Scheme of Assistance
The Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 introduced a new Scheme of Assistance, which replaced the previous system of private sector home improvement grants. The scheme also aims to encourage home owners to take more responsibility for the condition of their homes, to ensure that private housing in Scotland is kept in a decent state of repair.
Home owners are primarily responsible for their own property under their title deeds, but local authorities have statutory powers to maintain and improve the general condition of private sector housing in their area. If an owner needs help to look after their home, the Scheme of Assistance allows local authorities broad discretionary powers to provide assistance. This assistance can be provided through advice and guidance, practical help, or through financial assistance by way of grants or loans. But it is for the local authority to determine what kinds of assistance are made available on the basis of local priorities and budgets.
Local authorities must provide assistance to owners who have been served a statutory work notice requiring them to bring a house into a reasonable state of repair. Local authorities must provide assistance by way of grant for most work to adapt homes to meet the needs of disabled people, other than for home extensions. All other assistance is discretionary.
Under the Scheme of Assistance local authorities must prepare a statement providing information about the assistance that is available locally.
In 2010-11 the Scottish Government collected some statistics from councils on this scheme. As this was the first year that these statistics were collected, and due to the fact that some councils were unable to record all of the information asked for, these statistics are provisional official statistics. We expect the quality of the data to improve over time as councils become familiar with monitoring the scheme - as such there may be revisions to the published data in the future.
The statistics reveal that councils provided householders with 25,000 instances of help and spent almost £50 million. Of this:
· 6,000 grants were paid to disabled households totaling £22.4 million.
· 3,000 grants were paid to non-disabled households totaling £12.4 million.
· 15,700 instances of non financial help were given to non-disabled households
· £12.6 million was spent by councils on the operational costs of the scheme.
Web Tables
Summary statistics by local authority can be accessed through the following web link:
Link to web tables