14-07-2025
- General
- The Herald Scotland
Inside Glasgow's tenement crisis and the call for new laws
It should have been repaired or demolished after it was gutted by the blaze in 2020, but instead the burned-out building sat open to the elements.
Some of the owners had insurance, others did not. There was no block insurance.
And so the Victorian B-listed building was stuck in bureaucratic stasis.
If there is anything surprising about the situation at Albert Cross, it is that it is still relatively rare for any of the 77,000 pre-1919 homes in Glasgow to completely collapse before our eyes.
The deterioration is normally much more gradual.
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But for how much longer? The city's tenements are in crisis. Age and a lack of maintenance are catching up with them.
Roofs, stone façades, joists and chimneys have endured more than a century of Scottish winters.
In my Pollokshields tenement, we've just been handed an eye-watering quote to fix our mullions. I didn't even know what a mullion was until a couple of months ago.
A 2018 survey found around 46,600 tenement flats in the city need structural, weather-tightening and restoration work.
And as these buildings age, the pace of their decline will only accelerate.
The big problem, when it comes to major structural repairs, is getting everyone in the block to agree.
Replacing a roof, securing bulging sandstone, dealing with dry rot – it all needs to be carried out collectively. All the owners in a close need to agree and pay their share.
In theory, a simple majority of owners can approve common works. In practice, as anyone who has ever been in this situation can attest, if even one refuses or cannot afford to pay, everything grinds to a halt.
Councils have the power to step in – by paying a "missing share" and pursuing repayment – but budgets are tight and such interventions are rare.
And compulsory purchase orders are rarer still and even more tricky to get over the line.
The problem is that the system we have to deal with these situations simply was not designed to cope with this scale of failure.
So, is it time for a new Tenements Act?
That is the proposal from Labour MSP Paul Sweeney. But what would it involve?
The Scottish Parliamentary Working Group on Tenement Maintenance has been meeting for seven years now. In 2019, it recommended ministers look at owners' associations, sinking funds and five-yearly inspections.
In response, the Scottish Government asked the Scottish Law Commission to develop options for legislation.
That's still ongoing, but with a year until the election, the onus must now be on parties to come up with some suggestions.
One possibility touted by Jon Molyneux, the Green councillor for Pollokshields, and worthy of consideration, is mandatory insurance.
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That would likely go beyond the current legal requirement for individual owners to insure their own flats, instead requiring comprehensive block-wide coverage that would ensure repairs could proceed even when some owners lack adequate insurance or funds.
The collective cost of repairing Scotland's pre-1919 housing stock could run to the billions.
But the cost of doing nothing will be far higher.
