2011 rent increase

At last night's meeting of the Housing Committee I was forced to rule a motion by Cllr Fraser MacPherson out of order. I have no wish to stifle democratic debate, but Cllr MacPherson made a procedural mistake which left me with little choice.

The rent setting process has two stages ... firstly the Policy and Resources committee sets the budget, then the Housing Committee sets the rent. By law the rent increase must be enough to cover the budget - we are not allowed to subsidise council house rents.

This means that anyone who wants to propose a lower rent increase must first put a motion to the Policy & Resources Committee, cutting something out of the budget.

Cllr MacPherson prepared such a motion, but for reasons unknown failed to put that motion to P&R. As I understand it he had wanted to cut £500,000 off the budgets for preparing relets.

This meant that his proposal to reduce the rent increase would have led to what I would regard as an illegal budget. We would have been half a million short.

In these circumstances I had no option but to rule his motion as incompetent.

It was a long night with a three and a half hour discussion of the biomass plant coming before the housing budget, and it is unfortunate that Cllr MacPherson made this mistake.

In case anyone should imagine that my ruling was an attempt to stifle debate, the rent increase was the subject of a two month consultation; we sent every tenant information about the increase and invited views; and we held open events where tenants could put questions directly to officials.

We also set out the three options at a previous Housing Committee and debated a similar motion from Cllr MacPherson at that time. And last night we chose the lowest of the three options.

No-one wants to put rents up, but we have a legal obligation, imposed by the Scottish Government with all party support, to bring our council houses up to the very basic Scottish Housing Quality Standard. We need to spend around £30 million in this year alone to do that, most of it borrowed. We need to raise rents to cover the cost of that borrowing.

On the other hand, the work we are doing in thousands of homes involves installing new efficient gas central heating systems. They are cheaper to run than most electric systems and tenants will save money as a result.