Scottish House Condition Survey Local Authority Tables 2022-2024

Disrepair

The SHCS quantifies disrepair for a wide range of building elements ranging from aspects of roofs and walls to chimney stacks, internal rooms and common parts of shared buildings like access balconies and entry doors. This is reported in two categories:

• Critical elements. This refers to disrepair to building elements central to weather-tightness, structural stability and preventing deterioration of the property, such as roof coverings or the structure of external walls. These elements are listed in section 2.7.1 of the Methodological and Technical notes.
• Non-critical elements. This relates to any damage to a non-critical element (such as skirtings and internal wall finishes, staircases, boundary fences or attached garages) which requires some repair beyond routine maintenance.

Elements in both of these categories can then be assessed according to the severity of disrepair, as follows:

• Urgent – this relates only to external and common elements[1] (a mixture of critical and non-critical) where immediate repair is required to prevent further deterioration to the building fabric or health and safety risk to occupants. Not all disrepair to critical elements is necessarily considered urgent by the surveyor. Internal room floor structures and floor finishes as well as internal walls and the presence of dry / wet rot are the only critical elements for which urgency is not applicable.
• Extensive – where the damage covers at least a fifth (20%) or more of the building element area. This can apply to any element whether critical or otherwise.

Disrepair which is not to a critical element, is not urgent or extensive, is referred to as basic. This is the minimum category of disrepair in the survey.

More detailed description of the categories of disrepair is given in section 2.7 of the Methodological and Technical notes.

Here we begin by focussing on any disrepair to critical elements, no matter how small. We then provide analysis of disrepair to critical elements by severity, in line with the Annual Key Findings Report. Full descriptions of the different categories can be found in Section 7.8.7 in the SHCS 2019 Key Findings Report. The published tables allow users to explore the other disrepair categories in more detail.

Disrepair to Critical Elements

Dundee City (74%) had the highest rates of disrepair to critical elements, whilst North Ayrshire had the lowest at 19%. Eight other local authorities had higher than average rates (47%) of disrepair to critical elements and eight had lower than average rates (Figure 10).

On average across 2022-2024, 47% of dwellings had disrepair to critical elements.

Figure 10: Percent dwellings with disrepair to critical elements by local authority, compared to Scotland average. SHCS 2022-2024. [Note 1]

Urgent Disrepair to Critical Elements

Considering severity of disrepair, Scottish Borders (44%) had the highest rates of urgent disrepair to critical elements, whilst East Renfrewshire (6%) had the lowest. Eight other local authorities had higher than average rates (18%) of urgent disrepair to critical elements and ten others had lower than average rates (Figure 11). Although some disrepair to critical elements is fairly common it tends to be at a relatively low level in each property, affecting on average no more than 2.5% of the relevant area in 2024; more details on disrepair can be found in Section 5 of the SHCS 2024 Key Findings Report.

On average across 2022-2024, 18% of dwellings had urgent disrepair to critical elements.

Figure 11: Percent dwellings with urgent disrepair to critical elements by local authority, compared to Scotland average. SHCS 2022-2024. [Note 1]

Extensive Disrepair to Critical Elements

Extensive disrepair to critical elements was low with a national average rate of 2%, Fife (4%), Glasgow City (1%) and North Lanarkshire (1%) are the local authorities with a rate significantly different to the national average[2].