The Scottish Housing Regulator today published the third in its series of monthly dashboard reports to help understand the impact of the Coronavirus on social landlords and to support the work of the Social Housing Resilience Group.
The dashboard for June shows that the number of people who applied to local authorities as homeless increased by 18% to 2,923, and the number of households in temporary accommodation increased by 7% to 13,875. Arrears of rent owed by tenants of social landlords increased by just over £3.75m, although the overall rate of increase was less than half that for the previous month. RSL arrears increased by 1% with local authority arrears increasing by 3.4%. The number of empty homes rose by nearly 13% to just over 9,300, even though landlords let nearly 1000 homes more than in the previous month.
Since April, all social landlords provide the Regulator with a monthly return of a small set of key measures that focus on the main areas of impact on landlords’ operations. From June this includes information on landlords’ use of notice of proceedings and evictions. This is to assist the Scottish Government to discharge its duty to report to Parliament on the effectiveness of provisions in the Coronavirus (Scotland) Act 2020 extending notice periods for recovery of possession by social landlords.
The Regulator has also published today the full dataset for all landlords from April.
The published dashboards and dataset are available on the Regulator’s website.
Landlords are due to submit the next monthly return for July on 7th August.
The Regulator has committed to continue to work closely with the Social Housing Resilience Group to monitor the impact of the pandemic on landlords.
View the dashboard and dataset here.
Notes to editors
- The Scottish Housing Regulator was established on 1 April 2011 under the Housing (Scotland) Act 2010. Its objective is to safeguard and promote the interests of tenants and others who use local authority and RSL housing services. The Regulator operates independently of Scottish Ministers and is accountable directly to the Scottish Parliament. It assumed its full regulatory responsibilities on 1 April 2012. The Regulator consists of the Chair and seven Board members. More information about the Regulator can be found on its website at housingregulator.gov.scot
- SHR sets out how it regulates social landlords in its published framework – Regulation of Social Housing in Scotland.