Dear Cabinet Secretary for Housing

I write with urgency regarding your recent letter to stakeholders following your statement to Parliament on the Housing Emergency on the 2nd of September, 2025.

We know the response rates in the recent consultation: 94% of responses or almost 4400 people and organisations said rent controls should apply to mid-market rent properties, and a whopping 97% of responses or 4465 people and organisations said rent controls should apply to built-to-rent properties.

Your announcement to exempt these tenures from rent controls demonstrates who you primarily listen to - investors. It’s clear that you are now drip feeding us decisions your government took months ago. 

Exempting mid-market rent, built-to-rent, ‘below market rent’ properties and instances when landlords ‘invest’ in their property is merely parroting back at tenants the explicit recommendations from landlords and the investment taskforce. It is inaccurate to suggest otherwise. Your proposals do not represent so much as a hint of engagement with the responses submitted by over 4500 individual tenants, citizens or organisations seeking to end the housing emergency.

If this is how you ‘balance’ stakeholder input, the entire consultation on rent controls can only be viewed as a farce, never mind the waste of public money, resources, and energy given to satisfy private investors. What a missed opportunity to move this bill forward in the interests of Scotland’s tenants - a priority you claim is close to your heart.

By proceeding in this way, you have set your priorities clearly. If the loopholes you propose pass into law, you and your government will have evidently bent to the greed of landlords, developers, and their lobbyists. Landlords make up just 5% of Scotland’s population, while 35% of people in Scotland rent their homes. You have sided with those who seek profit at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Scotland’s tenants, many of whom are in relative poverty and are the very people you were elected to serve. 

Since publication, this bill has been watered down at every stage. What Scotland needs is a universal system of rent controls which can bring rents down, not just slow the rate of still-unaffordable increases. Rents are out of control: we’ve seen rents in Lothian increase 104% since 2010, in Glasgow 88%, while inflation for the same period increased 50%. Allowing increases above the level of the inflation based cap - which already allows for an additional 1% over the rate of inflation as a gift to landlords - will further exacerbate poverty levels and continue to drive people from their homes. Every Local Authority in Scotland is either struggling or outright failing to meet its statutory duties on homelessness, and yet you remain intent on pouring fuel on the fire of out of control rents.

As you very well know, exempting MMR and BtR housing will create a two-tier system of rent controls that’s both unworkable and leaves thousands of tenants across Scotland with no recourse to challenge unfair rent hikes. Build-to-Rent homes are some of the most extortionate private sector rents across our cities. A continued reliance on this kind of housing will drive people from their communities and permanently alter the fabric of our cities. Gifting international hedge-funds exemptions from policy designed to control their profits - at the expense of our communities - is not a legacy that any housing minister should wish to leave.  Instead, you will be remembered for turning our cities into play parks for investors, with Glasgow city centre becoming a soulless field of corporate housing that exploits tenants.

Your proposal to allow current below market rents to reach ‘open market’ levels evidences a lack of seriousness. When we met with you in August you assured us that tenants, and particularly mothers living in poverty, were at the forefront of your thinking on the final stages of this bill. Yet you are choosing to ignore that current market rents are the most significant problem facing tenants. We can’t afford them, they drive us into poverty and cause deepening inequality. 

With regards to allowing for above-cap increases in situations where the landlord has ‘invested’ or ‘improved’ the property - this is irresponsible and shortsighted. When fifty percent of all housing stock in Scotland is in disrepair to a critical element, why should swathes of landlords be able to regulate themselves under the guise of ‘improvements’ that don’t materialise? We know that this isn’t how improving housing quality works in practice: under the current system landlords can already increase the rent as much as they like without so much as installing an air vent. There is no incentive for landlords en masse to better their homes, meet minimum energy standards, or eradicate serious health risks like damp and mould, and your proposals do not compel them to act any more than the current, failing system. This proposal would make rent controls a farce while further appeasing landlord greed.

When we met, you expressed ‘sympathy’ for the needs of Scotland’s most precarious tenants and stated your commitment to creating a more just private rented system in the interests of tenants. Given your current plans, these words are not only meaningless but insulting. You are protecting private foreign investors and rich landlords at each step of the way to ensure that they can continue extracting more and more of our wages. Rest assured, our members across Scotland will not forgive your Government for this failure, and we will remember with whom you sided when you had the chance to transform Scotland’s private rented sector for the benefit of tenants.

Sincerely,

Ruth Gilbert
National Campaigns Chair
Living Rent