By Lily Gordon Brown
Every place one turns to right now in Scotland, prospects are looking grim. Child poverty is on the rise; food insecurity is on the rise; job precarity is on the rise. And perhaps most pertinently here, rents are on the rise. Since 2010, rent for a one-bed home has increased by 60.7%; the figure sits at 9.6% within the past single year. In Glasgow alone, rents have gone up by 86% since 2010; that means a flat that once cost £300 per month will now cost approximately £510. This is also while 7266 people in the city are currently surviving in temporary accommodation and 36,000 people are on the waiting list for social housing across the city.
The above has become a routine narrative across the wider UK and the world at large. We are living through an age of financialisation, where housing is one of, if not the, key site of capitalist activity. In the UK, the housing market is still regarded as one of the ‘safest’ sites for investors and their counterparts to inject capital and extract a profit. Unlike some other countries, the UK’s housing market was able to quickly bounce back from the 2008 Global Financial Crash. No miracle occurred; rather, this was thanks to the state’s bailout of the banks.
Yet, someone always loses in this zero-sum game, bringing us to the flipside of the story. Concurrently to the bank bailouts, state architects were carefully designing the austerity project which would see ordinary, working people carry the greatest burden of the crisis. One of the key terrains whereby austerity has played out is in housing. Local councils up and down the country have seen their budgets slashed, undermining their already fragile infrastructure. By 2010, mass public housing had become a relic of past times for many areas. There has, of course, been regional variance here, contingent upon the uptake of right-to-buy and the pace and intensity at which stock transfer, the alternate route to the privatisation of public housing, has occurred. But overall, processes of privatisation twinned with austerity in the sphere of housing have carried very material, everyday consequences, including the cutting of housing benefit, the steady decline of social housing and a deregulation of safety measures. Austerity can and has been understood as a process of state violence and even, in some cases, state murder.
Throughout the majority of the UK’s twentieth century, in no small part thanks to the women of Govan and beyond, the private rented sector was subject to intensive regulation. Feminist resistance in the sphere of social reproduction contributed heavily to the implementation of rent controls under the Rent and Mortgage Interest Restrictions Act of 1915. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the PRS had become a genuinely peripheral form of housing and by the early 1960s, around 55% of Scotland’s population resided in council housing. The figure reached 62.2% in Glasgow. Rent controls were tied to the property rather than the tenancy; rents were set by officers who actually factored in the condition of the building and froze rents at more affordable, pre-war levels, amongst other wide-ranging advantages that came out of the Act.
Now it feels as if we are inhabiting an entirely alternate universe. Since the 1980s, the private rented sector has once again found its dominance in Scotland and across the UK. The 1980 Housing Act precipitated the beginning of Thatcher’s aggressive stride toward a “property-owning democracy”, triggering a huge privatisation of housing stock via the Right to Buy (RtB). At its peak in 1989, 40,000 public dwellings moved into the hands of homeowners, symbolising what Christophers has marked as the ‘New Enclosure’, a mass wave of privatisation. The blame, of course, should not be laid at the feet of tenants who engaged in the RtB process. Rather, it was the state who actively ensured that those public dwellings lost to homeownership - many of which are now rented out in the private rented sector - were not replenished.
Often less understood, however, are the long-standing implications of the 1988 Housing Act, which pivoted legislative focus to the realms of private renting. It is well known that in the decades of welfare capitalism (1945-1970s), marked by some historians as Britain's ‘golden age’, a “deal” had been struck between capital and labour. While private capital was permitted to circulate and private business to operate, public ownership was commonplace and unions had won collective bargaining rights, in turn organising a powerful workforce cutting across myriad sectors. Until the 1980s, a sort-of deal had also been struck between tenants and landlords. Prior to the aforementioned 1988 Act, private tenancies took the form of “protected and statutory” tenancies which concurrently provided a sense of material and ontological security for those living in the already-marginalised private rented sector; alongside these regulated rents, private landlords encountered legal hurdles in repossessing their property.
Yet in the decades since we have seen the balance of power shift firmly in favour of landlords. Between the mid 1980s and 2021, even the most moderate of rent controls had disappeared in Scotland. The ‘crisis’ only accelerated in the nineties with the introduction of Buy to Let mortgages and again throughout the 2010s. Scotland was not granted immunity from this treacherous policy making. Devolution over policy areas such as housing did not arrive until the late 1990s, meaning that those north of the border were subjected to the same ruinous policies inflicted on Scotland by the Westminster establishment. Selective devolution has also frustrated any real process of autonomy in Scotland; for example, Westminster still reserves power over immigration and asylum law, inhibiting the actions of those working at the intersection of housing and migrant justice. The impact of this selective devolution is two-fold; though it is certainly undeniable that Westminster’s assertion of control impedes progress in Scotland, it also provides MSPs in Holyrood with a scapegoat for their inaction or indifference to change. What’s more, we are still obstructed by a political elite acting in their own interests; as The Feret reported last year, ‘15 of Scotland’s 56 MPs said they own additional properties in towns and cities across the UK and abroad, with seven declaring that they receive rental income of more than £10,000 per year.’
Despite these structural constraints, reform to housing legislation has been forced through in Scotland. Right to Buy and no-fault evictions (commonly known as Section 21) have both been phased out. Emergency rent caps were also won, albeit a temporary measure to address a cost of living ‘crisis’ which, in fact, has no end date. These successes can certainly be attributed to the organised tenants movement, bringing us to the key actor in our story: Living Rent. Scotland’s mass membership tenants’ union which emerged from a campaign group formed in 2014, Living Rent has been on the frontlines of housing politics through its tenacious organising efforts, direct action and community building. The union functions at varying scales, from the neighbourhood to the national. It’s day to day consists of going up against the growing landlord class and campaigning on a platform of radical demands. Rent controls form a constitutive part of this platform, a demand etched into the very fabric of the union. Members and organisers have spent years building popular sentiment for a return to a regulatory system that can too often feel consigned to history.
These organising efforts, though often neglected by mainstream channels and reportage, are encapsulated in the Housing Bill currently passing through Scottish Parliament. In November, the union saw a historic victory in the passage of Stage One of the Bill - which commits in writing to the (re)implementation of rent controls, amongst other not insignificant wins. In any event, the devil is in the detail. There are mounting concerns that the government will be pressured by the active landlord lobby to water down the Bill, particularly in coaxing them to tie rent controls to the tenancy rather than the property. This would see landlords granted the right to raise the rent in-between tenancies, likely leading to a surge in evictions and consequent displacement.
Predictably, the rallying cries of the landlord lobby can be heard across the country: “rent controls would see landlords leaving the market in droves.” And apparently in this fantastical world inhabited only by landlords (and maybe a few self-declared Yimbys), the supply of housing would also disappear with them. There is no acknowledgement of the plain fact that the bricks and mortar have and will continue to remain firmly in place, rather it is the ownership of the property which might pleasantly switch hands.
So lost in the parochial ideologies of rentierism, which sees wealth built upon the ownership of assets rather than the means of production, there is a failure amongst politicians and their counterparts to recognise this as a moment, an opportunity, to radically interrogate the ownership structures which have come to dominate the current malaise. What’s more, in Scotland, fully devolved powers in the sphere of housing are not being used to their maximum potential. These failings are indicative of a wider reality. That of a constructed, intentional crisis of housing. We did not arrive here by accident, by some policymaking gone wrong. No, the architects of neoliberalism, of austerity, of private property relations at large, have foreseen the outcomes of their actions, and fed off the material consequences of this zero-sum game. We should not accept this state of affairs as the norm, as the ‘way things are’. To do so would be to admit defeat.
Rent controls represent one step in contesting this long-standing, structural oppression which whilst serving a small minority of profiteers, has also contributed to a growing tenant consciousness. Thus, significant decisions lie ahead for Scotland over the next few months, particularly as we move toward the latter stages of the Housing Bill, determining whether the Bill becomes an Act of Parliament and passes into Law. Living Rent will continue to pressure the government to meet the demands coming not only from those in the organised tenants movement, but also from the Scottish trade union movement and organisations such as The Poverty Alliance and the Children and Young People’s Commissioner.
Looking across the border to England and Wales, tenants are too rallying around the call to implement rent controls. The content of Renters Right Bill, introduced to parliament by Labour back in September, certainly reflects its title. Although it is set to bring finally an end to section 21 evictions and assured shorthold tenancies (not insignificant wins), it remains largely reformist in nature. By evading a commitment to rent controls, the Bill fails to encompass the radical overhaul of the housing system required to address the crisis laid out in the words above. The urgent need for rent controls cuts across society and across borders, impacting tenants and workers, children and families. This fight belongs to all of us, and it is only just beginning.
This article was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Lipman-Miliband Trust.
10 March 2025
