Tenants count cost of slum landlords

WEALTHY private landlords across Scotland are making a packet from hard-up tenants.

Shock figures today show more than 20,000 Scots families who rent privately are living in overcrowded conditions.

Slum landlords are lining their pockets by squeezing more and more people into unsuitable accommodation.

It’s worth remembering that many of the tenants in the properties receive housing benefit. The state are effectively lining the pockets of unscrupulous owners.

Labour’s planned crackdown on the private rented sector – the so-called Mary Barbour law – is a good first step to ending this scourge.

But the real problem is chronic underinvestment in social housing over decades.

Britain used to spend four-fifths of its housing budget on building houses for social tenants and one fifth on benefit payments.

That situation was reversed because of ideological opposition to building social housing that started with Margaret Thatcher and which Labour, once in power, disastrously failed to tackle.

The SNP – in charge of Scottish housing policy for more than a decade now – have also simply not done enough to sort out the crisis.

Council and housing association houses are cheaper, cost the taxpayer less and are better for tenants. Public investment in them also creates jobs in the construction industry.

Yet, instead of this obvious solution, we seem happy to hand out wads of public cash to private landlords in return for overcrowded and poor quality housing.

It’s a disgrace that this Victorian-era scandal is still going on here in Scotland in 2018.