Scottish social housing could have a single tenancy within two years under government plans to forge ahead with the mass transfer of council homes to new landlords
Wendy Alexander pledged to publish a Housing Bill next year which would focus on ditching secure and assured tenancies, for which campaigners have long argued.

The minister for communities also announced her commitment to setting up a single funding pot for housing and ensuring local housing strategies are also coordinated under one roof.

But delight at the news was tempered by concern that there would be no radical reform of the Right to Buy. Alexander dismissed rumours that the Right to Buy discount would be scrapped under the bill as "a load of rubbish".

The minister's "vison of housing policy in Scotland" also sidestepped the thorny debate over the future role of Scottish Homes and the creation of a single housing regulator, which the Chartered Institute of Housing condemned as a "missed opportunity".

Officially publishing the resonses to the recent housing Green Paper, Alexander said she was signalling her intentions for the future of housing policy.

She warned the Scottish Parliament that there was much work still to be done on the bill, which will aim to cope with the planned surge in stock transfer under the £500m New Housing Partnerships programme.

Nearly a quarter of all local authority housing in Scotland is already set to be transferred by 2002 using public and private finance.

Alexander said: "Radical ideas in the Green Paper such as a single tenancy, single local housing plan and single local housing budget all require further work before firm proposals can be brought forward to the social inclusion and housing committee for scrutiny."

The draft bill is to be published for consultation during the next parliamentary session, which begins in September 2000. The committee will debate the bill before it reaches the parliament, which has no equivalent of Westminster's House of Lords.

A spokesman for the executive described the announcement as giving "an indication of the areas on which the government is concentrating," although he added that other issues would be included.

Source

Housing Today