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Buying flats and renting them back to former owners could help us improve stock
City of Edinburgh Council will offer to buy flats in mixed-tenure schemes and rent them back to their previous owners as a last resort when they are struggling to pay for repairs. Kate Campbell explains more
City of Edinburgh Council is one of the largest landlords in Scotland with a housing stock of around 20,000 homes.
We have major capital improvement works going on, and a plan to invest around £170m in improving our homes over the next five years.
The single biggest challenge we face is that more than half of our homes are in mixed-tenure blocks, where we share responsibility for repairs and maintenance of common areas with homeowners and private landlords.
Unfortunately, there is no tradition of factoring in Edinburgh, with many owners in former council estates unclear about their maintenance responsibilities and with limited resources to pay for improvements.
Last week, our Housing and Economy Committee agreed to drive forward a mixed-tenure improvement strategy, which includes a proposal to establish a staff team to engage with residents and a proposal to review our scheme of assistance to make it easier for owners to pay for improvements.
“Many owners in former council estates are unclear about their maintenance responsibilities and with limited resources to pay for improvements”
One of the proposals contained in the report, which has attracted media interest, is council purchase of an owner’s home with an offer of a tenancy. I would like to set the record straight on our plans for this.
The first thing I would say is that this would be entirely voluntary. And it wouldn’t be the first option we’d consider when an owner is struggling to afford their share of communal repairs.
We’d look at other options such as helping owners to access loan funding first.
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But for some former council tenants, or homeowners on low incomes, we think this would be welcome – allowing them to stay in their own homes without getting into levels of debt that might be hard for them to afford.
Like many other landlords, we already have an acquisitions and disposals policy where we sell vacant council homes in stairs where we are a minority owner.
We use the funding from sales to purchase homes in blocks where we can consolidate ownership.
Since implementation of the policy in 2015, we have purchased 59 homes and sold 36 homes, giving a net increase of 23 much-needed social rented homes. The option of buying back homes with sitting tenants would be an extension of this policy.
Now that the committee has agreed in principle to amend our acquisitions and disposal policy, officers will look in more detail at how this would be implemented, but to my mind it’s a very positive step.
“We’d look at other options such as helping owners to access loan funding first”
The priority is that our tenants have better-quality homes and a higher standard of living, but it is also important that we work with homeowners on low incomes to explore all possible options to keep them in their own homes.
Jointly with homeowners, we need to move to a more planned approach to maintaining common parts of buildings and estates.
If we don’t, it will not only be bad for our tenants but it will also lead to bigger problems down the line, which will cost owners more in the long run.
Kate Campbell, housing convenor, City of Edinburgh Council
