Scottish House Condition Survey Local Authority Tables 2022-2024

Scottish Housing Quality Standard (SHQS)

The SHQS is a common standard for assessing the condition of Scotland’s social sector housing. However, as the SHCS collects data on all tenures, the data can be compared across the housing stock although private owners and landlords are currently under no obligation to bring their properties up to this standard. Dwellings are assessed on 55 different elements – which are broken into five broader criteria. Failure of one of these criteria results in an outright SHQS fail – the criteria themselves can be failed in many cases on a single element. In the SHCS 54 of the 55 individual elements are assessed by surveyors trained to collect detailed information on housing characteristics. Only one element is not assessed using SHCS data: no information is collected on external noise insulation[1]. The data collected is subsequently aggregated by Scottish Government analysts into higher level measures for each of the five criteria and the standard overall[2]. A full list of SHQS criteria is available on the SHQS website.

In the period 2022-2024, an average of 55% of dwellings in Scotland failed the SHQS (Figure 12). West Lothian (42%), Clackmannanshire (45%), East Dunbartonshire (46%) and Stirling (49%) had failure rates lower than the Scottish average. Five local authorities had failure rates higher than the Scotland average, East Lothian (66%), Argyll & Bute (65%), Dumfries & Galloway (65%), North Ayrshire (63%) and Shetland Islands (63%).

Focusing on the social sector, the average national SHQS failure rate was 41% in the period 2022-2024 (Figure 13). Most local authorities had similar rates to the 2022-2024 social sector national average. However, Shetland Islands (72%) and East Lothian (58%) had higher failure rates than the national average, while social sector failure rates in Glasgow City (34%), North Lanarkshire (32%) and Stirling (20%) were below the national average. It should be noted that as the social sector sample size in the SHCS is smaller than all tenures overall (nationally 2,020 compared to 9,036 in the three year period), there are larger margins of error associated with social sector estimates (as seen comparing the confidence interval ranges in Figure 12 and Figure 13).

The most common criterion all local authorities failed on was around elements relating to energy efficiency followed by the below tolerable standard criterion. The next most common failures were generally on elements relating to the “Healthy, Safe and Secure” criterion, followed by those addressing the “Modern Facilities” criterion.

The Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR) is responsible for monitoring compliance of the social housing sector with the SHQS. There are some differences between the SHR and the SHCS in the way data for assessing the standard is collected and reported which make the headline rates not immediately comparable. Abeyances and exemptions are not taken into account by the SHCS as it is not feasible to collect this kind of information in the survey. In addition, despite the high quality of the physical survey, there are challenges in detecting the presence of cavity wall insulation in all cases.

On average across 2022-2024, 55% of dwellings failed the SHQS (all tenures).

Figure 12: Percent dwellings failing SHQS (all tenures), compared to Scotland average. SHCS 2022-2024. [Note 1]

On average across 2022-2024, 41% of social sector dwellings failed the SHQS.

Figure 13: Percent social sector dwellings failing the SHQS compared to Scotland average. SHCS 2022-2024. [Note 1]