How we won a rent freeze in Scotland

People before profits — As the Scottish government announces a rent freeze, an activist with Living Rent who fought and won shares how they did it, and what must come next.

This week, the Scottish Government announced, with immediate effect, a rent freeze across both private and social housing, as well as a ban on evictions. The details are still a little vague, and campaigners still have big, unanswered questions, but there is no doubt that it is a dramatic and important step forward for tenants’ rights across the country.

It goes without saying, of course, that this was the result not of magnanimous politicians doing the right thing, but of years of tenants organising and fighting back in every corner of the country. Since 2014, tenants’ union Living Rent has been demanding the reintroduction of rent controls, scrapped by Thatcher in the 1980s, and building a union capable of forcing the government to do it.

While there is overwhelming and widespread support across Scottish politics for rent controls, the government has so far failed to deliver. In 2016, delegates to the governing SNP’s annual conference unanimously passed a resolution in favour of a national system of rent controls. Later that year, the SNP introduced so-called ‘rent pressure zones’, which they claimed would allow local authorities to ensure affordable rents.

At the time, Living Rent members warned that these ‘rent pressure zones’ (RPZs) were designed to fail and, sure enough, six years later the policy has proven impossible to implement anywhere. This failure to deliver meaningful rent controls at the time, coupled with rents continuing to increase far faster than incomes, has been a disaster for tenants. But if the failure of RPZs pushed tenants to the edge, the pandemic pushed them over it.

NEW: The Scottish government has announced a rent freeze, effective immediately.

Well done to @Living_Rent for showing that we can force those in power to act on the housing crisis.

Our campaign is calling for the rent freeze to be extended across the UK.#EnoughIsEnough

— Enough is Enough (@eiecampaign) September 6, 2022

In these six years, Living Rent has also grown dramatically. Counting dozens of local branches, organised deep in neighbourhoods and communities, and paid-up members in every city and town in Scotland, the union has focused not on parliamentary lobbying, but on building working-class, tenant power able to force politicians to change the housing system.

Week in, week out, the union’s local ‘member defence’ teams are stopping evictions, forcing repairs, winning massive pay-outs from landlords, and growing the union. Members are pushing for retrofits, for better public services and building links in their communities. Alongside its focus on grassroots militancy, the union has also secured dramatic legislative victories: including the abolition of no-fault evictions and insecure short-assured tenancies, a sweeping set of new limits on holiday lets, and a hard-won ban on evictions during Covid.

Crucially though, these legislative victories were not achieved by conciliation and compromise, but by uncompromising demands from the union, confident that its legitimacy comes from the mass of tenants it represents, not the glossy reports it publishes.

In 2021, the Scottish Parliamentary elections led to a ‘co-operation deal’ between the SNP and the Scottish Greens. Their co-operation agreement included a crystal clear commitment to rent controls. Again here, Living Rent members have raised vital unanswered questions about the details, and especially about the timeline. While the agreement recognised the need for rent controls in a failing housing market, it didn’t propose actually introducing rent controls until the very end of the parliamentary term – as late as 2025.  Despite these issues, the agreement did and does mean that Scotland is closer to the reintroduction of rent controls than at any point since they were scrapped, and that matters.

This aside, tenants continue to reel from the financial shocks of lockdown and the pandemic, the spiralling costs of living and inflation have taken matters from bad to worse. Many of the issues driving the cost of living crisis are, to at least some extent, largely outside the powers of the devolved Scottish Government. As a result, the SNP and Green politicians have been banging the drums hard over the energy price cap rises in particular — comfortable knowing that they can posture however they like, because the actual responsibility for action sits with the Tories in London.

But, as Living Rent members have pointed out consistently, for most tenants, the annual cost of rent dwarfs even the most disastrous predictions of the cost of energy. Across Scotland, landlords have also serving tenants with eye-watering rent increases, many as high as forty or fifty percent. Housing, unlike the energy price cap, is completely devolved. That means the Scottish Government has no excuse for inaction on rents, and Living Rent made sure that they understood that.

This extreme and utterly untenable situation was the context in which the Scottish Government finally stepped up and announced a freeze on rents this week — despite rejecting an opposition amendment to do exactly that just months ago.

The government has still not announced the details of how this rent freeze will work — and there are some crucial concerns about that. The announcement was that it would last until March, but most rents in the social sector go up annually in April — so how does this protect them? What happens where rents are already unaffordable? What happens to people who’ve already been served rent increase notices?

These questions desperately need answers, and Living Rent members will be working hard to ensure that the freeze has real impact. Even with those caveats, though, it is an extremely welcome move — and a serious blow to the unfettered profits of private landlords in particular.

The current crisis means that an emergency rent freeze was an absolutely necessary temporary measure, but it isn’t really the goal.

Going forward, the goal for tenants has to be something much, much more ambitious. Living Rent has called for a comprehensive, national system of rent controls that doesn’t just freeze rents, but brings them down. The ‘points-based’ system the union proposes would also tie the amount a landlord could charge to the quality of the property, forcing them to make the repairs and improvements that Scotland’s housing so desperately needs.

The point of this system is not to just curb the worst excesses of the sector, but to fundamentally and permanently reshape Scotland’s housing.

The response from landlords to the rent freeze has already been hysterical, wailing that they will be forced to sell up. Our response? Good. There should be no place for the rampant exploitation that we see in rented housing, and it should be the clearly stated purpose of a system of rent controls to shrink the sector.

This rent freeze is an important step, but put bluntly: we must make landlordism unviable as a business.

Gordon Maloney is a campaigner with Living Rent

Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.


Ad

Latest on Huck

Silhouette of person on horseback against orange sunset sky, with electricity pylon in foreground.
Culture

The inner-city riding club serving Newcastle’s youth

Stepney Western — Harry Lawson’s new experimental documentary sets up a Western film in the English North East, by focusing on a stables that also functions as a charity for disadvantaged young people.

Written by: Isaac Muk

Couple sitting on ground in book-filled environment
Culture

The British intimacy of ‘the afters’

Not Going Home — In 1998, photographer Mischa Haller travelled to nightclubs just as their doors were shutting and dancers streamed out onto the streets, capturing the country’s partying youth in the early morning haze.

Written by: Ella Glossop

Black and white image of people in traditional Japanese dress, some holding fans, with dramatic lighting.
Photography

See winners of the World Press Photo Contest 2025

A view from the frontlines — There are 42 winning photographers this year, selected from 59,320 entries. 

Written by: Zahra Onsori

Neon-lit studio with two people in red shirts working on an unidentified task.
Youth Culture

Inside Kashmir’s growing youth tattoo movement

Catharsis in ink — Despite being forbidden under Islam, a wave of tattoo shops are springing up in India-administered Kashmir. Saqib Mugloo spoke to those on both ends of the needle.

Written by: Saqib Mugloo

Two individuals, a woman with long brown hair and a man with dark skin, standing close together against a plain white background.
Sport

The forgotten women’s football film banned in Brazil

Onda Nova — With cross-dressing footballers, lesbian sex and the dawn of women’s football, the cult movie was first released in 1983, before being censored by the country’s military dictatorship. Now restored and re-released, it’s being shown in London at this year’s BFI Flare film festival.

Written by: Jake Hall

Group of young men with graffiti-covered wall behind them.
© David Corio
Music

In the dressing room with the 20th century’s greatest musicians

Backstage 1977-2000 — As a photographer for NME, David Corio spent two decades lounging behind the scenes with the world’s biggest music stars. A new photobook revisits his archive of candid portraits.

Written by: Miss Rosen

Signup to our newsletter

Sign up to stay informed from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture, with personal takes on the state of media and pop culture in your inbox every month from Emma Garland, former Digital Editor of Huck, exclusive interviews, recommendations and more.

Please wait...

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.