Professor Douglas Robertson

The RentBetter research shows that changing the legal basis of the tenancy has resulted in the majority of tenants feeling safe and secure in their home. That’s a major success which should not be underplayed. People feel safer and more secure living in private rented accommodation than they did five years ago.

This is easily explained because the tenancy – the Short Assured Tenancy (SAT) – provided only a six-month contract between tenants and their landlord. At the end of that timeframe, tenants could simply be asked to leave. Or if anything happened, such as a tenant deciding to press for the outstanding property repairs to be carried out then, in less than six-months, they might just find themselves and their family looking for a new home.

The premise underpinning this basic piece of tenancy reform was simply that operating a six-month tenancy arrangement within a PRS that now accounted for more than 15% of all households was utterly ill-suited to how the private rental market actually functioned.

People should not be expected to find a new home so regularly. Not only is that task challenging, stressful and time consuming but there were also major personal and social costs attached to such moves. For instance, depending on where the new accommodation was, they might need to register with a new doctor, or have to find a new school or nursery for the kids.

Such a tenancy might have worked when the PRS accounted for just 6% of the housing stock, housing a population dominated by students, young people renting before buying and poorer single people, if in fact it ever did. And it’s worth remembering that back in 1988 when deregulation of the PRS happened the working assumption was that landlords would use the Assured Tenancy which offered a longer tenancy period, whereas they went almost entirely for the Short Assured variant, which offered a default eviction should the need arise.

Since the advent of the PRT the number of SATs has declined as these old tenancies ended and a new PRT tenancy was issued in its place, as is a legal requirement. However, the pace of change was not as assumed. Over its five-year duration the RentBetter study has shown that the practice of ‘rolling over’ a SAT continued in many cases for many years, ensuring it took far longer for PRTs to become the dominant tenancy across the sector. Policy makers had wrongly assumed that given the SAT was of six-months duration it would take just over a year for that tenancy to disappear.

This finding was, however, very significant as it confirmed the previous tenancy was clearly not fit for purpose. Private rental tenancies did not turn over quickly. People generally stayed far longer than six-months, but that tenancy was insecure because it could be ended quickly. Now the tenancy is ‘open-ended’, with a set of legally defined procedures both parties need to follow to bring that arrangement to an end. Hence, that feeling of greater safety and security.

What is most peculiar however is that seven years further down the line some landlords are still able to use a SAT. When questioned about this they made clear it was now used as a mechanism to avoid the requirements of the new tenancy. As such the Scottish Government’s plan to finally abolish all remaining SATs seems sensible.

But here is the contradiction. While tenants enjoy safety and security from the PRT, they still know nothing about the new rights confirmed on them by this legislation. These new rights were designed to further enhance their safety and security, yet the Scottish Government and its various partners charged with implementing this policy reform have proved incapable of enhancing tenants’ knowledge of them. As Blog 4 on this research previously stated, what is the point of having new rights if you know nothing about them. That knowledge gap in understanding the rights conferred by new tenancy has been consistent throughout the five years of this study. Over time tenants have not become more knowledgeable nor conversant with their new tenancy rights. This surely represents a serious failure in policy implementation, a failure being continued by those now charged with administering this entirely new system. This concern is explored in further depth in a Blog 8.

Further, while the enhancement of tenure safety and security is to be celebrated, this change has also altered tenant expectations and understandings of what security now constitutes. What the RentBetter study in its entirety revealed is that according to tenants, affordability has now become the core element to ensure tenure security. If you can no longer pay the rent, then your home security is undermined. That of course has always been the case, but as Blog 9 explores, one change across the sector over the last few years has been that rents have consistently risen. As they become ever more expensive, as defined by affordability measures, this ensures affordability now becomes the core issue for private renting.

• Professor Douglas Robertson was the chair of the Scottish Government Advisory Group between 2009 and 2015 that made recommendations for reform and now sits of the RentBetter Advisory Group

This first blog is available here.

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