Glasgow City Council has rightly championed taking a tough line against rogue landlords who fail to register with the council to escape their property being subject to inspection.
The policy is designed to ensure all rented property meets the required safety standards and to weed out any landlords failing the council's test of being a fit and proper person.
This was not only to improve standards in Glasgow. Landlord registration is a requirement of the Anti-Social Behaviour (Scotland) Act 2004 and, from September last year, those who failed to register became liable for a fine of up to £50,000. Estimating that around 6000 private landlords had failed to meet the deadline, the council took the commendable step of setting up a private landlord registration unit, bringing together officers from environmental health and other departments to make the process easier.
Yet one of its own councillors, who is also a landlord, failed to comply for almost a year. Sohan Singh was elected as a Labour councillor for north-east Glasgow this month. He is best-known as the owner of the city's Artto and Lorne hotels and Bombay Blues restaurant but is also a director of Kyleforth Ltd, a property development company. It owns a tenement block in Royston Road which formerly belonged to the council but was sold to Kyleforth nine years ago for a nominal sum at a time when the council was keen to divest itself of responsibility for social housing.
The benefit of the transfer to community-based housing associations is now apparent in the transformation of previously run-down areas of the city including the Royston/Blochairn area. Yet the one block owned by a private developer remained something of an eyesore amid the regeneration for several years.
The flats have been occupied since May last year, although Mr Singh did not register as a landlord until April this year, by which time he was a council candidate. There is no excuse for the delay. As a businessmen who had an earlier brush with the law, he should know how vital it is to ensure that official paperwork is properly completed. (In 1999 he was convicted of taking part in a scheme to defraud the Exchequer of £1.6 million of duty on alcohol and spent 10 months in jail before the conviction was overturned on appeal.)
In addition to ensuring rented property is safe and suitable for the number of occupants, the requirement for landlords to register provides reassurance for tenants that the arrangement is above board. Councillors should be at the forefront of ensuring that all landlords register to provide safeguards for private tenants who are often on low incomes.
As a landlord, Councillor Singh (who has not yet declared any interests according to the city council's website) should be leading by example. Instead he flouted the law. The citizens of Glasgow, and particularly Mr Singh's constituents in the city's North East ward, deserve better.
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