23 November 2025

Missing Share Scheme

Written by: factors

All may not be lost if a fellow owner fails to stump up!

Housing (Scotland) Act 2006

The Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 gives local councils, in Scotland, the ability, if they choose (not a requirement) to intervene where owners are having problems getting other owners to pay their share of repair costs for common area repairs and maintenance. This can allow the majority of responsible owners to proceed with urgent work without delay. But as you can imagine, where public money is concerned:

There isn’t a requirement for local councils to offer this scheme.
If they do offer the scheme then the requirements are tightly written and there’s no way that they’ll pay for some grass cutting if one of the owners refuses to pay! It really needs to be essential repairs or maintenance.

Realistically, the scheme is only deployed in self-factoring situations, because the council expects professional factoring businesses to have their own debt collection facilities, and ways to dealing with owner “bads debts”.

This power is granted to local authorities under Section 50 of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006. It’s important to know that it is not mandatory for every council to run a scheme, and the exact rules (like financial thresholds or fees) can vary significantly between local authorities.

What is eligible?

To apply to the scheme, the repair must be classified as essential common maintenance, and the owners who are paying must have followed the correct legal procedures. So, if you think that you may need to apply to the scheme, firstly make sure that you follow the decision-making, owner communication and, where needed multiple quotes requirements to the letter. This usually means securing a majority decision for the work and formally serving a Section 50 Notice to all owners.

The “51% Rule”. Most councils will only consider an application for a missing share once they are satisfied that a strong majority of owners, usually at least 51% , have already paid their share into a designated maintenance account. An account that has been correctly setup and is being correctly administered according to Deeds or other legislation (again, stick to the letter of the regulations).

Whose share can it cover?

The scheme is typically used for owners who are identified as unwilling to pay, unable to pay (e.g., due to poverty), or cannot be found after reasonable inquiry (e.g., an untraceable landlord). But unwilling payers aren’t “getting away with it” because there will be a debt recovery process put in place.

So, for the avoidance of doubt, the scheme isn’t making a grant, rather, it’s accelerating payment of the missing share(s), whilst doing everything possible to recover the debt in due course.

How is the debt recovered?

The money the council pays out is not a grant to the building; it is a debt recovered from the non-paying owner. The council will add interest and administrative fees, and they often secure the debt against the non-paying property by placing a Charging Order or Inhibition on the Title Deeds of the specific property concerned, which essentially means they get paid when the property is eventually sold, because no buyer, or their solicitor, will want buy a property that has an undischarged Charging Order against it.

For example Edinburgh Council’s scheme

Edinburgh City Council do have a Missing Share Scheme (at the time of writting, late 2025) and they also publish a very clear and helpful guide for potential users of the scheme. A short extract, which addresses what the owners must demonstrate is below:

show that the maintenance being carried out is reasonable
show that each owner is being asked to pay their correct share of the costs
show that written notice requesting payment has been provided to each owner, where they are traceable
open a ‘maintenance account’, that is, a bank account set up to hold owners’ funds which are used to pay for any common repair and maintenance costs. (The account should be set up by either the property manager (factor) or at least two other people to authorise transactions on behalf of the other owners.)
nominate a person (once the maintenance account is open) to write to all the owners advising them that they must deposit their share of the cost of work into the maintenance account. This process is referred to as serving a section 50 notice (s50)
show that an owner hasn’t paid their share of repair costs into the maintenance account by the final date for owners to make payment into the maintenance account
show that a Scheme decision taken has been notified to all owners.