As a councillor with a ward where there is a high proportion of tenements, I must applaud Ann Laird of Friends of Glasgow West for an excellent letter in the Herald yesterday :
New MSPs must make an upgrade of our tenement law the priority
Published on 2 Apr 2011
Why do flat owners in older tenement properties in Edinburgh so often end up handing over the common repairs on their combined property asset worth upwards of £1.2 million to a local authority department?
In 19th-century Scotland, a typical tenement building was owned by a single individual or trust, who maintained the property –and this worked well for repairs. But mostly since 1950, tenement flats were sold off individually in large numbers. Allocation of responsibility for common repairs would be set out in the title deeds for each tenement whenever the first flat was sold off.
The tragedy is that for 50 years, the necessary parallel upgrade in our tenement law – a standard legal instrument in many countries – was not done. The Scottish Parliament’s Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004 brought some belated improvement, but shied away from a fully workable system for common repairs.
So although things are considerably better, tenement flat owners may still have difficulty in getting their co-owners to agree and pay up, and property managers (or factors) are in a similar position. And surprisingly, too few flat-owners make a realistic effort to work with co-owners - compared with, say, eight owners of a hypothetical business worth a comparable £1.2 million.
In Edinburgh, the answer has been to use a willing surrogate source of authority, the local council. But the combination of a minority of wayward private flat owners and the unusual position of a council department spending large sums of money on behalf of private owners, provides a perfect breeding-ground for exactly the kind of unfortunate problems we are now seeing – surely an accident waiting to happen. And do we also expect a council which has stepped in on one level, to have full capacity for what are often significant and demanding heritage conservation works?
Meanwhile the hidden culprit is our Scottish Tenement Law which could do better for the 25% of households in private tenemental ownership. Our new MSPs must put these long-term issues high on their agenda in the next Parliament.
Ann Laird,
Chairman, Friends of Glasgow West