Chamber and committees

I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which shows that I own a rented property in North Lanarkshire.

Today, we learned that research by Shelter Scotland put the cost to councils of housing those who have been made homeless due to evictions to manage arrears at £28 million in the year before the pandemic. Perhaps anticipating that research, the sector reiterated the statement that it signed with the Government in June, saying that it does not evict those who are working on a repayment plan. The City of Edinburgh Council’s SNP housing convener, after the council decided to end its short-lived eviction ban, said that the council

“will only ever go to court as an absolute last resort”,

but also, tellingly, that it goes to court

“to prompt engagement with tenants”.

If we ever needed an example to show that our housing system is broken, a housing convener who is charged with overseeing a council’s homelessness service telling the press that it uses court proceedings to shunt tenants to pay arrears is one.

A report that was commissioned by Shelter Scotland on understanding the true cost of evictions in Scotland said that just 20 per cent of social rented evictions result in the property being recovered. In addition, the cost of eviction, when it happens, is not just financial. The process can be highly stressful and potentially damaging to mental and physical health, and it has lasting impacts on the mental health of children.

I welcome today’s confirmation that work is under way on the rented sector strategy, but the programme for government will leave tenants waiting for years. There will not be a housing bill this year, and we do not know when there will be legislation on rent controls and a new private rented sector regulator, as the Government’s ambition is to introduce legislation

“by the end of the Parliamentary session.”

Having no legislation on rent controls will mean that vital data will not start to be collected, and, like the planning and transport bills in the previous session, implementation will be pushed into the next session of Parliament. Of course, the SNP and the Tories threw out the chance to legislate for a fair rents bill in February, in the previous session.

Having no housing bill will mean that the homelessness prevention duty is also unlikely to become a reality until the second half of this parliamentary session, which means that tenants will have to rely on promises rather than rights in legislation. In meetings that I had over the summer, I was told that the bulk of what is in “Housing to 2040” must get under way in the next 18 months if it is to be a success, and that includes the rented sector strategy.

Before the summer, we debated at length the need for an extension to the evictions ban in the Coronavirus (Extension and Expiry) (Scotland) Bill. Ten weeks on, the promised grant fund has not been launched. We are told that the Government is working at pace, but it will be the end of the year before hard-up tenants even get access to the fund. Many—no doubt including the four in five who were unsuccessful under the loan scheme—will be well into their six-month notice period by now, and evictions in the social rented sector are already up by 500 per cent.

The premise of the loan scheme was woefully inadequate, and its success rate was dismal. More than twice as many people were rejected as were successful, and many of those were rejected because they failed a credit check. Rather like the revolving door of threatening court action and then having to rehouse people as homeless, that was symptomatic of a broken housing system. It is not unreasonable to expect the Government to comprehend that tenants who were struggling to pay their rent and were in arrears and a dire financial position, and who sought support from the Government, might not have satisfactory credit records.

Our homes have never been worth so much to us as they are now. They are a first line of defence against Covid, but the summer has exposed a gulf between the haves—who are comfortable enough to own a home, possibly work from home and make renovations, with house prices shooting up at the fastest rate in 14 years—and the have nots. The number of households in temporary accommodation is the highest on record, and they are now staying for a staggering 199 days.

In meetings with stakeholders, we have discussed the fact that there is no true understanding of the affordability of housing—private, social rented or otherwise. In fact, the Government does not know how to define housing affordability because it does not have or collect the data. It needs to be able to determine what affordable is. Is it any wonder that organisations have described the system as broken?

I welcome a plethora of the commitments, including that of getting all our housing stock to the level of energy performance certificate C, but we are a long way off tenants and owners understanding their responsibilities or the costs that lie ahead. Those reforms are not insubstantial, as they strike right at the heart of tenants’ rights and housing affordability in general. It is tenants and owners, not the Government, who will fund those changes.

Over the summer, I was told repeatedly about the pressure on tenants’ rents, which fund new builds. That is becoming considerable. Although the affordable housing supply grant looks set to increase, tenants’ costs will be stretched further by their funding the changes in energy efficiency and decarbonisation.

In discussions with landlords and letting agents, Citizens Advice Scotland has found that they are supportive of greater energy efficiency but that there is a perceived lack of financial and technical support to inform decision making. If we believe that housing is a human right, we should be affirming those rights for tenants in law before substantial housing reforms are implemented.

We had the opportunity to pass a fair rents bill towards the end of the previous session of Parliament. That we will now not get the opportunity to pass a fair rents bill until the end of this session is a glaring omission from the programme for government.

I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests, as I am the owner of a rental property in North Lanarkshire.

To ask the Scottish Government what analysis it has commissioned of the likely costs to homeowners and landlords of reaching net zero emissions in housing by 2045. (S6O-00077)

Recent announcements on the decarbonisation of all properties across all tenures in the wider Glasgow city region put the cost at £9 billion to decarbonise their heating and make them energy efficient. Two thirds of those properties—300,000—are owner-occupied. While some owner-occupiers will be able to afford to make a contribution, we know that many, including in my region, will not. Can the minister set out the Government’s plans to support low-income owner-occupiers who have little savings, the expectations on those owner-occupiers and the support that the Government will provide to enable them to participate fully in the journey towards 2045?

There does not seem to be much tension between ring-fenced support and local discretion, given that COSLA, local government leaders and trade union representatives have called for Government intervention on this issue. Does the cabinet secretary understand the feelings of local government staff when they see public pay policy being disregarded to give national health service staff a welcome but more generous settlement, and when they see the Government intervening in negotiations with teaching staff? Does she understand why local government staff are on the brink of industrial action, which could have an impact on our schools and public spaces, which have already undergone severe disruption? Will the Scottish Government consider providing additional support to councils and getting involved in the negotiations to reach a conclusion that will mean that local government staff feel as valued as the cabinet secretary set out in her opening statement and we avoid the disruption to schools and other services that we have experienced in the past year and a half?

We have touched on this issue already and Elma Murray covered it in her opening statement, but I want to ask about how the pandemic has had a greater impact on certain communities and sections of society. Elma Murray talked about women and minority ethnic communities, but are there any other sections of society or communities that the pandemic has also had a greater impact on? What evidence do you see of local authorities directing funding resources to support such areas in particular, rather than the funding going to the areas or communities that shout the loudest?

I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of interests as an owner of a rental property in North Lanarkshire.

For those of us who have been involved in the various stages of this legislation, it has been a fairly hectic week that has highlighted why emergency legislation procedures should be used sparingly. Being in the midst of a global pandemic is obviously a solid reason for using the process, but it has not been without difficulty. There was no formal Government or committee consultation and scrutiny and we had little more than 12 hours after stages 1 and 2 to consider, discuss and lodge amendments, which stifled the opportunity for meaningful discussion between back-bench MSPs and ministers.

Drafting the bill in such a narrow way has limited how members could amend it to best reflect how we feel we should respond to the pandemic. To my mind, that was no clearer than when we were talking about protecting tenancies. I am starting to feel a bit like a broken record, having said basically the same thing in the chamber for three days in a row, but it bears repeating: the ability to isolate at home is the most important response that we have to breaking the transmission of Covid-19. Vaccines are a huge part of that, too, but the evidence on their impact on transmissibility is not yet clear. The most effective way to avoid passing the disease to another person is by isolating at home; to do that, you need to have a home.

On the same basis that the Government argued that furlough and the £20 uplift in universal credit should be extended, which I support, I argue that the ban on evictions should have been extended to areas in levels 1 and 2, and the fact that there is no ability to amend the bill to reflect that is a failing. The Government has made the case to the UK Government on furlough and universal credit because we are still living with restrictions and entire sections of the economy are still severely impacted or are not functioning at all.

Surely the Scottish ministers must accept that the same arguments apply to the extension of the eviction ban. Many households have been affected by unemployment, reduced employment, reduced earnings or surviving on furlough. Lots of people have, through no fault of their own, accumulated debts and rent arrears because of the global pandemic. The response from Government to that should be a combined effort to halt evictions, and to deal with the source of the problem: arrears that have been built up as a result of the pandemic.

The Government has announced a new grant fund to tackle arrears, which is very welcome, but we desperately need to see the qualifying criteria, a stronger commitment to convert any loans from the current scheme to grants, and an assessment of whether the £10 million mentioned will be sufficient to halt the tidal wave of eviction notices predicted by organisations in the housing sector.

Labour will support the bill at decision time, but we are looking for concrete commitments from Government about the issue of entitlement to and adequacy of the grant fund, and that the volume of eviction proceedings will be closely monitored and urgent action will be taken to protect tenants, if required.

I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of interests, which shows that I am an owner of a rental property in North Lanarkshire.

In the stage 1 debate yesterday, I highlighted guidance issued by the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, which states:

“Housing has become the front line defence against the coronavirus.”

At all points of the pandemic, the key public health advice to people has been to isolate at home, no matter whether they have symptoms, have been in close contact with a confirmed case or have Covid 19. With that in mind, I lodged amendments that would have extended the eviction ban to level 1 and 2 areas to protect those threatened with eviction, through no fault of their own, due to a global pandemic, and to protect their ability to isolate at home under any of those circumstances. However, because of the way that the Government has drafted the bill, those amendments have been deemed out of scope. Since Jackie Baillie’s amendment 1 has been withdrawn and the Deputy First Minister talked yesterday about supporting policies raised by Opposition members that can be taken forward without the need for legislation, I hope that the eviction ban is at the top of his list.

In the absence of an ability to amend the bill to include a ban, I lodged amendment 5, which would require ministers, for as long as the legislation is in force, to report on the efficacy of measures to protect tenants in Scotland from eviction. The amendment would hold the Scottish ministers accountable for their policy decisions in that area and place the reporting requirement on a statutory footing that would ensure that the Parliament was fully aware of the effect of the Government’s decisions on some of the people made most vulnerable by the effects of the pandemic.

I turn to the other amendments in the group. The Scottish Government’s £10 million tenant hardship loan fund was supposed to help people to avoid the risk of losing their home because of pandemic-related financial pressures. However, so far, only £490,000 has been paid out. Putting people into more and more debt is also not a viable solution to their housing debt. We have repeatedly called for the loan fund to be converted into a grant fund, and we welcome yesterday’s Government announcement to do just that.

Amendments 16 and 24 should be considered together as a package. If amendment 16 is agreed to but amendment 24 is disagreed to, tenants will be in a weaker position and I want to avoid that. Amendment 16 would expire all the pre-action checks that landlords must complete, under the current legislation, before raising a notification of proceedings against a tenant. However, amendment 24 would replace those provisions with a requirement that notices of proceedings against tenants cannot be raised until they have received a grant from the Government to pay off their rent arrears. The amendment would also give a statutory basis to the tenant hardship grant fund that the Government announced yesterday.

The amendments have been lodged with the intention of supporting tenancies and ensuring that individuals and families are able to comply with one of the most important pieces of public health advice during the pandemic: isolate at home. I ask members to support all the amendments in the group.

I move amendment 5.

I take on board members’ comments about this group of amendments and I concede that they are not ideal. We are left in this situation because of how the bill has been drafted. We would like to have lodged amendments that extended the ban on evictions to level 1 and 2 restriction areas, but that has not been possible.

I take on board the points that the Deputy First Minister makes about amendment 5 and the range of support mechanisms that are already in place. I will seek to withdraw amendment 5, and I will consider the Deputy First Minister’s points and have discussions between now and the deadline for lodging stage 3 amendments to consider whether it would be appropriate to lodge amendment 5 again.

On amendments 16 and 24, as I said earlier, I would not want amendment 16 to pass if amendment 24 failed. The intention of the amendments is to ensure, as much as possible, that while the emergency powers are still in place, no evictions can be carried out until the grant fund is put in place. Again, I have listened closely to the Deputy First Minister’s points and will review the amendments overnight, with a view to potentially lodging them again, so I will not move amendments 16 and 24.

Yes, that is correct.

Amendment 5, by agreement, withdrawn.

Section 2—Expiry of provisions

Amendments 6 and 7 not moved.

Amendment 8 moved—[Pauline McNeill].

I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests, and declare that I am an owner and landlord of a property in the North Lanarkshire Council area.