A New Deal for Tenants: consultation analysis

Introduction

Background to the analysis

This report presents the analysis of responses to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the the draft rented sector strategy A New Deal for Tenants.

The Scottish Government consultation paper invited views on delivering A New Deal for Tenants, which aims to ensure all tenants, whether living in private or social rented homes, can access secure, stable, tenancies, with affordable choices – whilst also benefiting from good quality of homes and professional levels of service and rights.

The consultation asked 61 questions. It was launched on 20 December 2021 and closed on 15 April 2022.

Profile of main consultation respondents

In total 8,346 responses were available for analysis. Where consent has been given to publish the response, it can be found on the Scottish Government’s website.

Respondents were asked to identify whether they were responding as an individual or on behalf of a group or organisation. Organisations accounted for 172 responses, with 756 responses from individual members of the public.

In addition, 7,508 respondents made a campaign-type submission, with:

• 6,118 email or postcard responses all endorsing the response made by Living Rent, Scotland’s Tenants’ Union
• 1,390 email responses in support of a Cats Protection campaign

Organisational respondents were allocated to one of 12 groups by the analysis team and the Scottish Government.

A breakdown of the number of responses received by respondent type is set out in Table 1 below and a full list of organisational respondents can be found in Annex 1.

Among the organisations, the ‘Private landlord, letting agent or their representative bodies’ respondents were the largest group, followed by ‘Local authorities and their representative bodies’.

Within both the ‘Private landlord, letting agent or their representative bodies’ and ‘Individual’ respondents groups, a number of respondents had drawn on standard text at some or all questions. Respondents using this text often referred to supporting the position taken by the Scottish Association of Landlords. Around 70 respondents drew on this text, with the considerable majority of them being ‘Individual’ respondents.

Analysis of all comments made by the 756 ‘Individual’ respondents found that around 3 in 5 (or around 450 respondents) identified themselves as being a private landlord.^[1] Overall, therefore, more than half of the 926 non-campaign respondents (around 450 ‘Individual’ respondents and most of the ‘Private landlord, letting agent or their representative bodies’ respondents, are private landlords.

Around 1 in 20 ‘Individual’ respondents identified themselves as being a tenant, with most reporting that they were a private tenant.

In addition to inviting responses to the consultation, the Scottish Government commissioned The Tenants Information Service (TIS) and Tenant Participation Advisory Service (TPAS) to facilitate additional tenant participation. Focus groups with Private Rented Sector (PRS) tenants were held in April 2022, with eight PRS tenants participating. A further nine participants took part in a focus group that was focused on the experiences and views of students. There were also groups for PRS tenants living in rural areas and for those living in mid-market rent (MMR) homes.

Analysis and reporting

A number of respondents did not make their submission on the consultation questionnaire but submitted their comments in a statement-style format. This content was analysed under the most directly relevant consultation question, as were the themes raised by focus group participants.

The remainder of this report presents a question-by-question analysis of answered to both the closed and open questions.

The number of non-campaign respondents who made a comment is noted at each open question. Living Rent made a comment at all but Questions 22 and 36-39 and in each case this was endorsed by the 6,118 respondents to their campaign. This means that comments or suggestions by Living Rent were the most frequently-made points at these questions. The Cats Protection campaign respondents answered Questions 19 and 20.

As with any public consultation exercise, it should be noted that those responding generally have a particular interest in the subject area and the views they express cannot be seen as representative of wider public opinion.