I’ve rented the two-bedroom flat I live in for the last eleven years.
It has a draughty interior and leak-prone windows. There’s always at least two weeks every winter when my pipes freeze and I’ve no heating. It costs me a fortune to keep the place damp-free. Sometimes it rains in my bedroom.
But it’s home and I love it.
These walls have witnessed some of the biggest moments of my adult life.
It’s in this flat that I cried over my dad’s sudden death, celebrated my first ever newspaper byline and gave my new baby her first post-hospital feed.
I’ve been thinking of these moments and how much joy I get from where I live a lot recently.
Last month, my landlord informed me that he was raising my rent by 25%.
I was confused, to say the least.
Last year, the Scottish Government introduced a rent cap of 3% as part of emergency measures to lessen the impact of the cost of living crisis.
The cap applies to nearly all tenancies, but my landlord insists that mine is somehow exempt from the legislation.
After many hours of frantic Googling and pouring over the legislation in detail, I was convinced that everything was fine, and my tenancy was indeed covered by the cap.
But I went in search of a definitive answer.
Searching for answers
My MSP was brilliant and her team did the best they could to get the necessary information from the Scottish Government but they couldn’t get a firm yes or no either.
The housing charity Shelter were also unsure.
I sent my landlord all the information I had gathered anyway and said I thought he had got it wrong.
He withdrew the rent increase and I was breathing easy again.
But last week, he wrote to me to tell me he had changed his mind and, as of October, my rent will be going up by 25%.
So I’m in a bit of a pickle, to put it mildly.
With a bit of scrimping and saving around the more enjoyable aspects of my budget, I could probably afford the increase.
But if I agree to what I’m almost certain is an illegal rent increase now – what’s to stop him raising it even further in six months’ time?
I’ve been advised to pay for the services of a housing solicitor.
But the Scottish Government brought forward the legislation – it shouldn’t be so poorly drafted that even they themselves can’t say for sure what they meant by it.
I have a standard, run of the mill, tenancy agreement.
If my tenancy is exempt from the cap then there will be thousands of others across Scotland that are too. Unless the Scottish Government give a definitive answer on the loopholes to the cap, there will be many tenants like me who could also be vulnerable to steep hikes.
And here’s the kicker: even if I am eventually proven to be right, there is nothing to stop my landlord deciding that my tenancy is not financially viable anymore: selling up and chucking us out.
Anybody who has tried to rent a property recently will know why that prospect fills me with even more dread than a 25% increase in my housing costs does.
‘Scottish Government talks a big game about protecting tenants’
Rents are sky-high at the moment and so too is demand.
Last week, a BBC report suggested that Scotland has one of the toughest and most competitive rental markets in the UK. Four years ago, a rental property might have attracted the interest of around eight prospective tenants.
According to a survey commissioned by the BBC, that figure has now shot up to 27.
It’s not uncommon to hear of tenants offering six months’ rent upfront to secure a property.
The Scottish Government talks a big game about protecting tenants but there is clearly much more that needs to be done.
I naively thought that the good relationship I have with my landlord and a decade of being a perfect tenant might have counted for something.
Clearly it doesn’t.
But any disappointment I feel about that fact is eclipsed by the irritation I feel towards the Scottish Government and its complete inability to properly explain its own policy.
‘My mum loves tidying’
If you want to know what your child really thinks of you, just eavesdrop on them during a playdate.
In fairness, my daughter only has one volume and it’s always cranked up to max, so it was impossible not to overhear as she ruthlessly assassinated my character while in the company of her wee pal the other day.
For the crime of offering to make the pair sandwiches, my 9 year old declared I was ‘’SO WEIRD’’. When my daughter found out her friend got pocket money for doing chores, she said that it was ‘’SO UNFAIR’’ that I didn’t give her cash, given that she makes her bed ‘’nearly every day’’.
I was trashed for eating a tub of sweets that she got for Christmas (that she didn’t like) and for making the mistake of gently singing away to myself while I cleaned up the mess they’d made the kitchen.
On this, my daughter reassured her friend not to worry because ‘’my mum loves tidying. Like, she actually, LOVES it.’’
