When it comes to housing and health we need greater public awareness of the law and of our rights and obligations, says Steve Clarke.
To quote the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH): ‘Evidence suggests that living in poor housing can lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular and respiratory disease as well as to anxiety and depression. Problems such as damp, mould, excess cold and structural defects which increase the risk of an accident also present hazards to health.’
From the turn of the century, housing in Wales has received huge public benefit from ensuring there are measures to improve housing. The Welsh Housing Quality Standard in the social housing sector is a case in point. However, there is a clear growing divide between the standards of accommodation expected and delivered in the social housing sector and those in the private rented sector.
Of course there is legislation that ensures that any person renting accommodation receives safeguards in relation to structural and utility provisions. The health and safety rating system under the Housing Act 2004 ensures there is a process for measuring the impacts on hazards in the home. Annual gas safety checks, electrical checks for houses in multiple accommodation and other provisions also exist, smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors, known fire risks in furnishings are all now accepted practice in addition to recognition of the hazards of building materials such as asbestos that existed in so many materials. But many of these laws and standardised practices are complicated, require highly specialist knowledge and are little known among private renters and indeed landlords and letting agents.
As a representative organisation, working constructively within the sector, we acknowledge that huge strides have been taken to ensure that managers and staff obtain a better understanding of the links between housing and health. The CIEH-commissioned Building Research Establishment (BRE)[1] study, demonstrated the health and financial benefits that accrue from making the link. It estimated 363,433 recorded Category 1 hazards in occupied dwellings in Wales with average costs of £3,000 per property. This required an investment of some £1.2 billion with the estimated savings to the NHS trusts being around £67 million over 22 years. So there are proven public health and indeed fiscal benefits of providing intervention and investment.
But Category 1 hazards are not entirely limited to structural defects as a consequence of landlords’ repair and improvement provisions. We do need greater public awareness about not only the rights that accrue from the laws that seek to protect renters, but also how our lifestyles can impact on proper maintenance of the home. We would argue this is too great a task to leave to overseers alone.
As a society, we must do more to ensure that public education ensures that the laws, policies and processes that accrue from our knowledge and understanding of how we live and where we live, are in fact enacted in the home. Of course the added difficulty is that when we make laws, they are not always consistently consolidated into single Acts that pull them all together in an understandable way for the public.
At a recent private landlord seminar, where we were invited to speak, we recognised that despite the best efforts of private landlords, professionals and amateurs managing housing, people also need educating regarding their rights and obligations. That applies critically in how to exercise them, because our reliance on public and third sector advice, also requires knowing what to ask, who to ask, and how to exercise the enacted provisions that exist. Of course this can be further complicated, by our adversarial culture that also ensures that often the best defences are deflection, attack, or at the least go into officialdom mode, and that’s something that many people fail to cope with.
Given the limited resources available the challenge for government is how we can better educate the population to understand their rights and their obligations and the benefits that can accrue for their families and for the public purse if the home is well maintained. It’s therefore, not just about bricks and mortar, it’s also about educating people to understand lifestyle consequences in addition to the landlord’s obligations.
If we are to make significant inroads into the health and housing debate in Wales we do need to create greater public awareness of how our laws seek to protect us and what to do when they don’t. But we also need to understand better our obligations and the consequences of poor management of the home by occupiers. Striking a fair and proportionate balance must be the way forward.
Steve Clarke is managing director of Welsh Tenants
[1] BRE Housing Centre toolkit 2008, Good Housing Leads to Good Health