Chamber and committees

I hope that it is well recognised that we talk about the right to adequate housing as a human rights issue pretty consistently. We are moving the debate on to recognise that that point needs to be expressed and experienced across the tenures. The right to adequate housing includes affordability and issues around personal control and dignity, which is why we are talking about changes in the private rented sector in relation to things such as personalising a home—it is hugely important to recognise that a rented home is somebody’s home, not just a property with a tenancy.

In relation to choice, there are many reasons in different sectors why somebody might feel that they do not have the ability to make choices about where they live or the kind of property that they have. In relation to the PRS, it might simply be a matter of price. We are very aware of the particular challenges of rent increases over recent years, especially in cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, which is why we are committed to introducing proposals on rent controls. The social rented sector already has regulation of rent and requirements on landlords to consult, so the choice that people have there is not necessarily the same as in the private rented sector.

I hope that those issues will come out in the current consultation, and we will obviously take account of the committee’s particular views on how we can express those matters better.

Thank you, convener. This is my first time back physically in a Parliament committee room for quite a while and it is a great pleasure to be here.

The Scottish social housing charter has been in place since 2012, as you said in your opening remarks. It was reviewed in 2017 and has now been further reviewed in 2021. It describes what tenants and other customers of social landlords can expect from their landlord by stating in clear and plain language the outcomes and standards that all social landlords should achieve when providing housing services. In doing that, the charter helps tenants and other customers to hold landlords to account.

During 2021, to help us to prepare the revised version of the charter, we asked tenants, social landlords, the Scottish Housing Regulator and other stakeholders for their views on the charter and the impact that it is having on services for tenants and other customers. Our review of the charter involved a series of virtual consultation events alongside a formal consultation.

The strong message from across the sector is that the charter continues to be of value and relevance. It is working well, is key to improving the landlord-tenant relationship, is being used by landlords and tenants to compare and monitor performance and is encouraging landlords to deliver improved services for their tenants and other customers.

The Scottish Housing Regulator reports annually on landlord performance against the charter and those reports confirm that year-on-year improvements continue to be made across most of the charter outcomes and standards. The independent analysis of the feedback from the virtual events and the formal consultation clearly showed that the charter has a positive impact; that the outcomes and standards should remain largely the same; and that it continues to be of relevance and value and supports improvements in service delivery.

We have carefully considered all the consultation analysis and made some minor changes to the outcomes, standards and supporting descriptions. We have confined changes to those few that stakeholders suggested would improve the quality of services that social landlords deliver and to reflect policy and practice developments.

Changes that we are putting forward include incorporating a reference to human rights and the right to housing for all individuals into the charter, recognition of the benefits of using a range of digital and non-digital communications, and recognising the changing landscape in the context of decarbonisation in relation to the quality of social housing.

We have also highlighted the range of actions that social landlords can take, on their own and in partnership with others, to support victim survivors of domestic abuse and placed an additional emphasis on the role of social landlords in preventing homelessness.

Those modest revisions have updated and future proofed the charter, reflecting developments in practice, policy and legislative requirements. The charter continues to provide an improvement framework and a statistical baseline for both tenants and landlords to assess and compare performance individually and across the sector. It encourages and supports landlords to continue building on improvements that they have already made in delivering the high-quality services that tenants and other customers want and expect.

I look forward to hearing the committee’s views and answering any questions that members may have on the charter. Subject to that, I hope that the committee will be content with the revised charter and that it will recommend that the Parliament should approve it.

The consultation on the charter revision has been extensive. The 12-week consultation was on the Scottish Government’s website and was widely publicised by the Government and other stakeholders. There were 12 virtual stakeholder consultation events for tenants, landlords and others with an interest in social housing. That process was facilitated by the Tenant Participation and Advisory Service and the Tenants Information Service. The range of issues that the convener mentioned—particularly in relation to the cost of living, including the affordability of energy and other costs—touch on some long-term challenges that the sector and the rest of our housing system will have to deal with. The current consultation and the new deal for tenants will also touch on those issues.

That is probably an area where some of the questions remain open, as we are currently consulting on the new deal for tenants rented sector strategy. We have clearly indicated some potential changes to the role of the regulator in relation to social housing. However, in the private rented sector, there is no charter equivalent nor is there a regulator at present, although we are proposing one.

The opportunities to close the gap in outcomes for housing across different sectors, the opportunities for social landlords to develop their wider role in the community in relation to energy systems, for example, and the opportunities to learn lessons from good practice—and from where practice has perhaps not been so good—in relation to tenant participation are all areas where there will be some interesting overlap and connection between the social and private rented sectors, although there might not necessarily be a direct read-across. The social rented sector has some innate advantages in relation to tenant participation in that, often, but not always, landlords tend to be bigger and have a geographically defined focus. Quite often, the social rented sector has a more stable and older tenant population. Some of those factors lend themselves to the ease with which good social landlords have improved their practice in relation to tenant participation. Often, those factors are absent in the private rented sector. Trying to achieve that level of participation and tenant voice will be a challenge. The current consultation is actively exploring that.

I am grateful for the opportunity to hear Living Rent’s perspective. If I remember rightly, I am meeting it later this week, so I will get a chance to explore that concern in more detail. I note that Living Rent is pleased with the charter itself and that it has agreed that the charter outlines worthwhile outcomes. If I understand Living Rent’s perspective properly, its view is that what needs to change is the way in which social landlords are regulated, rather than the charter itself.

I am sorry to come back to the point that there is an open consultation on some of these issues and it might be wrong to pre-empt that. The consultation proposes greater involvement for the Scottish Housing Regulator as well as the creation of the new regulator for the PRS, which will improve standards and enforce tenants’ rights. The vision for and principles of regulation are being consulted on and will be based on standards of quality, affordability and fairness to try to achieve the tenure-neutral outcome that I was talking about earlier.

I would like to think that some of the work that we are currently doing and which will flow from the current consultation on the new deal and the rented sector strategy will go a long way towards addressing some of Living Rent’s concerns, which, as I understand them, are not principally with the charter itself or the changes that we are proposing today.

In short, I do not think that that is okay, but it connects directly with the issue of the private rented sector having no regulator or equivalent to the charter. The new deal for tenants consultation does not go into specific questions about whether there should be a charter like this for the PRS, whether the charter should be expanded to cover it or precisely what the regulator should be. Instead, it opens up a range of options in that respect. At the moment, however, the private landlord in the situation that you have described is not regulated in the same way in relation to prevention of homelessness.

Ideally, if things are working well, social landlords hear the tenant voice directly. The regulator has the responsibility, which it is given by Parliament, to monitor the work of social landlords against the outcomes, including on tenant participation and tenant voice.

As I said earlier, since the creation of the charter, in 2012, and the review of it in 2017, there has been pretty good evidence to suggest that it has been an effective tool in raising standards. Nevertheless, if there was a major turn in the other direction, that would be picked up by the regulator in its reports to Parliament and there would be an opportunity for either Government or the regulator itself to take action.

Sure, I can say a wee bit about it, but I might not be able to say much more than that because, as I say, the consultation is live. It is an important question, though, about the extent to which a regulator for the private rented sector would either align with and share some functions with or diverge from the current Scottish Housing Regulator for the social sector.

There are significant differences at the moment. We are committed to reducing the gap in outcomes between the tenures, but there will probably always be some degree of difference in relation to the legislative framework, for example. Towards the end of the charter, in the section on rents and service charges, we have a very wide difference between the legislative arrangements relating to rent in the social rented sector and the broadly free-market approach in the private rented sector.

We are proposing major changes there; we have the experience of rent pressure zones, which have not been used at all in Scotland. We now have a commitment to introduce a single, national system of rent controls with some degree of local flexibility. We are not yet at the point of having a detailed proposition on that in legislation to put to Parliament, but that work will continue. Whatever we were to say about rents and charges within the private rented sector would need to take account of the legislation that is still to be developed, introduced and debated in Parliament.

Other elements of the charter would fairly reflect an expectation that somebody should have of their housing, regardless of which tenure they are living in. Something like the charter, if that is the way we go in relation to the PRS, would have some common points but probably also some divergence. The same thing will be true of the PRS regulator that we are proposing. There will be a very live debate about the extent to which it should align with or diverge from the approach of the existing social sector regulator.

Clearly, the social rented sector should be taking that role, and very many social landlords do take a wider role in relation to environmental factors and the community at an economic and social level. As I mentioned earlier in relation to energy issues, social landlords could have a critical role in investing in the heat networks that need to be developed and implemented extensively throughout this decade. Those heat networks will have an impact not just on social landlords’ own tenants; they can be catalysts for the wider community way beyond the social landlord itself. There are already examples of that, but not enough.

The question is: to what extent should the charter seek to capture that wider role? As I said earlier to Mr Briggs, in the consultation that we undertook, we wanted to ensure that the changes to the charter that we have proposed address the issues that tenants want to be addressed in the charter in a way that they feel is effective for them. That is not to say that other issues are not important, too—to social landlords and to the Scottish Government, for our net zero targets and for our homelessness and child poverty targets. Not every important issue is necessarily best captured in the charter itself.

The wider approach that Willie Coffey talks about is hugely important, but that is slightly outside the scope of what we should be putting in the charter. The revisions that are being put forward today are pretty much in line with the strong view that what is currently in the charter was working well and needed only modest changes.

I am turning to my colleagues. I am fairly sure that there is a requirement to make tenants aware of the charter.