Wendy Murray, who lived in Stevenson Street, in Glasgow’s Calton, was offered homeless accommodation within the notorious Alexander Thomson Hotel after Glasgow City Council deemed her tenement block to be in a dangerous structural condition. Fortunately, friends stepped in to house her before the city, in response to an intervention from the Govan Law Centre, which provided a furnished flat.

I read this sad story in an article entitled ‘Glasgow must tackle its tenement timebomb’ by Paul Sweeney, MSP and Glasgow conservation campaigner, in his Glasgow Times column of 15 May 2025. What is needed, argues Sweeney, is “a review of building control regulations and emergency repairs – we must prioritise the repair of the tenement building to minimise the amount of time people are left homeless”.

Paul Sweeney wrote the piece after attending a lunch held in Glasgow’s Trade’s Hall to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the city’s community-based housing association movement, which I also attended. Fifty years back, such a review brought into being a programme of works organised through Housing Action Areas that, within 30 years, and at a cost of many millions, eradicated tenement slums right across Scotland. In Glasgow and the West of Scotland, much of this work was carried out by community-based housing associations, hence the celebratory lunch. What brought all this about was a storm in January 1968 that devastated Glasgow, exposing the rotten and decayed condition of so much of the city’s tenemental housing stock.

Wendy Murray’s traumatic experience results from the lack of basic property maintenance on her tenement. The owners within her block have collectively failed to fund such work over many years. The local government building regulation system still, as Wendy discovered, has powers to intervene for public safety, but no longer the resources to fund emergency property repairs. The Housing Action Area, introduced way back in 1974, was abolished by Paul Sweeney’s party back in 1996, replacing it with Housing Renewal Areas which can only offer advice as how you and your neighbours might go about remedying the situation, but not provide public subsidy in the form of grants.

That situation has continued with successive SNP administrations showing absolutely no interest in addressing what Paul Sweeney describes as a ‘tenement timebomb’ across Glasgow. Kevin Stewart, an ex-housing Minister said to me it’s a local authority issue, because they have the powers. Yes Minister, I replied but powers need hard cash behind them to function and it’s you that controls that cash.

After a lifetime of undertaking research and policy work in this area, I published a valedictory report in 2018, which attempted to bring together current knowledge about this growing disrepair problem and the range of remedies needed to resolve it. I presented its findings and solutions at a variety of events, including one in the Scottish Parliament. I’d like to think this work added some pressure onto the Scottish Government to come up with solutions. Their response, however, when it eventually emerged, was simply to ask the Scottish Law Commission (SLC) to report on a single idea, that of making it compulsory to have owners associations within all tenement blocks. My core argument has always been there is no such single ‘silver bullet’.

The Scottish Parliament’s Tenements Maintenance Working Group, which has now been meeting for a decade, is currently focused on but two issues. The first is to feed into the SLC discussion paper on having compulsory home owners associations, something a number of us argued for way back in 2003 when the Tenements Act was being debated. Professor Robert Rennie, author of the SLC proposals which underpinned that piece of legislation, had pushed back on that idea saying home owners within the blocks would be incapable of running such a body. Now, with private renting rather than owner-occupation dominating these old tenement blocks, he now might just be right.

The second issue being considered by the group is having a sinking fund attached to these proposed owners’ associations, because if owners cannot access monies to pay for any required repairs then they can talk and complain to each other but can never act. A sinking fund is best understood as a Christmas Fund, small amounts of cash being continually saved up over years to address any problems within the building, decided upon by the owners association.

But it can never be that simple. As I argue in my report, there is no one (or two in this case) ‘silver bullet’ given there are so many different but linked issues that need addressed. Critically, it should not be the case that people buy into this physical and financial mess through simply purchasing a tenement flat. But Scotland’s Home Reports, provided by surveyors, and the services of solicitors, lenders and property managers currently do absolutely nothing to stop such a catastrophe from happening. Sadly, Wendy Murray’s situation is far from unique. The recent spate of tenement fires across Glasgow leave owners still paying for a property that now no longer exists and then face the prospect of additional costs for its final demolition. Within any block, there are always going to people with no or inadequate home insurance. A legal duty for owners associations to have responsibility for organising block insurance, common elsewhere in Europe, would appear to be beyond our comprehension here in Scotland.  

Have a read of my Built Environment Forum Scotland report ‘Why Flats Fall Down: Navigating shared responsibilities for their repair and maintenance’ and consider the broad range of issues, and potential solutions, it details to address maintenance and disrepair issues within older tenement housing. But bear in mind that if no one in government is willing to make this a priority because of its cost implications, then the warning signs from people like Wendy Murray will continue unheeded. And it’s also worth remembering that civil servants have, after more than 20 years of deliberation, still failed to deliver even a new basic housing quality standard that covers all of Scotland’s housing uniformly, rather than, as presently happens, standards which vary markedly depending on the property’s tenure.

Grasping the scale, complexity and seriousness of this problem demands the skills and talents of many people, and certainly not just politicians. The lessons from the Housing Action Area legislation of 1974 illustrate this well. The crisis Wendy Murray and many others are experiencing is as Paul Sweeney says only going to get worse. With the old refurbished tenements now well past their 30-year life expectancy, the pace of their demise will only accelerate, as the Scottish House Condition survey has long witnessed.

This article was originally published on the CaCHE website.