As the Housing Bill continues to journey through Parliament, can consensus and common sense prevail in allowing tenants to decorate their homes as they see fit?
A recent look around at the homes available for rent in Glasgow demonstrated a huge diversity of properties available, but also a huge variety of standards of properties in respect of decoration. This was highlighted particularly by a flat made available for rent that had previously featured in Scotland’s Home of Year and was decorated as highly as one might expect from a property on the interior design show.
Being unable to decorate may feel like less of a burden for a tenant in a well-maintained flat than for one renting a similar flat that hasn’t been updated in over 20 years. The immediate counter arguments will be that the market takes care of this by pricing the respective flats accordingly, that decoration is a highly personal topic therefore there is no starting point that would keep everyone happy, and that reasonable requests to reasonable landlords are generally approved.
The market does play its part here in pricing properties but that does not change the fact that each tenant faces a lack of choice and autonomy over the property which they plan to adopt as their home, the tenant who moves to a highly decorated flat can be equally restricted in their ability to make changes to their taste as the tenant who moves to the poorly decorated property. And whilst decoration is a very personal topic, that cannot be used as an excuse for poor decoration in the first place.
In the PRS, tenants can often have less flexibility when it comes to decorating compared to other tenures. Buyers on the open market may choose a property in need of modernisation, sometimes benefiting from a lower purchase price, while social housing tenants may find their homes decorated before moving in or receive a decoration voucher to help with costs, often with fewer restrictions on making the space their own.
Balancing tenant autonomy and landlord considerations
The allowances made in Part 3 on decoration give some valuable concessions to the tenant but rely heavily on the definition of reasonableness, which until tested will be as subjective as taste in décor is.
Landlords can get ahead of these changes, both when they let a property and in considering requests for redecoration. Small investments in decoration when letting a property can increase the desirability of a property and help with tenancy sustainment. Being open to requests for decoration and willing to enter constructive conversations around this will allow tenants to foster a sense of their own identity in the property and may also lead to a more sustained tenancy.
