Legislation to end the right to buy has been introduced at the Scottish Parliament.
The Housing (Scotland) Bill is designed to retain social housing by preventing the sale of up to 15,500 homes over the next 10 years and to improve conditions in both social and private rented accommodation, the Scottish Government said.
Due to previous legislation and suspensions in some areas, right-to-buy is already unavailable to many people living in social housing, including new tenants and those in new-build property.
Right-to-buy will come to an end three years after the bill becomes law, which the Scottish Government hopes will happen next summer.
People wishing to own their home would be able to seek support from the Government through various shared equity schemes.
The Bill will also protect the private rented sector, which has more than doubled in size, from 5% of all homes in 1999 to 11% in 2011.
This will be achieved with some legal changes, which will see private-rented sector cases being moved from sheriff courts to a new First-Tier Tribunal, the introduction of regulations for letting agents and increasing the power of local authorities to report breaches of house condition standards.
There are around 3300 households in Scotland with people who live permanently in mobile or park homes, who are set to benefit from changes in mobile home site licensing.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article