SCOTT Donohoe of Unison calls on private sector landlords to accept the evidence in the recent Govan Law Centre research report and engage in a proper debate (Letters, October 28). The research report consisted of in-depth interviews with 12 tenants. Four of these were pre-selected, and eight were selected from a wider group of 60 people contacted in the street. There are 368,000 tenant households in Scotland, so 12 people is a pitifully small sample. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the 12 were selected because some or all of them had had problems. To then portray anecdotes from those selected as being typical of the private rental sector is hardly convincing “evidence”.

One of the problems in conducting a proper debate is that the private rental sector has been targeted by political activists who appear to have ideological objections to there being a private rental sector at all. A century ago, when three-quarters of the population lived in private rentals and landlord exploitation was rampant, such political attitudes would be entirely justified. But are they now? Today, 75 per cent of Scottish landlords rent out only one property. This is hardly some wealthy ruthless rentier clique to be combatted as class enemies.

The effects of this campaigning can be seen in the first consultation carried out by the Scottish Government into their proposed Private Tenancies Bill: 2,500 comments were made; 79 came from landlords and some 2,000 were organised by the Living Rents Campaign. The Scottish Government’s working party considering these responses appears not to have included a single tenant or a single landlord. Apart from a lone Shelter member and one landlords’ association member, the working party was overwhelmingly composed of public sector housing officials. Hardly surprising, then, that they failed to strike a measured balance.

Whatever the virtue of the causes they support, this political campaigning is skewing the debate. It has persuaded the Scottish Government that there is a problem with tenant security and so they are proposing to abolish the Short Assured Tenancy. This sounds so very much like the Rent Act 1976 when a well-intentioned law had catastrophic results. Up to one-third of private rented accommodation vanished within months as small landlords took fright and the acute pressure on what remained made the lot of tenants much, much worse.

Untouched by the proposed bill, in contrast, is the situation where a bank or building society can serve repossession notices on a landlord and leave tenants in ignorance. This happened last year to two friends of mine; their landlord went bankrupt and the first the tenants knew was when they were given 48 hours to leave. Legislation to prevent this sort of outrageous action might be a common cause between activists and private landlords, as might be action to build more affordable housing and public sector social housing. But first, some of the housing activists need to shed their ideological blinkers and start talking to landlords.

Russell Vallance,

4 West Douglas Drive, Helensburgh.