Glasgow City Council’s property arm has made headlines again this week, this time for trying to squeeze an exorbitant sum from a vital charity by hiking up rents.

The charity, Turning Point Scotland, is a life-saving crisis service for vulnerable Scots struggling with drugs and alcohol. City Property, the ALEO, had already slapped the charity with an outrageous six-figure dilapidations bill in September last year for its former premises at 218 Bath Street, which Turning Point Scotland (TPS) was forced to vacate in February 2024 after Glasgow’s health and social care partnership sliced the frontline service’s tender in half.

The salt in the wound this week was a doubling of rent on the charity’s property in Tradeston, which they warned could close within weeks if the dispute is not resolved.

Govan Law Centre is now taking a case to Scotland’s top civil court on behalf of a service user to determine via judicial review just how lawful City Property’s (and the council’s) policy of seeking large commercial rents and dilapidations bills from critical charities is.

If you can hear a bell ringing, it could be the faint peals of the Trongate 103 eviction row that unfolded in the spring, when City Property decided to radically alter leases and surge rents for arts organisations in the Merchant City building they called home.

It also reminds me of a poignant protest I covered a few years ago in Easterhouse. Dozens of traders walked out of The Lochs Shopping Centre in the biting cold amid claims that City Property (their landlord) was seeking backdated rents from businesses closed during lockdown, which they couldn’t afford, and ignoring pleas for face-to-face meetings (City Property said it was “not aware” of the meeting requests). The shopping centre, which functioned more like a community hub popular with pensioners, had faulty heating, an inoperative escalator and a damaged car park that the landlord hadn’t fixed, the shopkeepers claimed.

A few months later I went to Sandy Smiths Butchers in Govan. Mr........

© Herald Scotland