Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast. I’m Kieran Findlay, and with Jimmy Black today, we’re delving into a challenge that’s becoming increasingly urgent but often goes unseen until something goes wrong. Mixed tenure housing blocks and the responsibility for maintaining them.

Many of Scotland’s social landlords now own homes within blocks that also contain private flats. But what happens when the social landlord is in the minority?

Jimmy Black

So to discuss this issue, we are joined by Audrey Murphy, interim director at Abronhill Housing Association, where more than 40 % of homes are located in mixed tenure blocks.

And returning to the podcast is an old favourite, Professor Douglas Robertson, who has undertaken extensive research into tenement improvement, housing renewal and the social policies behind them.

Kieran Findlay

Audrey, thanks for joining us. I think it was the SFHA conference where you initially raised concerns to me about how this kind of fragmented ownership limits the social landlord’s ability to maintain and invest in their buildings. So could you begin by setting the scene to the listeners now, please?

Audrey Murphy

Yes, thank you very much for having me on the podcast today. I’ve been a long fan, I usually listen to it on the way back from Cumbernauld, so it’s lovely to be here. And obviously, thanks to the Professor for coming along.

Abronhill, one of the smallest landlords in Scotland, 257 units. Its the only community-based housing association in Cumbernauld, and we have an area of operation called Abronhill. We have 257 stock of about 168 of those are flatted blocks and 105 of those tenants that have families are in mixed tenure blocks. Those 105 tenants sit across 70 flats, or 70 closes as we would say in the olden days, and out of those 70 closes, Abronhill are only in the majority in two. So 68 blocks where we do not have the majority right to override anyone else.

That, as you can imagine, while social landlords have a strict adherence to compliance and they have different standards to maintain than it is in private owner occupiers or other private landlords, it means then that we really do have a kind of limited control over what you would say is investment and blocks to meet SHQS, or EESSH standard, or even just limited control in terms of just keeping the internal common shared spaces properly.

So it really does make for quite a complex operational environment, is a nice way of putting it. And I suppose for us at Abronhill, you go to Abronhill if you’ve ever visited, and it does take me back to my very younger days, back a long time ago when you were used to seeing a lot of estates having poor external fabric and poor internal fabric. So yes, it says, and actually I’ve been wanting to raise for a while.

Jimmy Black

Audrey, the law of the tenement 2004, did that not sort it all out for you? Can you not get a tenant management scheme going? Can you not get all these things happening? What’s wrong that you can’t just use that legislation?

Audrey Murphy

Because, there’s no factoring agent, there’s no factors in any of the blocks, I think there’s two out of the whole scheme. So the whole area’s got about 140 blocks. North Lanarkshire Council are in 94 blocks. They’re very much similar to us. They have about 197 tenants and they’re only in the majority in six of those blocks. So even getting together with North Lanarkshire Council only puts us in the majority of eight blocks out of 140 with no factor.

Now, if you take the make-up, we’ve done a huge exercise in Abronhill to find out who was behind all those houses, owner-occupiers and private. There is a huge, over just under 40 per cent private rented landlords, of which there is around 140 who own one and the rest of them, about 196 landlords, and the rest of them all own more than two.

So you can understand trying to even have a communication plan with no common factoring agent is a huge undertaking for an association who has six part-time staff. Just even using the legislation and setting up meetings and getting agreements, we’ve done some work, but it’s very sporadic and it certainly doesn’t offer our tenants a consistent approach. Would that make sense?

Kieran Findlay

Yeah it does. Thanks for that, Audrey.

Douglas, you’ve studied Scotland’s tenements for…

Douglas Robertson

Forever!

Kieran Findlay

… decades. From your perspective, how did we arrive at this situation where, as we said, the ownership within the buildings is so fragmented and the responsibility for the upkeep is unclear?

Douglas Robertson

Well, Abronhill is an interesting one because that was a late demise of the New Town Corporation and the sell-off of the stock. A lot of tenants then got a discount, but also when they wound up the New Town Corporation, that was a lot of pressure for people to buy. Often, I would imagine, quite a number of them were on quite low incomes and therefore sustaining owner occupation within a multiple occupancy block would have been a challenge.

I think we’ve got lots of problems going on here. It kind of brings everything together. You’ve had this move to have owner occupation within blocks that were originally designed with one landlord. And that’s the same with the tenements in the past, if you like. There was probably a majority of landlords. And then we sold off to owner occupation. So within the tenement context you had factors but you see here we don’t have a factor so we don’t have that background and that history. The factor was the New Town Corporation originally.

We’ve also got, I suppose the Scottish Government or previously the Scottish Executive has, since 2000, no sorry, 1992, it was coming forward as a part of the Housing Improvement Task Force to have a unified quality standard. 33 years later, we still don’t have this. Now I know civil servants are busy, for 33 years, this has been an issue. It keeps coming up.

And there are interests within the private landlord entity, which try and stop quality standards changing. There are interests within, well, nobody wants to address owner occupiers in terms of that, apart from the old below tolerable standard, and then we have within local government and within housing associations a different standard. So we have created a different set of housing quality standards depending on the tenure, and if you’re in a mixed tenure block and you are the landlord seeking to respect the interests of your tenants, you’re caught as Audrey is.

So lots of things about housing policy that have progressed have ended up creating this mess, and the trouble is that the Scottish Government and the previous administrations, whether Conservative or Labour, have just avoided this one.

Jimmy Black

So Douglas, why doesn’t the current law work? I say we have the law of the tenement, was lauded at the time as being the answer to this, why doesn’t it work?

Douglas Robertson

Because the law of individual property rights probably overrides it.

I think where you challenge owners’ rights, it becomes quite a difficult issue. This was the thing that when the Act was passed in 2003, the Law Commission at the time was quite keen not to have compulsory owners’ associations, which people were arguing for at that time. The other thing that’s changed is that a lot of the properties at the lower end of the market are now within the private rented sector.

When a lot of this was done, the private rented sector was about 6% of the housing stock. It’s now about 20% of the housing stock. So that’s come back with a vengeance as an investment product in large part for people that have got the ability. You were getting a better return privately renting than you were on investments. So that creates a financial and ownership and then a management problem that just does not come together.

There is currently a review of the law of the tenement, if you like, being carried out by the Law Commission. And that’s just reported, I think you know about that, Jimmy, I’ve not seen the document yet. But the idea of having compulsory owners associations doesn’t actually help Audrey in any way, because the owners, you try and get all these landlords to actually meet, as she’s already found.

So this solution that, politicians seem to love the idea of a silver bullet. One solution will solve the problem. So they’ve now gone down the road that will change the law of the tenement, we’ll have compulsory owners associations and a sinking fund, and it all will be sorted. Well, it won’t. I think that’s the problem. And Audrey’s case illustrates it brilliantly.

Jimmy Black

Can I come back in that and say that if you had owners’ associations in all your tenements, and I suppose every individual tenement would have to have an owners’ association, they would have to meet every year. In theory, if all of this went through, they would have to save money so they had a fund for repairs. And there would have to be a five-yearly inspection of the building. These are all the kind of proposals that are being noised about by the Scottish Government. And the Scottish Law Commission has been looking specifically at the whole thing, but owners’ associations and creating a legal entity that you can work with, you can sue, you can take to the housing tribunal or possibly the sheriff court.

So, it sounds as though they’re trying at least. Does it sound practical to you Audrey?

Audrey Murphy

I would never look a gift to hers in the mouth. To me, I’m quite happy with anything that benefits. I hope Douglas doesn’t mind if I call him Douglas. I agree with what he’s saying. I think that I would take anything at all. It would be easier, I think dealing with 70 blocks if they were all a separate housing owners association and dealing with 70 rather than 200 landlords, I think that’s a benefit.

I’ve been a long advocate for sinking funds, I think. To have an owner’s responsibility for a building and you’re sharing that building and not to put some money by for it is just common sense. I think like, let’s say 33 years, maybe if we’d all put money away 33 years ago, we wouldn’t have the problems that we have now.

I am a great advocate of having up-to-date stock condition surveys. We’re obliged and required to have them. Other owners are obviously, they don’t have to, they don’t pay for getting stock condition surveys or contributing to them. So yeah, I do think it’s the right way. What I’m not convinced is that it will solve everything.

The reason that Abronhill, it was interesting to hear that it’s 20% or so for private landlords, I mean we’re nearly up at 35, 36% because in the private landlord sector, just about any time a flat comes up in one of these areas, it’s a private landlord that buys it because it’s a high yield and very little responsibility because they know they have not got a social landlord or the local authority in a position that the majority to push through on legislation that we do have for investments and repairs.

So I think we, I would welcome any changes and any improvements, but I do think we have to start thinking about globally where we are in Scotland in terms of tenure mapping would be good to know who, where everybody is.

I think the fact that, owners also need to look at the other common spaces, pathways, lighting, all that contribution that makes up a whole building. We had, for instance, the investment programme about 15 years ago in two big blocks in Cumbernauld and Abronhill. And you wouldn’t think they were just done 15 years ago because the lack of, again, the same issues that led to the council doing the blocks and doing investment and probably out of pocket a little bit with it, but they haven’t been able to maintain or sustain that investment. So it looks like 40 years old rather than 15 years old. So that is one of the issues that you get with this shared tenure.

So I’d be happy that as long as the legislation is shared amongst owners, that they have to maintain to the same standards as every other owner. And I think that’s how you would do get better buy-in to say you have a responsibility for each, you have a responsibility to meet a certain standard. I think that’s what we’re really needing.

Kieran Findlay

It sounds like a bit of a mess, Audrey, if you don’t mind me saying.

Audrey Murphy

It is. 

Kieran Findlay

Give me some examples of the kind of barriers that you’ve encountered when you’re trying to do any sort of repairs. What happens, for instance, if there’s an urgent issue?

Audrey Murphy

Well, you remember the last storm, not the last storm, the other storm before that. So I’ve got kind of a couple, I’ve even got one positive example for you, so things are not all so bleak.

So we had an internal, the roof, obviously, you can get fixed because it’s the roof and there was water coming in but there was actually internal damage to the top landing ceiling. Now our tenant was on the bottom floor and the water was coming all the way down. No one had reported it, but our tenant reported it. And when they reported it, they said, ‘please don’t tell the rest of the block that I’ve reported this’.

So you can get this, you get the idea then that our tenants may be living with a pressure from owner occupiers or from private landlords. ‘Don’t cost me any money’.

So we had went out to inspect it and right enough that the whole ceiling at the top, it was two private landlords, tenants, one of them was certainly not occupied. And we set about getting in touch and asking to arrange a meeting because it was a health and safety issue.

Now thankfully there was two letting agents in the middle floors and they were excellent to work with and they were very much, because we met them on site, we showed them the unsafety of the, and the fact that the rest of the sailing could come in. So we had agreed and we took photographs and we followed the procedures to, offered a meeting, logged it, and then we met with the two refactoring agents for the two other blocks, the other private, the other owner occupier across from our tenant. And we managed to put in writing that we needed this work done. And we got it done.

But of course, one of the private landlords decided he wasn’t going to pay anything. And so between the rest of the five owners, we picked up that tab and we got it done and everyone was delighted.

Now that took the extra effort that takes, whereas if you’re in a majority, you would just walk in and you would just get that done. But I had sleepless nights thinking, ‘what if somebody slips on those stairs?’ What if we had someone going in wiping the stairs down because it’s raining just about every day, water was coming in.

It’s a delay in the impact that it has on our tenant that was living in that building, making sure that she didn’t step out to a puddle when she was going out and stuff. So for me, it’s innocent that our tenant happens to be living in that mixed tenure block. Shouldn’t she have the same standard as another tenant living in a block where we are the majority? And it’s that inconsistency, and it’s the time and effort it took just to do one job. It takes a lot of effort and staff, you making sure that everything was in place and getting quotes quicker and getting the work done quicker because you know there’s a pressure on because you’re trying to communicate with people who don’t want to communicate with you, largely, don’t want to be getting a bill through for their responsibility.

So that kind of highlights, touch wood we haven’t had like a roof blow off or we’ve not had a fire. Those things keep me wakened at night because I was actually on a webinar there from Under One Roof and they were talking about the responsibility for owners. But even just having adequate insurance for blocks amongst owners is hard to check that everyone has what they should have. I think there was a fire in Perth a wee while ago and it turned out the whole building had to be reinstated. And only four out of the eight owners had insurance.

Jimmy Black

Well, Audrey, we’re going to bring Douglas in at the moment because he is the man who wrote ‘Why Flats Fall Down’ and ‘Tick Tock for Tenements’. And you highlight the case of I think someone called Wendy Murray in Glasgow who had to leave her flat because they discovered when the fascia fell off the pub down below that the columns holding the old tenement up were really rusty and weak.

We’ve had a case in Dundee recently where all the flats above a pub had to be evacuated and the pub as well, of course, because it was bulging, the walls were bulging. It’s happening, so Douglas, is this the future of tenements? Do we just have to accept that the fabric is decaying and there’s not much we can do about it because the law doesn’t help us?

Douglas Robertson

Yeah I think so and it’s sad to say because most of my life I’ve spent being involved in people trying to improve tenements and we seem to be in a stage now where that is not possible. We got rid of the legislation that had achieved all the improvement in 2006, where they got rid of the Housing Action Area, the whole 1974 legislation improvement grants. So now local authorities can offer advice, but very few have money.

Glasgow has money, and Glasgow can offer certain things that other authorities don’t do. The missing owner, in your case, the owner that wouldn’t or the landlord that wouldn’t, the local authority can pay that. But it has to be a local authority scheme, it has to be an improvement scheme. There’s a lot of complexities involved in that.

The insurance issue I think is a fundamental one. Glasgow is now poxed with a whole number of tenants that have been up on fire. They’ve had to demolish it. The rebuild or anything cannot take place because the owners are actually those without insurance are having to then pay for the demolition cost and the reinstatement cost is not there. So, Pollockshields, I saw that recently there was a big demolition taking place there.

New towns I think are in a very difficult position because of the history. I’m just remembering there was a case in Glenrothes where I think a private landlord owned quite a number of properties within a block. And I think the whole thing had to be demolished. And of course for the council’s budget, Fife Council’s budget, that was a massive expenditure that they didn’t expect and they had, for health and safety reasons, they had to demolish the whole lot and it didn’t come through.

So it’s quite shocking that, having spent 40, 50 years improving tenements, we’ve now, through cutbacks in public expenditure, cutbacks with local government intervention, because local government is reluctant now to intervene, because if there’s a cost, it comes off their capital programme. And if they don’t have a capital budget for improvement and renovation, which they used to have, most of them don’t, with the exception of Glasgow having an earmarked budget. And I think Edinburgh has a certain amount of money, but the other authorities don’t. So I think outwith Glasgow and Edinburgh, and even Glasgow and Edinburgh, we’re seeing a lot of these collapses.

And that’s why I was trying to, as a swan song from finishing up as an academic, to say, ‘look, this is the work I’ve done. These things are falling down, can we try and sort it?’ And everybody wants to look for a simple solution. So they’ve gone on this idea of owners associations. But when that was argued, Rennie, who was the law commission guy that looked at that, said owners wouldn’t be able to get together.

Well, that situation’s even worse now, because the owners don’t live in the block. Now it’s private, as Audrey’s made clear, it’s private landlords that own the block, trying to get them together in that type of structure, I think it’s a good idea. I don’t have a problem with it. I argued for it at the time, way back in 2003. But it’s not actually going to address the problems and issues. You know, we need compulsory insurance. That needs to be a requirement. Everybody has to have insurance. If you’ve got a mortgage, you have to have insurance. But if your mortgage is finished, you don’t necessarily pay for an insurance. That leaves everybody else exposed because that means every…

It’s the rights of individuals are being compromised by their neighbours and we actually have to accept that a tenement is a different structure than a semi-detached house or a detached house and I think our legislative system and promotion of owner occupation has not accepted that and we actually have to bite the bullet to have very strict laws I think in respect of tenemental property because your personal property rights are then being undermined by the actions of your neighbour and it’s up to the Law Commission to come up with something better than a compulsory owners association which I don’t think actually addresses the issues that we’ve got.

Jimmy Black

Douglas, even if they do come up with an effective owners association, isn’t part of the problem the money? That the people who are owning a lot of these tenements are on low incomes, they’ve bought a flat, they can just cover the mortgage, they’re not actually able to invest in their property in the way that’s required. Even releasing equity, if there is any, is difficult.

Douglas Robertson

Well it’s a difficult one but then we don’t allow people to drive about in wrecked cars. If it doesn’t meet the standard they’re not allowed to drive the car.

Jimmy Black

Yeah okay, but we acted as though was an emergency back in 1968 when the hurricane blew the roof off my sister’s flat in Glasgow and the roof off many other flats in Glasgow.

Suddenly we saw we had a housing emergency, a real housing emergency.

Douglas Robertson

And Albert McQuarrie became a millionaire. That’s another story.

Jimmy Black

But suddenly the government was shoveling money into improvement grants and basically subsidising owner-occupiers or owners of properties who weren’t able to do it for themselves or didn’t want to. Is it time for that to happen now? Is it government money that’s going to start this? And they’re putting money into the RAAC houses in Aberdeen for example, they might not be tenements, maybe the government has to start shoveling some money into the tenement stock to keep it going.

Douglas Robertson

Well we have to make a decision whether is it correct that if you are an owner and cannot afford to be an owner we should support you. That’s the fundamental point. A lot of the people that are not paying this are not the owners, they are the landlords. And they’ve made a lot of money out of this.

But again, we’ve ended up with a tenure system which illustrates that it’s not about housing, it’s been about finance. Now we have to therefore address the finance issue. It seems to me to be quite crazy that we are actually getting people buying property, sometimes two, three hundred thousand pounds, and they discover that it’s a complete nightmare within it, there’s nothing, the home report is not highlighting the problems here, that was supposed to be doing that. Because the home report is written for the mortgage company, not for the owner. And in a sense, we’ve got a whole system which is, housing has been created as a financial model to make money for people as opposed to providing housing.

And maybe we actually have a more fundamental think about, should we be supporting these financial opt-outs like Airbnb and private renting. Why are these organisations, some pay tax, some don’t pay tax, but it’s a financial benefit for these entities to exist. Maybe we should be a bit harder on that and change, stop allowing the housing market to be pushed up and up and up by all these other entrants coming into it to make money from it.

Kieran Findlay

I’m wondering as well if RAAC has exacerbated the issue. It kind of two-fold really, flat owners could they be potentially complaining that the council has done some studies done some excavation, not excavation, but done some surveys and they don’t agree with the costs of RAAC or that because of the complex situation is that these studies these surveys haven’t taken place at all? Is that something that you’ve come across, Douglas?

Douglas Robertson

I’m not familiar that much with the rack. I know the issue, the technical issue with RAAC, but I don’t know how it’s being addressed. It seems to be in a very random way.

Kieran Findlay

Audrey, is that something you’ve come across at all?

Audrey Murphy

Well, we have done our studies. We have done our studies in December 2023 before I got there.

We have eight different types of properties across our stock and we have the reports for those eight different types. You do the survey on one type, know, they all built up at the same time. And we have no RAAC in our properties, thankfully. Obviously there is the, we do our big six compliance and we have their, asbestos monitoring and our damp and mould now, our electrical and ourgas and things like that. We don’t have any lifts apart from a mobility access and demo lift. But for me, the issue was the private landlords, which Douglas had mentioned there. I think we do have a high level of private landlords and I think it’s because, as I said earlier, they kind of have a free rein, if you like. It’s a high yield area.

The owner-occupiers, I think, and Douglas mentioned it earlier as well, a lot of them is maybe probably just, because we do have 140-odd that have just got one property, and I think they’ve maybe became a landlord by default almost. Maybe being mum and dads bought under right to buy, and then, that’s them, they’re a private landlord.

So I’m not saying that all private landlords are not easy to find, but certainly the explosion of portfolio land, private land, that kind of portfolio, we certainly do have a number that have Dubai addresses, have addresses far and wide, and a lot of the times, even when we’ve had a case where we were at the letting agent, even they were finding it difficult to contact their client of an issue that we had as an emergency.

So there is a difficulty around that increase. But for me, I think any of these older buildings, I know obviously we use the word tenement, but these are different style, but the tenement covers that whole flat, anything that’s a flatty block is under the legislation. And I just think that, apart from Cumbernauld, which was a new town, you’ve got Irvine and you’ve got Glenrothes, they must be all now because these are all about 70 years old, 75 years old. So they’re all getting to that stage unless there’s been major new build developments and take them away. But these are all getting to those properties of an age where they really need a significant amount of investment that I don’t believe has been happening.

For me, you were saying there Jimmy, that are they just passed their sell by date? So do we wait another 30 years and look at them when they actually are falling down and then the public purse has got CPOs or the government’s going to have to try and rehouse, not only just social tenants but owner-occupiers and private landlords’ tenants, because nobody’s invested in these properties for decades and they will get to an age that they will be needing demolished.

Douglas Robertson

The house condition survey shows that Audrey, it shows that the pre-1919 houses are generally the ones that are in the poorest condition but the ones between 1964, yeah 1964 right up to 1980 are coming through as very bad in poorest condition as well so it’s not just an old housing issue actually it’s the more modern houses that were built with RAAC with other materials.

And also there’s technical issues within Cumbernauld, I remember, because there was issues about deck access blocks. Yes, that’s before somebody owned the pavement. Was the pavement owned by the housing or was it owned by the authority? And there was problems with water coming off the walkways and going in, I remember that.

Jimmy Black

Now, we’re running out of time, so I think we need to talk about positive solutions now if we can. So Audrey, what’s your idea to fix this? As short and as brief as you can.

Audrey Murphy

Oh, I’ve got a list, Jimmy. First of all, I’ve been, as a new board member of SHFA now, I’m looking to try and understand how the sector, the social housing sector in Scotland, how badly affected it is with this mixed tenure issue for minority landlords. So I’ve kind of asked them to help me set up a mixed tenure forum.

I’d like to try and see some data of just how many tenants are impacted, that they’re not getting the same equality of service across Scotland because of that issue. Because it’s like anything else, global numbers I think helps focus the mind to if you’re lobbying government for change and you have, and you can talk about maybe 20,000 tenants or 30,000 tenants across Scotland rather than 105 just in Abronhill. You know it makes much more stark figures in reading. So I’d like to try and understand what the impact is across all the tenants across Scotland.

I would like to see every tenure being held to the same standard. I think the fact that we all have different standards to maintain just causes confusion and I think people can hide behind that.

I would also like to see the review coming up to put in some things in place in terms of this sinking funding and that should definitely help. I would like to see a bit more financial support. We’ve just had this cost-of-living crisis. I think a lot of owner occupiers cannot afford the works that are getting asked for social landlords or local authorities to do. One of the quotes I had back in 2022, owners were getting asked to maybe pay about £35,000 for a flat worth maybe £55,000.

But it’s not about money. think Douglas is right, it’s not about money. It’s about what would we all do if these buildings who house a lot of people just are not fit for purpose anymore. And we already have a homeless crisis, we need to save them.

Douglas Robertson

I think I’ve just covered most of the ground. I do think the Owners Association will work for a certain number of blocks. I think where you’ve got a lot of private landlords, it’s going to be highly problematic for that. Sinking fund, I think, is a good idea. The other one I would quite like is for the Scottish Government to actually properly fund the Scottish House Condition Survey, because what we’re seeing is that we’ve got a Scottish House Condition Survey which has got such a small sample size now. know, having spent 40 years back campaigning for house condition surveys so we could actually better understand the quality of the housing stock we have, to see it fall away to almost being useless is a, I think, disgrace in terms of government statistics.

But in terms of other issues, I do think we need to look at the notion that a tenement is a different property type and therefore there should be different rules and understandings as to how that operates. And the fact that other countries can operate private management systems that function, that people know they pay in, they are required to pay in, there is the owner’s fund, and if they don’t pay, as they do in America, if you don’t pay these fees, the owner’s association can eject you from your property.

So, these are tough choices. That sounds very drastic. But in England, they have that already. It’s called leasehold and freehold. And if you don’t pay your fees in leasehold, they take your house back and they don’t compensate you. So perhaps there needs to be a reality that living in a tenement is different and it does have additional costs and you have to pay for maintenance.

Kieran Findlay

Thanks, guys. Before we wrap up, if listeners want to learn more about these issues, are there reports or campaigns or initiatives that you’d like to highlight now? Well the report I wrote in 2019 is getting aged, why tenements fall down, but you can put that on the link. It still does get a bit of coverage. That’s trying to pull everything together. It was like a package, here’s it on a ribbon, passing it on to another generation, like Audrey, to take forward and try and solve the problem.

Kieran Findlay

And Audrey, very quickly.

Audrey Murphy

Douglas, before you hand there, hang up your hat. I’m always looking for board members at Abronhill.

Douglas Robertson

I live up in deepest Perthshire, so I’m afraid I’m too far away from you.

Audrey Murphy

Anybody listening on the podcast, if you’re interested and you have any experience in this area, contact me at Abronhill. You can share those details. Happy to have any board members come on and I will absolutely hopefully get the mixed tenure forum up and running and I can maybe come back and tell you all about it.

Kieran Findlay

And Audrey, you’ve got a prospectus that you launched and the deadline is upcoming as well.

Audrey Murphy

Yes, January the 16th. We have our prospectus for a strategic partner in any shape and that is to come on board anything from just, you know, working in shared services to, you know, working together to add a bit of strength and weight to our challenges to right all the way through for our transfer of engagement. As we’ve mentioned before, none of this comes cheap. We’ve got net zero coming over the hill. We don’t know what the compliance is going to be for that. We have the raft of legislation that we need to make sure that we comply with and it all costs money.

So yes, looking for a strategic partner and hopefully we’ll get somewhere. We’re working on a growth and consolidation strategy that we’re hoping to talk to all our stakeholders and our tenants around in next year. So yes, we’ve got loads of things planned to meet the challenge head on. That’s what the plan is.

Kieran Findlay

Right, thanks. And that brings us to an end of this episode. Thanks again to Audrey Murphy at Abronhill and Professor Douglas Robertson. I’ve been Kieran Findlay. Jimmy’s been Jimmy Black, and we’ll be back with a new episode in a couple of weeks. Thank you.