal that we have.

Over the long term, in the past, there has been an increase in regulation in the private rented sector, which has gone alongside a substantial increase in the size of the private rented sector. The member mentioned some countries, but perhaps we can all choose the comparisons that we make selectively. There are other European countries with a higher level of regulation and long-standing systems of rent controls that have an even bigger private rented sector than Scotland. Therefore, it can be done properly and responsibly, making sure that we raise standards and that there is protection for tenants and tenants’ rights at the same time as making sure that our housing systems have an adequate supply of good-quality stock.

We have based some of the reporting requirements, as well as the provisions on the expiry or extension of the provisions in the bill, on a model that will be fairly familiar to those who followed the emergency coronavirus legislation.

It is important to acknowledge—the committee discussed this with the previous panel as well—that we are doing that having not yet dealt with some of the longer-term work that needs to be done on data in the private rented sector in particular. Aaron Hill made the point that we have more data, some of which is collected by the regulator, for the social rented sector. That is extremely useful, but we do not have that data in relation to the private rented sector. That is one of the reasons why the Government has a long-term goal not just to collect more data and have the mechanisms and machinery in place to do that, but to create a regulator for the private rented sector.

We will continue to monitor and report on the operation of the emergency legislation. We are conscious that some of the data that is being collected in real time is only going to come in as we are having to make decisions, so we want to work very closely with stakeholders, including those in the private, social and student accommodation sectors, to ensure that our decisions are informed by their expertise.