The man on the Buchanan Galleries steps: was he right about council houses?

A man sitting on the steps by Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow has been shared all over social media this week, saying Scotland's council houses were taken from the public and sold off. He swears a lot and he doesn't mince his words. He's also mostly right.

What he said, word for word

The clip is 86 seconds long. Below it is every word. I've starred out the swearing, because some of the people who use this site are at school, but I haven't changed anything else.

Full transcript

The council own nothing. They own absolutely f***ing nothing. Not one thing. It all belongs to the people.

And it wasn't that long ago that you could demand that the council find you a property, because it was your property. All of the properties were your properties. They belonged to everybody. They were community owned.

And then they decided they were gonnae con you. They were gonnae defraud the whole f***ing lot of yous, and sell you back that which was already yours at a f***ing very small peppercorn rent.

And look where we are now. People have got them on private hands and private ownership, and they're charging fortunes to rent them. Fortunes! £750, £800 a month for a f***ing two bedroom ex-council house. I know a guy that was paying f***ing £750 for a one bedroom house, and you couldnae swing a f***ing cat in it. That's how bad it is.

And yous all allowed it. The whole f***ing country allowed it. Because it was fraud. Absolute, abject fraud. They didnae own them. They didnae have the right to sell them. They had a fiduciary duty to protect that property for all of you. All of you.

Thieving, criminal, corrupt, parasitic f***s.

What we don't know about him

Let's be honest about something first. Nobody watching this knows who he is or how he lives. We're all filling in the gaps.

He's sitting on cold steps in the dark, rolling a cigarette out of a tin, and he looks like life hasn't been kind to him lately. He talks about housing like someone who's felt it, not someone who's read about it. So most people, me included, have assumed he's struggling, maybe without a home of his own. I'd bet a fair bit on it. But it is a bet. He might have a flat round the corner. I'm writing about what he said, not deciding who he is.

What struck me, and I think most people who shared it, is the gap between how he looks and how he talks. "Peppercorn rent." "Fiduciary duty." "Absolute, abject fraud." He doesn't stumble over any of it. Plenty of politicians couldn't deliver it that cleanly with a speechwriter and an autocue. That says more about us than about him. We decide what somebody knows before they've opened their mouth.

So I checked what he said against the official figures.

Were the council houses sold off?

Yes. This is the heart of what he's saying, and it's true.

Right to Buy let council tenants buy the home they lived in for less than it was worth. The longer they'd been a tenant, the bigger the discount. In Scotland it came in with the Tenants' Rights, Etc. (Scotland) Act 1980.

In 1981, fewer than 4 in 10 homes in Scotland were owned by the people living in them. By 2024 it was 6 in 10, and only 23% of homes were social homes, rented from a council or a housing association.

The Scottish Parliament ended Right to Buy on 31 July 2016. The Scottish Government said that would stop up to 15,500 more social homes being sold over the next ten years. By then, nearly half a million had gone.

Was it fraud?

Here's where he goes further than the facts.

In law, the council did own those homes. They were built and run with public money, and you can argue they belonged to everyone in a moral sense. But the legal title sat with the council.

And Right to Buy wasn't something councils dreamed up. Parliament passed it. A tenant who qualified had a legal right to buy, and the council had to sell. You can call that a terrible policy, and plenty of people do. But a law passed by Parliament isn't fraud, and councils that followed it weren't committing a crime.

"Fiduciary duty" is a good phrase, and he uses it properly. It means a duty to look after something on someone else's behalf, the way a trustee looks after money for a child. Councils are meant to look after public money and property for the people they serve. His argument is that selling homes cheaply, homes that were never replaced, broke that trust. That's a political argument rather than a legal one. It's a serious one, and I think it's the one he's really making.

One small thing. A peppercorn rent is a token rent, next to nothing. He uses it to mean the homes were sold for far less than they were worth. The term's a bit off, but the point stands.

Is he right about the rents?

He says people are paying £750 to £800 a month for a two bedroom ex council house. If anything, he's being kind.

Compare that with council rent. The average council rent in Scotland was £86.32 a week in 2024/25, about £374 a month, across every size of home. A two bedroom private let in Greater Glasgow costs nearly three times that.

His friend paying £750 for a one bedroom place isn't far off either. The ONS average for a one bedroom home in Greater Glasgow was £845 in September 2026.

These figures mostly reflect homes advertised to new tenants, so some people who've been in the same place for years pay less. But anyone looking for somewhere now faces these prices. And the help hasn't kept up: the most Universal Credit will pay towards private rent is frozen below the average, as my guide to the Local Housing Allowance rent shortfall shows.

Not every home sold under Right to Buy is rented out now. Many are still lived in by the families who bought them, or by the people they sold to. But some have ended up with private landlords, and when they're let, they're let at market rents. I couldn't find an official count of how many in Scotland.

Can you still demand the council finds you a home?

This is the one part he's got backwards, and the truth is almost worse.

On paper, your rights are stronger now than they've ever been. Since 31 December 2012, if you're homeless in Scotland and it isn't judged to be your own fault, the council has a legal duty to find you a settled home. Not just families or people who are ill. Everyone.

The problem is there aren't enough homes to keep that promise. In 2025/26:

• •19,004 households were in temporary accommodation on 31 March 2026, the highest since the figures began in 2002.
• •10,715 children were among them, also a record.
• •On 21,800 occasions, a council should have offered somebody temporary accommodation and didn't.
• •There were 7,760 breaches of the rules that limit how long people can be kept in unsuitable places like B&Bs.

Glasgow City Council declared a housing emergency on 30 November 2023. The Scottish Parliament declared a national one on 15 May 2024. So the right he says we've lost still exists. It's the homes that have gone.

Hardship can reach anyone

Whatever his story is, I think the clip landed because most of us know somebody who's one bad year from trouble. Maybe we are. Homelessness in Scotland doesn't look the way people imagine.

• •41,443 households applied to their council as homeless in 2025/26.
• •The most common place people became homeless from was a family member's or a friend's home. A sofa, a spare room, a favour that ran out.
• •50% had at least one support need, such as mental health. The other half didn't.
• •62% were aged 25 to 49. Working age people, not just the very young or the very old.
• •716 households included someone who had served in the armed forces.
• •2,949 had slept rough the night before they applied.

Poverty works the same way. About 940,000 people in Scotland, 17%, were in poverty in 2022 to 2025. Two thirds of them (66%) live in a household where somebody works. And where you live matters: 31% of private renters are in poverty, against 12% of people who own their home outright. Rent alone pulls 13% of private renters below the poverty line.

Life can turn quickly. A relationship ends. A job goes. Somebody gets ill, or dies. A landlord sells up. Most people are a couple of those away from needing help, and the safety net he's talking about, a big stock of cheap public homes, is a lot thinner than it was.

I don't know if the man on the steps has a home tonight. I hope he does. But he's right that something was sold that can't easily be bought back, and the people paying for it now are the ones with the least choice. See the causes of poverty in Scotland for more on how that happens.

If you're struggling with housing

• •Shelter Scotland's free helpline: 0808 800 4444, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.
• •If you're homeless or about to be, go to your council's homelessness team. They have a legal duty to help, and to find you somewhere to stay while they look into it. mygov.scot explains what happens.
• •If your benefits don't cover your rent, ask your council for a Discretionary Housing Payment.
• •If you can't afford food or heating right now, a crisis grant doesn't have to be paid back.