Chamber and committees

That first-time buyer could be somebody coming out of the rented sector, which releases the property that they are coming from.

There was a form of rent control in place at the time when 8 per cent of rents increased, but not when 45 per cent did.

Derek McGowan and Lisa Mallon, I do not know whether you want to comment. Part of the difficulty is that tenants who want to stay in a property want to build a good long-term relationship with their landlord and do not want the hassle of spending time and paying the cost of complaining. How do you resolve that situation? How do you make tenants more aware of their rights and support them to enforce those rights, given the social interaction between them and the landlord?

How do you enforce the legislation? Councils have a responsibility to ensure that the landlord is a fit and proper person, that they are registered with the landlord registration system, that gas certification has taken place and that EPC rating has been done. How do you enforce that at the moment and how many enforcement cases do you have in an average year?

I have a quick question for John Blackwood. John, you said that one in 10 of your members who took part in the survey was thinking about leaving the rented sector. However, when somebody leaves the sector, the property does not lie empty; it either gets sold back to the council, if it is an ex-council property, and re-enters the social rented sector at a much lower level of rent, as I have already indicated, or it gets sold to a private individual under the normal rules of supply and demand, whereby the more properties that are on the market, the lower the market price will be. Given that, according to National Records of Scotland, there are 120,000 more homes than households, where is the issue?

We have been talking about how to improve the private landlord register. When someone sells a property, they have to produce a home report. Should something similar be in place for landlords when they rent out a property? We have talked about the data sets that would need to be collected, and people are concerned predominantly about the level of rent and the quality of the accommodation. Is there a need for something like that to gather the information?

I will come on to enforcement in a minute.

Thank you. As I said I would, I come to enforcement. We heard evidence last week—from the RentBetter research survey—that many people do not know their rights, despite their having a tenancy agreement. Some do not even know the type of tenancy that they are in. How do we improve the level of information for private tenants?

Jennifer, you said that about 5 per cent of your landlords do not comply. There are two parts my question. First, what does Glasgow do about that and, secondly, how could we improve the enforcement regime?

John Blackwood, if I picked you up correctly, you said earlier that, in 2022, 8 per cent of people put the rent up and in 2023 that was 23 per cent.