Homes and neighbourhoods
Everyone deserves a home that is warm and safe. Good housing improves health, decreases fuel costs, and promotes strong communities. Our vision for housing is for good quality homes that are affordable to buy, affordable to rent, and affordable to heat.
Greens also know that our local neighbourhoods really matter - whether it's the quality of the roads and pavements, parking, lighting, personal safety, back lanes, greenspaces, trees, or spaces to bring people together. We will support the realisation of “20 minute neighbourhoods” through the new City Development Plan, so everyone has easy access to the things they need to lead good, active lives locally.
Homes that meet people’s needs
We will:
- Deliver more homes, across all tenures but especially for social rent, which are sustainable, affordable and in places and of a type that meet people’s needs. This includes meeting individual accessibility needs and the needs of larger and multi-generational family households.
- Bring more empty homes back into use, with more dedicated empty homes officers, and greater use of compulsory purchase powers.
- Use new licensing and planning powers to address problems associated with short term lets, and severely limit them in areas where they are making housing unaffordable.
- Ensure that public land for sale is prioritised for social housing, particularly in the city centre and areas where there are not enough homes for social rent;
- Support housing co-ops and more self-build housing.
Act on rip-off rents
We will:
- Act on the recommendations of the Tenant-led Housing Commission and make rent reform a key priority of the city’s Housing Strategy.
- Support national rent controls and consider the need for additional local measures.
- Improve existing support for renters, including access to discretionary housing payments, and promote rent adjudication as a tool for challenging unfair rent increases and poor property conditions.
- Extend the use of Enhanced Enforcement Areas and strengthen enforcement action against landlords who rent out substandard or overcrowded accommodation or refuse to carry out repairs.
- Consider how the Council can limit rent rises by Housing Associations.
- Develop a Council policy on Build to Rent housing, which addresses concerns on rent affordability and ownership models.
A rights-based approach to prevent homelessness
We will:
- Ensure that Council meets its statutory responsibilities to accommodate people who are homeless, and ensure that no one is forced into unsuitable temporary accommodation, ending the use of hostels and B&Bs.
- Reduce the time people spend in temporary accommodation by getting them quickly into secure, permanent accommodation, and put in place appropriate wrap-around support. Where people do need to use temporary housing, make sure it meets their needs, keeps them close to schools and support networks, and is in a good condition.
- Support a ban on winter evictions and call for all grounds for eviction to be discretionary, which means a tribunal has to consider whether action is 'reasonable'.
- Provide mental health and wellbeing support for children and families experiencing or at risk of homelessness, ensure that children's health and education needs are assessed when allocating social housing, and campaign for stronger protections from eviction for families with children.
- Ensure that every person leaving prison, hospital, residential rehabilitation, or fleeing domestic violence is provided with accommodation that meets their assessed needs to give them the best chance of recovery.
- Promote better engagement with tenants by Registered Social Landlords and work to make housing services and processes accessible and clear for people who have language and other access needs.
- Deliver a city-wide single housing register.
Improved student accommodation
We will:
- Build on the work we have done to limit purpose-built student accommodation and ensure that it does not impinge on the needs of wider communities.
- Campaign for more affordable student accommodation, to stop students from lower socio-economic backgrounds being priced out of higher education or forced into financial difficulty.
- Campaign for improved rights and protections for students, aligning with other housing tenures.
- Explore measures to improve student accommodation, for instance by exempting higher standard developments from HMO licence fees if high standards can be maintained.
Safeguard tenements and Glasgow’s built heritage
We will:
- Set up a Glasgow Heritage Commission to make recommendations to end the neglect and demolition of our heritage buildings.
- Increase funding to address repairs and energy efficiency improvements to pre-1919 tenements.
- Support the acquisition of tenement housing stock by registered social landlords, particularly where it is in mixed ownership and in poor condition. Use this opportunity to implement factoring, improve conditions and enable whole-block retrofits.
- Continue to campaign for changes to VAT which make it cheaper for developers to demolish and rebuild than to upgrade existing buildings.
- Identify opportunities to list more buildings and extend conservation areas, and make greater use of existing powers to preserve buildings.
- Continue to support Glasgow City Heritage Trust and Glasgow Buildings Preservation Trust.
- Strengthen heritage protections in the new City Development Plan, taking embodied carbon into account, and making it harder to demolish buildings.
- Require heritage training for members of the Planning Applications Committee.
A development plan which reflects local priorities
We will:
- Deliver a new City Development Plan that corrects historic mistakes in Glasgow and steps up to the climate and nature emergencies.
- Support the delivery of 20 minute neighbourhoods, and take steps to restrict developments that generate unnecessary car journeys.
- Provide funding for the development of Local Place Plans. Equip communities with everything they need to investigate their own development needs and plan their futures.
- Lobby the Scottish Government for further reforms to the planning system to allow local residents more say in planning matters, including but not limited to a third party right of appeal.
- Enhance and develop the planning training offered to community councils and other relevant community bodies, supporting them in their important role as consultees and representatives of communities.
- Consider how planning decisions can be made at a more local level.
Safer streets and public spaces
We will:
- Improve public space lighting and accelerate the roll-out of LED lighting which is nature-friendly as standard.
- Ensure faster reporting and repair of lighting faults, including using sensor technology to automate this.
- Seek local community input, giving priority to women, disabled people and other marginalised groups, to identify where spaces could be better lit, redesigned or busier to make them feel safer.
Litter-free neighbourhoods
We will:
- Support communities to develop litter prevention plans involving all relevant local partners.
- Increase the number of environmental health officers, explore ways to improve evidence gathering, and lobby for changes to national legislation so it is easier to prosecute serious flytipping. We will also support the case for a separate Environmental Court system to improve the enforcement of environmental protection laws.
- Ensure all businesses use appropriate waste and recycling collections, and seek better coordination of non-council waste services.
- Deliver enhanced litter collection and neighbourhood deep cleans on a regular basis.
Ensure parks meet everyone’s needs
We will:
- Protect and enhance dedicated parks staffing.
- Support better pathway maintenance and drainage in parks.
- Increase the number of enclosed dog runs in parks across the city.
- Resist the use of public parks for private events where this will lead to extended closure or damage to grass, and require an Environmental Impact Assessment.
- Support appropriate lighting in parks and increase public toilet provision.
Reduce impacts of cars on communities
We will:
- Increase spending on road, cycle lane and footway repairs and use the opportunities presented by any resurfacing works to implement road safety or traffic calming measures.
- Implement the pavement parking ban without widespread exemptions and enforce this proactively.
- Support a wider range of traffic calming measures and lower the qualifying threshold for taking action.
- Bring in more residents' parking schemes and use parking charges as a way to change behaviours.
Bringing communities together through play
We will:
- Complete the renewal of all of Glasgow’s children’s outdoor play facilities, deliver new play provision where it is needed, and strengthen requirements on housing developers to provide play facilities close by.
- Waive road closure costs for community Street Play events any weekend, all year round.
- Create a dedicated fund for community events.
- Encourage shared management of private lanes and back courts, and provide funding to help residents improve them.
- Support public protest
- Support and facilitate people’s rights to protest, without impinging on the rights of others.
- Create a regular public forum for holding the council, Police Scotland and other agencies to account for the way protests are handled.
- Campaign for stronger legal guidance governing public processions, to take into account their cumulative impacts and to make it easier to reroute processions.
- Work to prevent and eradicate anti-Irish racism.