A new toolkit helps Scotland’s tenement owners work together to maintain and improve their buildings ahead of changes to tenement governance.
With seven in 10 of Scotland's oldest tenements in critical disrepair, researchers at the University of Strathclyde have developed the resource with tenement owners support charity Under One Roof.
Governing Scottish Tenements: Democratic Skills for Sustainable Tenement Stewardship, provides practical guidance on making collective decisions about shared buildings.
Critical disrepair
Tenements are Scotland’s most common form of housing, accounting for 36% of households. However, 71% of pre-1919 tenement buildings were recorded as being in critical disrepair in the Scottish House Condition Survey 2019.
The resource, developed by Dr Iain Cairns from the Strathclyde Institute for Sustainable Communities, focuses on the skills owners need to reach decisions collectively on issues ranging from repairs and maintenance to energy efficiency improvements.
It applies four areas of ‘democratic skills’ – knowledge, reasoning, communication and interpersonal skills – to the practical challenges of managing a shared building.
Differing priorities
These include understanding owners’ rights and responsibilities, assessing evidence and quotations for work, communicating effectively with neighbours, managing disagreements and reaching compromises when owners have different priorities or financial circumstances.
Early drafts of the resource were reviewed by property lawyers and members of tenement owners’ associations to ensure that the toolkit reflects both the law and the lived experience of owners as accurately as possible.
The toolkit has been published as Scotland moves towards stronger arrangements for the management of tenements, including proposals or compulsory owners’ associations.
Dr Cairns said: “A key indicator of how energy efficient a building is likely to be is how well it is maintained. Without better governance of Scotland’s tenements to support effective maintenance practices, the Scottish Government may not realise its ambition for all homes to have significantly reduced energy use by 2045.
“It is unrealistic and unfair to expect flat owners to deliver this transformation on their own, as substantial financial support and coordinated retrofit programmes will be essential. But effective and fair progress still depends on tenement owners playing an active part.
Our toolkit contributes by helping owners with some of the practical skills and confidence needed to take an active role in the wider effort to protect and modernise Scotland’s tenement stock.
Maintaining buildings in good condition is important to improving their energy efficiency, and the toolkit argues that robust arrangements for basic maintenance will be needed if Scotland is to successfully decarbonise its existing housing stock and address fuel poverty.
Complex decisions
Mike Heffron, Chief Executive of Under One Roof, said: “Improving Scotland’s tenements isn’t only a technical or financial challenge. You can identify the right repair, have a contractor ready to do the work and even have the money available, but if the owners in a building can’t reach a decision together, the work may still not happen.
“Tenement owners are being asked to make sometimes complex decisions collectively, often involving significant sums of money and with people with very different circumstances and priorities. Our toolkit is about giving owners practical skills to navigate those decisions, deal constructively with disagreement and work together in the long-term interests of their building.”
The creation of the toolkit was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Creating Opportunities through Local Innovation Fellowships (COLIF) fund.