Idea for rent

Private rents in Edinburgh are the third-highest in the UK, as your paper reported recently. Last weekend at the Labour conference in Dundee, Richard Leonard proposed effective legislation to protect tenants. Compare that with the limp Scottish Government offering of “Rent Pressure Zones”. Despite all the evidence about rents in our city the SNP government has refused to consider making the whole city such a zone. The council has to spend time and money doing more research on rent increases and on household incomes to justify zones covering small parts of the city.

At the end of all of that, any zone will only apply to those who have the new style of tenancy (since December 2017) and landlords will still be able to increase rents between tenants as much as they want. The legislation is flawed and the guidance issued seems designed to tie councils up in bureaucratic knots.

The SNP is again trying to sound radical but achieving very little. Scottish Labour’s “Mary Barbour Law” would make a real difference. MARJORIE MACKENZIE

Grange Loan, Edinburgh