Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. I am Florence Eshalomi, the Chair of the Committee. I ask members of the Committee to introduce themselves.

I am Gagan Mohindra, Conservative Member of Parliament for South West Hertfordshire.

I am Will Forster, Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Woking.

I am Maya Ellis, Labour Member of Parliament for Ribble Valley.

I am Joe Powell, Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater.

Naushabah Khan, Labour MP for Gillingham and Rainham.

I am Sarah Smith, Labour MP for Hyndburn.

I am Andrew Lewin, Labour MP for Welwyn Hatfield.

May I ask our guest to introduce himself?

I am Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at UCL.

Welcome and thank you for joining us this morning, Sir Michael. Our new inquiry is looking at the conditions of homes, a key issue that continues to fill all constituency MPs’ inboxes. Alongside the Government’s ambition to build new homes—that ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes—the Government are also keen to look at transformational change in the safety and quality of homes. You led a review in 2010, which was very clear that poor housing conditions constitute a risk to health. Since the review has been published, a range of successive Governments have been trying to address some of the key issues, looking at the health risk posed by poor housing conditions. My opening question, Sir Michael, is to what extent you feel that this new Government have taken a lead in looking at material improvements in poor living standards across the country, and in the work that they are doing a year into this Parliament.

Looking at the figures, not too much has changed. Forgive me; it is unfashionable to say anything good about the current Government. I showed a slide a few weeks ago that I think came from the Financial Times analysis of the spending review, by decile of income. It showed that the lower the income, the greater the benefit is from the spending review. If you read the newspapers you would not see it—you have to be a nerd to read the Financial Times analysis—but it really did look like the result of the spending review was in the direction of improving resources progressively for the poor household. That is positive, because that had not been the case over the life of the previous Government. The analysis of fiscal changes, tax and spending changes of the previous Government showed, certainly in the first 10 years from 2010, that for families with children, the poorer the household, the steeper the reduction was in income. It does look like a change and, before sharply regressive spending settlements, now it looks mildly progressive.

The new Government have made some key changes in the financial areas that you outline. There is an increase in the national minimum wage and a big debate around working conditions and workers’ rights—so again people can have a more stable job and not have the threat of unfair dismissals—and the changes in childcare. As you know, many families have been having to pay core costs, which would go to housing, on childcare. What further steps do you think the Government could be taking to reduce the health risk linked to poor housing conditions with a financial aspect?

There is a statistic that still makes my hair stand on end when I look at the graph, and it needs to be reversed. We plotted life expectancy for every local authority in England in 2010, and then we looked at the subsequent change in local government spending power. If you imagine the graph, we have life expectancy on the x axis and reduction in local government spending power on the y axis. The shorter the life expectancy in 2010, the steeper the reduction in local government spending power is over the next 10 years, so the more unhealthy the community, the more money was taken away. I look at that and say, “In what moral universe could that be the right thing to do?” How could you possibly justify that on any grounds at all? The sicker the community, the more money we will take away. That needs to be reversed immediately—immediately. That is just wrong. It is bad for health, and it is bad for productivity. It violates all norms of fairness and morality; it is just completely wrong. That needs to change, but it will not change quickly. I am not the only one who would like to see a more progressive council tax, if we are going to have council tax and consumption tax as an important part of our tax raising. We know that, in general, a consumption tax such as VAT is regressive, so the council tax needs to be made more progressive. The Economist has pointed out the difference between Buckingham Palace and somewhere in Salford. When they have noticed—

Then you know something is wrong.

There is something really wrong. The effect is that sicker communities are being made sicker by taking money away from them. That has to change.

I think you will find agreement here on council tax. It is a long-running thing that we will be taking up with the new Ministers.

Welcome, Sir Michael. In defence of the FT, I think they would argue that they are a bit more mainstream than nerd readership. In 2010, there was a change of Government and austerity kicked in. Off the back of that, central Government at the time had to make some political choices. How much do you think that fed into the reduction in local government financing? I should declare that prior to being a Member of Parliament, I was a finance leader in a local authority. Secondly, you made a point about local council funding. One the one hand, that is really important to local communities and health outcomes, but we have also had central Government funding through the likes of the NHS, ICBs and health trusts. Have you done any analysis to show how the whole-of-Government envelope spending has either increased or decreased, not just local government spending in councils?

Yes. In 2009-10, public sector expenditure was 42% of GDP. The Government elected in 2010—the Conservative-led coalition Government, as you rightly said—had austerity as their No. 1 priority, and it was achieved. That 42% of GDP on public sector expenditure went down year on year. By 2019, 42% had become 35%. I am not good at sums, but 7% of GDP, at today’s GDP of around £2 trillion, is about £170-180 billion a year taken out of public sector expenditure.

A lot of money.

The Government talk about a £20 billion black hole. I think somewhere around £180 billion a year was taken out of public sector expenditure and local government funding was done in a regressive way. If funding of the NHS had increased to the same extent as healthcare in France and Germany, we would be spending about 20% more than we currently do. There were difficulties across the board centrally, as you say, as well as locally. I am a doctor, not an economist. All the way back in 2010, I said to my economist colleagues, “Hang on, you guys. Surely you have an evidence base. Faced with a crisis like this, do you spend or do you stop spending?” The Keynesians said “Spend”; the austerians said “Don’t spend.” I said, “You guys, work this out. Come on, you have been studying this for centuries. What’s the answer? It makes a real difference.” I could not believe that there was no answer to that question. It then turned out that people to the right politically favoured the austerity line. Keynes was no socialist, but people to the left favoured the Keynesian line. I thought, “This isn’t good enough. I want to know which way will get us out of the economic mess,” because the austerity line led to a social and health mess. We calculated, and I have been criticised by colleagues, particularly in Scotland, for being too conservative. We did a calculation. I am sure you are going to ask me about housing, and I am happy to talk about housing.

We have quite a lot of questions to ask you, Sir Michael.

We did a calculation. If you look at the social gradient in mortality, people living in the least deprived decile have the lowest mortality. We asked the question, “How many fewer deaths would there be if everybody had the same low mortality as people in the best-off 10% of areas?” Over the decade from 2010 to 2020, there would have been 1 million fewer deaths if everybody had had the low mortality of the best-off 10%. In the decade prior to 2010 there was a social gradient, so there would have been excess deaths, but we calculated that in the decade from 2010 to 2020, there were 148,000 excess deaths. Arguably, austerity killed 148,000 people.

Did that time period include covid?

No. Then there was excess. What happened because of covid was excess linked to deprivation, where covid exacerbated the disadvantage of being relatively poor. The excess went up because of covid. If you include the covid period, life expectancy from 2010 to 2024 did not improve—14 years when it did not improve at all—whereas prior to 2010, life expectancy had been improving about one year every four years. In that 14-year period from 2010, including covid, life expectancy did not improve at all, health inequalities grew bigger and health for the poorest people became worse.

I am mindful of time, Sir Michael. If we can keep our replies a bit more succinct, that would be helpful. In considering mortality, we are going to be looking at issues around cold homes and energy efficiency.

I believe that in the IHE’s report you have outlined that to bring all the homes across the United Kingdom up to standards of energy efficiency and to tackle the issues of cold homes, you need investment of about £74.5 billion, but the Government have currently committed £13.2 billion to their warm home plan. I am interested in how you would like to see the Government utilising the funds they have invested in this area to deliver the greatest benefits.

I am not the Government, but I really like the idea of a £28 billion green budget. Our recommendation was that one way to spend a quarter of that green budget, which would save the country money, improve health, probably improve productivity and improve children’s lives, would be by insulating homes properly for people who could not afford to do it themselves, precisely because of the figure that you mentioned. To put it in context, as you will know from our report, fuel poverty is pretty simple. It has three components: the quality of housing, the cost of fuel and poverty—people’s ability to pay. We look pretty poor on all three of those factors. As a country, we stopped investing in home insulation after 2013. It went down by 90%; we had been investing in home insulation until 2013, but then it stopped. We have among the worst quality in Europe. If you look at the loss of heat over a five-hour period, the loss is greater in housing in the UK than in other European countries. We have poor insulation, for reasons that I don’t understand. Our energy costs are at least 20% higher than the European average. This shows how little I understand about economics. Out walking one Sunday morning, I said to a friend who is a distinguished economist, “Why is it that we pay the marginal cost for every unit of energy, not the average cost? If I buy underpants at Marks & Spencer, they charge me the average cost, plus the marketing and whatever, not the marginal cost. If they paid n for 950 pairs of underpants and n+5 for the last 50 pairs, they do not charge everybody n+5; they charge the average cost. Why do we pay more for wind when the price of gas goes up?” He said, “Do me a favour—it’s Sunday morning, I’m having a nice time. Do you have to destroy it?” So I said, “Well, can you explain this to me, because people are dying? They are freezing in their houses because we have to pay more for wind when the price of gas goes up. Please explain it to me.” He said, “I’ll write to you.” So he wrote to me and gave me a lecture in economics, and I still don’t get it. I am in no doubt that people who understand the energy market will explain, as my economist friend explained, why we pay more for wind when the price of gas goes up. Why, given that two thirds of our energy is nuclear or renewable and very little of it comes from the Ukraine or Russia, when the price of gas goes up, do we pay more for renewables and nuclear? That is the price. The third part is that real incomes have hardly recovered in the last 18 years since the global financial crisis, so we are poor. As we pointed out in our latest fuel poverty report, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculates that the median income in the UK is really pretty close to the minimum income for healthy living. The median is what you need to lead a healthy life. That means that about half the UK do not have enough money to lead a healthy life, and that includes for heating their dwelling. I have been saying for a long time, long before the “heating or eating” came out, that if you look at cost of housing, you have to take cost of food into account. You have to take employment and what people are earning into account. We cited figures from the Food Foundation that to follow the healthy eating advice, if you are in the poorest 20% of income, you would have to spend half your income on food. The figures from the Resolution Foundation were that if you are in the bottom half of the income distribution and renting, you would have to spend 40% of your income on rent—so now you are spending half on food and 40% on rent. That is 90%. If your children need a new pair of trainers, forget it.

To bring it back to the warm homes plan, Sir Michael, how would you want to see that implemented, delivered and measured?

I beg your pardon, Chair. I would like to restore a green budget and to recognise that investment in home insulation, alongside the other two components that I have just mentioned—poverty levels and cost of fuel—is actually an investment. It is not a cost, because it would be good for meeting net zero targets, for reducing air pollution and for improving children’s health, their mental wellbeing and their educational performance. You would reduce excess winter mortality. It is an investment. I argue strongly that there needs to be a restoration of the green budget and that this should be part of it.

My constituency is one in which we have seen growing inequality in health, in life expectancy. There is now a 19-year gap between the poorest parts of my constituency and the wealthiest parts, even though they are adjacent. In my casework, I see a lot of issues with overcrowding. To what extent is that problem responsible for some of the differences in life expectancy? It is obviously one of the hardest things to solve from a local authority perspective, because local authorities lack supply, but are there practical things that we could do, while the Government are trying to increase supply, that you think would make a difference to overcrowding?

The first thing is that I find it very difficult to isolate one component and say that this or that is contributing so much to the health or the life expectancy difference. It is difficult for me to put a precise figure to answer your question of how much overcrowding is playing a role as compared with the other things. For example, take the educational performance of children in primary school. The more risk factors they have present, the worse the educational performance. One of the risk factors is overcrowding, but it is only one; there is also mental illness in parents, poverty, cold homes and so on. Overcrowding is only one factor. Like many people, I thought a lot about the fact that we dealt with rough sleepers overnight when the pandemic hit. Suddenly there was an emergency and we did it. This afternoon, when I leave here, I am going to walk—it was hard getting here. I am chairing a group for Camden council on children in temporary accommodation. The question is, why can’t we solve this today?

It is a question we ask almost every day in this committee.

That is the question I am going to ask these colleagues. I am chairing the group as an outsider, but I will ask these colleagues from Camden council. It has to be solvable, and really quickly.

Are there things that you would like to see schools or local authorities or others do for those children in overcrowded properties? We know the waiting lists are so long, especially for family-sized social housing. What are some of the things that those groups could do?

The evidence is that schools really can make a difference. I am sure you are familiar with the evidence, largely from the USA, that if you compare kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with kids from more advantaged backgrounds, at markers of school performance, the gap gets less as the school year progresses. The poorer kids catch up, but then, over the holidays, the gap opens up. When they start the new school year, the gap is wide again, and it then gets narrower as the school year progresses. That suggests that there is a great deal that schools and others can do. It is possible to provide places for children to study and do their homework. That could be done in schools. Schools are empty most of the time. There are all kinds of ways we could be thinking about solving the problem. If children cannot have a warm place to do their homework, it is probably possible to solve that and find a warm place for them to do their homework under supervision. That relates to your earlier question about cuts elsewhere in the system. There must be funding for it, but the facilities are probably there. The potential is probably there.

My constituency of Ribble Valley has a significant ageing population, and a lot of people are living in quite dated housing stock, which is not adapted. Looking at climate change, we know that heat-related deaths are on the increase and will only continue to increase. Given that our houses are not necessarily adapted for that kind of heat, what kind of changes would you like to see? Do you think it is possible to adapt our housing and the way we support people in the housing stock we have to avoid more of those heat-related deaths?

The impact of the gradient in mortality and health is that inequalities are not confined to poor health for the poor. People in the middle have worse health than people higher up, and that suggests that we are not dealing only with material conditions of poverty. I said before that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation figures suggest that about half the population is below the minimum income threshold. That means that even people who have their own house, who are not in squalor and who seem to be reasonably well off are not doing as well as they could. For people a bit higher up that spectrum, paying attention to energy saving is an important part of contributing to the net zero agenda. We did a report for the Climate Change Committee looking at equity, but the issues we looked at were housing, food, transport and work, and how you could take action in those four domains that would be good for both health equity and the net zero agenda. I think there is a great deal can happen to improve the efficiency of adequate housing that is not damaging children or adults’ health but could be made more efficient with respect to energy use. It is the same with transport. I was thinking when my cab came 45 minutes late this morning that I could actually have walked from home to Parliament in two hours. It would have been a good deal less stressful than waiting for the cab. All right, I am being silly now, but thinking about transport with a climate change hat on, there is so much more we could do about walking and cycling. It comes back to your opening question about the Government’s agenda. In thinking about 1.5 million new houses, we also have to think about the context in which those houses are placed.

To follow up on that more generally for the ageing population, to what extent do you think that we should be looking at different groups of the population in thinking about house building? Should we be supporting older people who own their homes to continue living in them, or do you feel that we should be supporting people to move into homes that are more adapted to how they need to live as they age? Do you have a strong view?

No, I don’t have a strong view. My general view is that I don’t want to do anything to make life worse for people who are better off; I want to make life better for people who are worse off. I don’t want to destroy the comfort and enjoyable life of people who are leading decent lives; I want to make things better for the people who are not able to enjoy those things. I don’t have a strong view. We need to think about climate, energy efficiency, transport, household and neighbourhood amenities and the like. I have, as I am sure many of you have, been lobbied hard that low-traffic neighbourhoods are terrible things and I thought, “Hang on, I thought it was an unalloyed good thing.” But I have been lobbied hard, because it gets traffic on to main roads where poor people, ethnic minorities and the like live and the argument is that it increases exposure. My response is that we need to look at those important questions and make sure that the actions we are taking for good reasons do not cause unintended harm. I don’t want to cause unintended harm to anybody.

Thank you very much, Sir Michael. I think it is fair to say that the 2010 review highlighted and raised the profile of poor housing conditions and that we will feature that as we embark on this new inquiry. Thank you very much for your time this morning. I am sure the Committee will be in touch with you again. Witnesses: Helen Garrett, Dr Henry Dawson, Michael Erhardt and Millie Brown.

Welcome to the second evidence session of our new inquiry on the conditions of homes. Could our guests just introduce themselves, please, for Hansard?

I am Dr Henry Dawson, speaking on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.

I am Millie Brown, deputy director for homes at the Centre for Ageing Better.

I am Mikey Erhardt, policy lead at Disability Rights UK.

I am Helen Garrett, representing the Building Research Establishment.

We have a range of questions for this second session. Again, we will be looking at issues around the conditions of homes.

The panel will be aware of the Government’s intention to build 1.5 million homes, but alongside that ambition they are really keen to deliver transformational and lasting change to the safety and the quality of housing. It would be interesting to hear what you think the scale is of the challenge that the Government face in reaching that goal.

I have a few points on that, if I may. We welcome the improvements that have been made to the energy efficiency standards that people in the rented sector are expected to meet. One of our concerns is that we have spent a long time insulating the easier-to-treat properties and we are now dealing with a harder kernel of hard-to-treat properties with solid walls, typically pre-1920s properties, might be listed, might not be. One of our concerns with the implementation of these new standards in rental accommodation is that we might see it being moved into the owner-occupied sector, when our ultimate aim is to improve the levels of affordable heating and insulation for all properties. We are concerned to see a displacement rather than a resolution of the problem in those properties, predominantly because these hard-to-treat properties are exceptionally expensive to insulate. We have a situation with variation in the stock between different local authorities around the country, yet a lot of the approaches that we are taking are blanket approaches. We could do more of a local authority-based approach. Local authorities know their areas, the conditions in their areas, the specific issues with legacy property building being carried out and what they need to be focusing their efforts on. We have made some improvements to keeping housing warm. However, the cost of fuel has increased. What we are seeing here is warmer housing, but with people unable to afford the additional heating cost for that accommodation. That is providing us with more properties for people who are not heating them enough to keep them warm. We have issues in the rental sector in particular, where people are relying on peak-rate electrical heating, which is generally used to heat individual rooms within a property rather than the structure of the property, as it costs so much to run. We are seeing a lot more damp and condensation in those properties, because people are reluctant to use expensive heating to replace the damp air that they would ventilate otherwise. Predominantly, local authorities are at the coalface in trying to rectify all these issues. Over time, between 2010 and 2020, we have had a 41% reduction in local authority funding and a reduction of a third in environmental health practitioners able to carry out works to rectify a lot of the issues in our built environment. We are very keen to see sustainable and predictable funding sources for the local authorities that implement a lot of the policy that is made here. I will allow some time for the other panel members to speak.

To continue that theme, talking about new homes and existing homes, I gave evidence to the panel on older people’s housing recently, thinking about accessibility. That is our major new thing. Of new builds, only 13% of homes currently meet M4(2), but we know that one in five people is disabled. Also, the population is ageing. For new builds, that is what we are pushing for. Thinking about the existing housing stock, we welcome the extension of the decent homes standard and the introduction of Awaab’s law. We think that they can be transformative. However, for the private rented sector and the social rented sector, there is a discussion about homeowners. I know that it is not represented much in policy, but we know, for example, that 2.3 million older people are currently living in non-decent homes, and 1.9 million of those people are homeowners. The Government’s responsibility is to homeowners, but if we do not address this, the impact will be huge. We know that half the £1.4 billion spent per year on the NHS on people in non-decent homes is on older people, who largely live in homes that they own. Currently, we are talking about disabled facilities grants. We responded to a consultation to change the allocation, and we really welcome it. However, there is still an issue with the means test when 1.9 million older people are living in poverty. Those people are not usually covered by the DFG because the means test is so outdated. We would really push for the Committee to think about how we help that group, who are particularly in need.

I agree with a lot of what Millie has said. As probably none of you will be surprised to hear, accessibility of our housing stock is very poor. We have never really built the homes that disabled people need. When we are thinking about what disabled people want and need out of housing in the UK at the moment, what I get told most is, “I would like to be able to afford it.” Disabled people on low incomes cannot afford where rent has been for years, let alone where rent is predicted to go. We do the ambitious house building, and we don’t disagree that we need to have ambitious social housing and building targets and keep to them, but are we going to change the ratio of rent to income with 1.5 million new homes? Beth Stratford and the team at UCL crunched the numbers, and the ratio will change by about one percentage point. Achieving the building all of those homes is frankly unrealistic at the moment, given the issues that we have with supply, skills and the kinds of homes we are building—a lot of them will not be accessible homes. If the ambitious plans are left the way they are, we are not going to make them affordable for people; we will just have lots more homes that people cannot afford to live in.

Part of my role is helping with the Government’s English housing survey, so it is perhaps not surprising that I love to bombard people with EHS statistics. As we presented in our submission, 15% of homes—that is 3.8 million homes—currently fail the decent home standard. That figure will of course go up, because the proposed standard will take away the requirement to replace ageing building elements. If you take that requirement away, you are just left with the disrepair in the stock.

Just as an estimate, how much do you think that would increase by?

I do not have those figures. It is in the impact assessment on the decent homes; I am not sure how much the MHCLG team has changed our original work on that, but it is in the impact assessment.

But the increase is significant?

There will be a significant increase, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it is delivering more of the standard that I think tenants aspire to and is the best way to mitigate failing standards. We still have 8% of dwellings with category 1 hazards, which means they fail the statutory minimum standard for housing. We have 1.3 million dwellings, or 5% of the stock, with what I would categorise as the most serious form of damp, whereby the risks to the household would be significantly higher than average. Over the previous five years, the EHS has reported increasing numbers, so rather than getting better on that measure, we are actually going in the wrong direction. Generally speaking, over the last five years a lot of those housing metrics have not notably improved at all. They are very much trickling along the ground.

You mentioned damp, Helen. The Government are seeking to roll out Awaab’s law from October. From the figures you have just highlighted, do you think the housing sector is ready to deal with that?

The housing sector is probably in a better position to state its readiness than I am. It is an excellent introduction, and I applaud the Government for taking it one step at a time and evaluating it before it is brought into other hazards. What it will do, which is really good, is raise awareness among social landlords—and hopefully private landlords and tenants as well—about the potential risk to their health and safety. We need the resources to be able to find those properties and educate landlords and so forth. So yes, one would hope that the figures will go down, but I recognise that private landlords and social landlords are often in a different position. They have a different starting point from which to tackle these important initiatives that the Government are introducing. One figure I did get from the EHS research for today, which the panel may be interested in—the latest figures are not available publicly, so I have to be careful in what I say—is about urgent disrepair in the housing stock. This does not have anything to do with decent homes; it has to do with the repair. There is either danger to the occupants or disrepair that is seriously making the property at risk of rapid deterioration. Way back in 2019, that was £21 billion across all tenures, and if we look at the repair that needs doing over a five-year period, it was roughly £35 billion. Obviously, most of that disrepair will be in the owner-occupied sector, and I fully support what Millie said. It is kind of the elephant in the room that most of our problems are in that tenure, because it is the most common tenure. I am anticipating that those urgent disrepair figures will probably exceed £30 billion now, given that we have had building cost inflation. It gives you an idea of the amount of work that we have. That kind of disrepair adds to the problems of non-decency and category 1 hazards.

That is really interesting. The panel has already touched a little on how this sits across different tenure types. I am sure that other MPs will share this experience: when I deal with constituents who are living in HMOs or in private rented accommodation, they often complain about the state of the property and the conditions. I would be interested to hear your reflections on how this sits across different tenure types, particularly student accommodation and HMOs.

I don’t largely work with HMOs, but I think it goes to the point you mentioned earlier about whether the housing sector is ready for it, with people living in those conditions. With Awaab’s law and the extension of the decent homes standard, you are relying on local authorities to monitor what is happening locally. They currently do not have enough resource capacity or funding to even improve the homes they own themselves. Looking to the future, there has to be a relationship between national and local government. We are expecting local government to do more, but what are the national Government giving them to enable them to do that? It is not just about funding; it is also about information, advice, support, listening and skills. I know we are here today to talk about housing, but there is an interconnection with how we can improve skills across not only retrofitting homes but the energy efficiency stuff that we talk about again and again. We have a massive skills gap. I think about Better Ageing’s work programme. How do we utilise the skills of the older generation to improve housing? That is a big thing for the Committee to think about. With overcrowding and HMOs so far, we have not spoken about this so far, but we need to look at the intersection of inequalities a bit further in terms of racialised communities; they are more likely to live in these homes. When we are talking about this, another element is giving local authorities guidance about how to interact with these groups and have the most impact on improving health equalities in HMOs and on overcrowding. There needs to be more guidance from national Government on how local government can deal with these things.

Thinking about how Awaab’s law will operate in practice, and moving on to overcrowding: Awaab’s law requires tenants to take direct legal action against the landlords. That is quite a tall ask, particularly for what is likely to be the most vulnerable tenants in the poorest-quality housing in society. Very often, tenants will move on to alternative accommodation rather than face a protracted battle with a landlord to address issues, but very often at the lowest end of the sector the alternative accommodation looks very similar to what they have just moved out from. In the guidance for Awaab’s law that has come out fairly recently, we have seen some very loose terminology. For instance, for the social rented housing provider the assessor of the hazards needs to be reasonably competent, but there is no mention in the guidance that they need to be HHSRS-qualified. HHSRS is a two-day course and would seem to be appropriate. We are very keen to see the HHSRS updates brought into force. We have been waiting for that for some time. The availability of trades for the sector means that carrying out repairs is very difficult at short notice and the timescales are pretty tight. Where landlords are required to rehouse tenants, given the shortage of accommodation, we are likely to see them being rehoused in whatever is available. That may lead to temporary accommodation solutions being used. We have seen some of the problems with temporary accommodation, particularly for children; there is no specification for how long they are going to be in that temporary accommodation or how far away it is from their original property. On overcrowding, one of the quicker things that we can do while we wait for the increase in building, which we thoroughly applaud, to be carried out is to have easier information sharing for local authorities to allow better cross-departmental working. One of the issues that we get with overcrowding is that people always drive towards a cheaper cost of living so they save money on their accommodation, but it requires a multi-departmental solution to rectify these issues, which are impacted on by multiple factors, as Sir Michael touched on.

How successful do you think the policies that have been announced by the Government will be in improving housing conditions? Can you give us a flavour of what meaningful improvements there will be for those in the poorest housing conditions in the next four years, by the end of this Parliament?

From our perspective, especially if we are thinking about accessibility and disabled people’s needs, it is quite negligible. We are going into a period of flux for the Department while awaiting a response to a consultation from about three years ago. We are now going to wait and see what happens to that. It was going to be a technical consultation on raising new build standards, the starting point for making homes more accessible, and we don’t know when that will happen again. The Minister responsible for building bonds between the community and the Department has also left their post. We are in a position of flux now for disabled people, who had low expectations, to be honest, and who saw very little happen with the NPPF and with the big claims around house building. That is having to wait, so when it comes to meaningful change, with no action on the cost of renting and no action on accessibility there is not a lot for us to be excited or hopeful about at the moment. But there is an understanding that this is a serious issue that affects not just your house, but your wider life and health. You can take that as it is.

We are thinking positively. It is nice to see these policies having some sort of joined-up thinking and to get to the end result, which is encouraging. In theory, the policies that they are putting forward should generate positive health, social and economic impacts. I would not be able to quantify them at the moment but the MEES ambitions in particular are positive. If we can tackle the coldest homes in bands F and G that still exist, that will deliver the biggest impacts for health improvement and savings to the NHS, for example, if we can get all homes up to band C. We have challenges. It does promise to deliver a good deal, but there are so many barriers, many of which we have already touched on today. For instance, what is the financial capacity of landlords to drive these improvements through? I echo what my fellow panel members have said: that relying entirely on private landlords, local authorities and social landlords to see this through will be an enormous challenge for them. They need effective resources for finances, staffing and training. Councils need more revenue to be able to help with enforcement; I think Henry would agree with that. I believe that selective licensing is not ringfenced at the moment, so resources could go into different parts of the local authority work. Local authorities definitely need resourcing and consistency of standards to be able to regulate—that goes for landlords as well—so that we can begin strategic planning and thinking about a holistic approach to resolving or trying to resolve these multiple and complex problems in the stock.

Can I talk about the warm homes plan specifically, thinking about other things that are being announced? We have done some analysis of why some initiatives—I won’t use the word “fail”, but were not as successful as was hoped. I am thinking about the green homes grants of a few years ago. One thing, as I discussed earlier, is a lack of infrastructure. The grants that were available were great, but the point was that at a local level there was not the right kind of mechanism to deliver that to local people or for people to do the upgrades to the homes. We think that you need a local one-stop shop—a good home hub, like we are trialling. It is also about a targeted approach. At the moment, I do not know whether that is the plan, but there is nothing publicly available to say who we are targeting with these initiatives. We know that the older the head of a household is, the more likely they are to live in a less efficient home. Without targeting, we risk missing out on the people with the most need. As we know, middle class, wealthier people know how to reach these initiatives, but without information and advice locally, people will not be able to do that. We did some analysis evaluating how the more you target those who are in fuel poverty and have the least efficient homes—on 1,000 homes, you could save £82 million—the higher the savings will be and the greater the impact will be, on the individual but also on the NHS and social care. Those are my two recommendations: build infrastructure and target those most in need.

A lot of the energy efficiency schemes have tried to target fuel poverty, but being able to identify households in fuel poverty is not as easy as it sounds. There are concerns about the current energy performance certificates and how reliable they are in getting us the starting point. We have been assessing the social housing decarbonisation fund and find that there are lots of properties where we probably have not reached the neediest, let’s just say. It is a challenge, which is why local stock condition surveys and so forth are important to help with that targeting.

In the 2010 data, only 6% of landlords were a member of a professional body, so one of the key improvements that we particularly applaud is having better information for landlords through the portal—the database that is been brought in for the private rented sector in the Renters’ Rights Bill, which we were particularly keen to see. We are very happy with that. We are also very pleased to see better security of tenure under the Renters’ Rights Bill, which will make tenants more likely to complain to a professional body that can support them. One thing that concerns us is that we are introducing yet more legislation into an already very confused environment. For instance, for damp, mould and excess cold, you have MEES, Awaab’s law, HHSRS, the fitness standard and the decent homes standard, which gives legislators a number of tools to bring to bear but which is very confusing for landlords and tenants. Using the decent homes standard to consolidate existing standards would be beneficial. We note that in HHSRS, the decent homes standard and the proposed changes to performance certificates, we are still not seeing a clear acknowledgement of fuel poverty in some of the metrics that are measured. We are very keen to see more focus around a fabric-first approach, because if the building is right, it comes down to a tenant’s choice and means. The building is the bit that we can change. Tenants’ choices and means are much more difficult to change.

I have a quick follow-up question for Helen Garrett on how we get better stock condition surveys and better data on the problem. People are pitching lots of new technologies for monitors, sensors and so on, but it seems that uptake is still quite low. What do you think is the potential for some of those types of solution? The way we do stock condition surveys now feels quite outdated.

I urge the Government, if they can afford it, to take more energy follow-up surveys. If new owners are agreeable to having them, those kinds of monitors give a wealth of information. In the last energy follow-up survey, which was a follow-on to the EHS, we put humidity and temperature loggers in homes and asked people about how they interact with their property. Such surveys can produce a wealth of evidence that we can learn from about how dwellings are behaving under climate change and how people are changing their heating patterns. There is very much a role for them. There are other ways technology can be used. BRE is currently experimenting with LiDAR and things like that, to get a relatively quicker way of getting a 3D measurement of the property and help people with the calculation whether it is cheaper to knock down the dwelling or retrofit it in some way. There are some good solutions. I know that the Government have their industrial strategy on AI and technology; it would be good to see some of those initiatives going into the world of housing, which I do not think is explicitly mentioned.

That is something that we will look into further in this inquiry.

Can I make a quick point on data? The starting point for us may be collecting data on accessible homes. Very few local authorities do that, but without understanding their local needs, how will they ever build the right kind of homes to suit their local population? Very few of the local authorities that we have spoken to could tell us—

Is that something that Disability Rights UK would want to see mandated?

Yes, we have asked local authorities for years to keep a local register. If you give local authorities the resource to do that, you can only benefit over time, because it means that different local authorities can do their local plans significantly better. Also, at the end of the process you can hold a developer much better to account. One of the ways in which developers get out of building accessible homes is by saying, “There’s no one here who will need one.”

I appreciate all your comments. Michael, you stated that Government policies for the disabled have been negligible. We all appreciate that we are in a state of flux, so I think that is very powerful. Turning to you, Dr Dawson, we might make some recommendations to the Government on housing conditions. One of them, based on your comments, could be that councils should share their data where there is a problem with landlords. That could be a duty that we recommend would need to be funded. I would welcome your thoughts on that. You mentioned Awaab’s law. How confident or unconfident are you that Awaab’s law and the Renters’ Rights Bill will improve things for tenants? Are you concerned that they will have these legal powers but that without legal aid and without the desire, they just will not have the capacity to take their landlord to court?

Thinking about the data side of things and sharing information, Operation Jigsaw currently has a very short-term funding solution. This is an organisation that helps local authorities to connect. We have been using them back into LACORS and the Local Government Association bodies we have had. It is invaluable for local authorities to co-ordinate their work and also to save 400-odd local authorities reinventing the wheel in how they manage their data and co-ordinate their activities. Longer-term funding for Operation Jigsaw and the facilitation of information sharing will happen through that. Another one is access to universal credit information. At the moment we have a right through the Housing Act 2004 to access housing benefit information. However, we are moving everyone over to universal credit and we have no right to access universal credit information that tells us about tenants, what they are paying and where they are living in the properties. We are very keen to see that. On longer-term changes that might be brought about by Awaab’s law, I think it very much depends on the tenant and their will to drive through improvements in their property if they are using the property as a long-term tenure, and we are seeing people using the private rented sector as a longer-term tenure now. It still comes back to the personality of the individual and their means to do it and, to some extent, their education and awareness of the levers of our society. We could see greater differentiation in the ability of tenants to support their rights, because the most vulnerable are least likely to be able to use the tools in Awaab’s law. They have the ombudsman and local authorities to come back to, but at the moment it is very unclear and there is very little in the way of guidance and suchlike on how the ombudsman is going to be brought in. The Renters’ Rights Bill will interact with local authority enforcement departments and with activity under Awaab’s law.

My substantive question will be on the warm homes plan, but I am keen to come back to Michael, because I completely sense your frustration but also your passion. I want to ask about the affordable homes programme because the Government have committed to a big uplift—£39 billion over the period, nearly double what the last Government committed to—and have talked about an ambition of 180,000 homes for social rent. I appreciate that that is in the future, but within that context I am interested in the discussions you are having about accessible homes. I believe that there is an opportunity here, perhaps a little bit greater than you see, but I want to get into it.

No, you are definitely right: there is a huge opportunity with that programme if it prioritises social house building that is of a high quality—we have asked for a minimum accessibility standard for years—and if we are building at that minimum standard and building more towards wheelchair-accessible homes. The waiting list is over 40 years for a new-build wheelchair-accessible home at the moment. That is your life spent waiting. It is important to remember that an accessible home is not a nice-to-have. It is a safe home for you. As a disabled person or someone with a long-term health condition, if you do not live in an accessible home, it is a dangerous home—and one that you may live in for 40-plus years. The difference from our perspective is that the building of those homes is to increase the supply of accessible homes, because we have loads and loads of old, inaccessible homes that we do not have huge plans to retrofit. Some of them, especially really old stock in cities like London, will be harder to retrofit, but it is not going to tackle cost. Those two things have to be treated as essentially separate. The way you tackle rising rents now is through other measures; you tackle the supply of accessible homes through building more of them. It may be that where our gap in understanding is coming from is the fact that we see people every day who are not even thinking about the fact that their home is inaccessible; they are thinking about the fact that they cannot afford to live in it and they will be made street homeless tomorrow. That may be what is missing: seeing that there are different levers beyond just saying, “Let’s build more,” and waiting for that to lower cost over time. Even if we do build, the estimate, like I said, is that the rent-to-income ratio will change by 1%. I think another estimate, maybe by Ian Mulheirn, was that the effect on rents would be less than 10% after you had built all those. That was covid levels of rent, when people were already facing the highest level of evictions that we had seen. It is about separating the two out for yourself as legislators to understand that we have different levers to fix different areas of this crisis.

Thank you for that. Turning back to warm homes, living in a cold home can increase people’s blood pressure, can be really damaging for their mental health and can even affect a child’s development. We have already talked a bit about the £30 billion programme from the Government, which I think is very welcome, but I am interested to hear from the panel a bit more on what you would be prioritising. Millie, you have already said those in greatest need, but I am also interested in the dynamic between the social housing sector and the private rented sector and where we can best focus resources right now.

I agree with Millie. By tackling the worst energy performance, you are more likely to make notable impacts on health improvement. Our cost of housing research demonstrates that that delivers the biggest saving to the NHS and to wider society. That is a big win-win. A lot of us have already mentioned the barriers of skills to deliver all this, but we are very much in favour of the fabric-first approach, because it may be easier to fit solar panels and things like that, but it is so important for the long-term welfare and affordability of fuel costs for households that we properly insulate those homes. That is why we are keen to get the fabric-first approach endorsed by Government. I appreciate that one of the recommendations in the decent homes consultation for social housing is fabric-first plus an anticipated smart measure or additional heating measure that we expect to come out of the EPC reform.

I have a few points on that. We are very keen to have a focus on these hard-to-treat properties. In particular, the landlords of those properties will need a little bit of support to bring about what will be quite expensive measures; 85% of the landlords have one to four properties. These are small cottage industry-style operators, and they will need a bit of help with some of the up-front financial cost. In particular, it will not necessarily improve the marketability of their property where tenants are looking for nice bathrooms and kitchens or a good location. In some of the updates that are being made to EPC legislation, we are interested in trying to close some of the loopholes we see around evasion or false declarations that are being made to avoid carrying out updates in the private rented sector. Social rented is doing much better in this area already, as we see from the data. A long lead-in time for these changes has already been established. I think it will require an awful lot of publicity for landlords in social rented and particularly private rented to let them know, as they are very often reactive in their response. In the private rented sector it will be smaller-scale landlords, to inform them that this is coming and allow them plenty of time so that we do not end up with a situation close to the deadline, for instance, for the EPC C standard to be brought in where there is a rush on people trying to get tradesmen to do works on the property. We are seeing long waiting lists and problems around that, so long lead-in times for these larger changes are a big help.

To go back to what I said earlier, I talked quite a lot about low-income homeowners, but there is also a particular group of homeowners who can afford to do retrofit themselves but have no idea how to. They are largely older people. The projections are that net zero will not be achieved unless we retrofit homes. That is black and white at this moment. I think there are two groups: those who are most in need, yes, need funding, but there is also another group who just need information, advice and guidance from a local authority, or even at a national level, to be able to undertake that work. For example, with the warm house plan there is an opportunity. Sometimes it can be quite jargonistic. It is also about appealing to certain groups. It is about how the Government portray it and the language they use. These are easy wins that will go a long way if the end goal is to bring all houses up to energy level C.

I have one final question. I am always interested in international comparisons. Many countries across Europe have a bigger PRS sector than we have here, and I understand that a lot of them are in a better place than we are on home insulation. Are there any countries or schemes that you would look to for inspiration that we might be able to follow?

It is not my area of expertise, I am afraid.

I think it is important to bear in mind, as Michael said earlier, we have the worst housing stock when it comes to insulation, so it is twofold. We could learn from others. I know Germany does a really good loan system. I cannot tell you the details now, but our good home inquiry a few years ago had a specific financing paper looking at the examples of Germany, which was brilliant. It is hard to compare, given that we are working with different situations.

Maybe it is a challenge for the Committee.

Can I make a short comment on that? It is important to remember that quite a lot of European countries like Germany and Spain have measures like rent controls. Probably the security that you are afforded will affect the interaction, which is quite often also relational. It is not just about whether or not this is a good thing to do; it is about your ability as a renter to lobby for it, ask for it and negotiate with your landlord. If you do not have the fear of spiralling rent, potentially that gets easier, but that is speculation from me.

To look further afield, we have a small number of countries with very different rental sectors and very different problems with properties. Potentially countries like New Zealand might be something to look at, but I don’t know enough to be able to respond without referring back to my notes.

I am mindful of time, colleagues.

We had Sir Michael Marmot in the previous panel, and obviously he is focused on health equity. I want to ask your opinion on that as well. As we know, almost five years ago Awaab Ishak died aged two of a serious respiratory condition caused by prolonged exposure to mould in his parents’ home. How confident are you that the introduction of Awaab’s law and the changes to the decent homes fund will prevent ill health?

We may have touched on that in our response earlier. As I say, it is a great initiative. I think we have probably covered a number of the barriers. My concern is that the worst landlords will always remain under the radar, and trying to catch the worst culprits who do not tackle damp and mould in that sector will always be incredibly hard. As I mentioned, in theory it should create awareness, but we need the training. Damp is inherently complex and is caused by often complex factors such as lack of ventilation, overcrowding and disrepair. It goes back to Henry’s point about having trained people who understand the causes and can get the right solutions. Not many landlords will understand that level of complexity. There are barriers to engagement, as we have said, with often the most vulnerable tenants. We need numbers on the ground and we need training. There are a lot of barriers, but at least it is a starting point and we have the potential. We have talked about data. We need information like that portal and even things like EHS to monitor how well we are doing so we can evaluate it and see where it may be failing. It has potential but it is not going to resolve damp for every household, I am afraid.

I think I have covered some of my concerns with Awaab’s law. Considering the decent homes standard fundamentally, it will still require the same local authority practitioners for environmental health to carry out inspections to ensure the standard is being met. We have heard a message from the Government about some of the debate over the Renters’ Rights Bill, but the decent homes standard and Awaab’s law negate the need to deal with some of the existing barriers to legislation, for instance not being able to impose conditions on selective licensing schemes where improvements are required to residential property, despite the selective licensing schemes being brought in to improve property conditions, and trying to go for a longer period for discretionary licensing schemes, additional and selective licensing schemes. The decent homes standard requires quite high levels of disrepair for a breach. For type 1 breaches, they pretty much all require a category 1 HHSRS hazard. It is what I call a Schrödinger’s hazard: you don’t have a hazard until a qualified assessor comes and assesses the property and tells you that you have got one. We need to see more training in HHSRS and more HHSRS assessors, because fundamentally all of these assessment systems come back to HHSRS.

A quick follow-up, picking up on what Helen said and on something that Millie said about home ownership problems. We are talking about training of assessors, but to what extent do you think there is a need for greater awareness generally of how to manage damp and mould in homes? How much do you think that would impact on some of these outcomes?

There is a huge need for that, and it is something that Ageing Better press for all the time, but again it is about behavioural change—how long does that take?—and looking at the interventions you already have to enable that change. As I said earlier, local authorities are the people who are the closest in a local area. They know the people who are working with those most at risk, and that is how you change people’s awareness of what is going on. We also find a lot of the time with housing conditions that people do not realise until they meet crises, and that is why the impact on the NHS is so huge. There is a responsibility of national Government to share information and update, but we believe the only way to do that is largely through existing local authorities and relationships, and communities in general. We recently did some work with the Race Equality Foundation looking at racially marginalised communities and their experiences of this, and it is twofold. There is systemic racism, for example, if the information locally is not in your language. These small things need to change if you want to reach those most in need. There is a long way to go: behaviour change is needed, but you need to look at the existing systems to do that, and we should not be trying to change anything that is supporting local areas to do that.

I think quite a lot of it comes from the process of negotiation around repairs. We worked with Medact, an organisation that organises medical professionals for health justice, on the Nags Head estate, an east London social housing estate owned by Peabody. It is a really useful example for us of what it is like for disabled people in the social rented sector. Looking at the statistics of the report we did with them, 57% of the households there had a chronic health condition and 86% of the people that we surveyed there said that they had new symptoms, including chronic health conditions, once they moved into the property. Talking about awareness, everyone I spoke to—I have been there a couple of years and I am not going to gush about how much I love them, but their campaign has been amazing—knew something was wrong in their home but when they went to their social landlord or to the outsourced repairs team, they were told, “It’s your problem, you’re doing something wrong, you need to do this.” I remember going into a house where they had just let the mould go and the wall was up to here with mould, because otherwise every time they raised a repair the person from Peabody or from the outsourced company would come out and go, “No, that is not real mould, that is not bad enough,” so they had to leave a whole room to go mouldy. When legal professionals got involved, they put a surveyor in and it turned out that in most of the houses in the estate, the trickle vents that help ventilate had all been painted shut years ago and it had never been their fault. So I think people know, but Millie is completely right: people don’t take action until you get to crisis. I don’t want to keep saying it, but that is the pressure people live under in the system, where it is like, “I just need somewhere stable to live.” You are making a choice, especially in rental, but you are right to say in home ownership too, because of how house prices continue to rise. You are saying, “What is the worst of the evils that I can live with? I can just tolerate those.”

I am mindful of time.

On the subject of data, something that can help with the behavioural side is the very low-cost internal temperature monitoring and humidity monitoring equipment that you can get. It should only go in tenants’ houses with their permission, and that should be able to be withdrawn, but that is very helpful to assess whether it is the occupier’s behaviour that is causing some of the problems.

Chris will move on to heat and climate change.

We have done some analysis recently, comparing it with other countries, and a UK home will rise by 5° in three hours, double the rate in Europe. Our homes are not built for it whatsoever. That includes new homes, largely because I understand that there is insulation in homes to keep it warm in winter. I am not a technical expert—I don’t deliver this myself—but we know that the insulation being put in these homes is making it so that the heat cannot escape in the summer. As you said, it is particularly a problem for older people. We estimate that people aged 65 and over are likely to constitute about four in five heat-related excess deaths, based on recent studies. At Ageing Better, we talk about how winter is coming and we are ready to campaign; it will be the same in summer. It is year-round that older people are impacted by the problems in our homes. We did a survey this year to look at that because we are having more and more heatwaves. In a sample, 1.9 million of all households say that basically their homes overheat in the summer and they have begun to feel unwell. We need to think about the technical aspect of how we address it, but again it comes back to information and advice. How do we get people to deal with this while we solve the problem at a national scale?

I am not an expert on the planning system, but we certainly welcome that the future home standard is basically asking us all to review the overheating standards in part O. We would like the standards to be extended to the material use of dwellings. There is a growing trend to convert offices into residential dwellings, which is a particular danger. We just have to get it right, because once we have a dwelling there, it is more difficult to take action. Having good building regulation and quality assurance for those buildings is incredibly important, but I am not an expert in the planning process. Going back to what Millie says, older people are the most vulnerable group to ill health through overheating. What EFUS showed us, rather worryingly, is that when temperatures were at the highest, older people were least aware and took no mitigating action against those dangers. They just were not aware of them. It goes back to the point about education about damp and mould. I don’t know what happens in the world of environmental health, but there is an educational piece: if we know the people who are at risk, we can try to make sure we offer them shading, particularly at night. They go to their bedroom to escape the heat from the day, so look at shading. The big culprits are uninsulated attics, but conservatories represent a high risk in older dwellings as well. We can try to make those properties better for those people if they are aware and willing to take some mitigating action.

I second the point about advice and guidance for tenants. That is needed, but it is also about better connection between the NHS and local authorities as the NHS deals with the health burden. Excess heat comes relatively quickly after we have had a high heat episode. We also need some focused activities on properties built post the 2001 building regs but before the overheating approved documents came in.

CIEH has not adopted an official position on this. However, we welcome anything that would help to alleviate the issue of excess heat, which is something we will see more and more over the coming years.

We will move on to a key issue that you have touched on throughout: the accessibility of homes.

I get a reasonable number of casework enquiries about the disabled facilities grant and the challenges of accessing it for lots of different reasons. I want to hear, possibly from Michael initially, what reforms to the design and implementation of the disabled facilities grant would help to ensure that those with a disability can live safely and comfortably at home.

I think it is important to remember that the disabled facilities grant is not the only tool that we have available to make homes more accessible. We have talked about retrofit. If we had higher standards, potentially via the decent homes standard, and they included an ask to make all homes as reasonable as you can get to that, you would not have the burden of the pressure that DFG has. There are lots of issues with it. The means testing is outdated. The formula is being updated at the moment for how they calculate where need goes. We have some technical issues, which I will not bore you with, with how we think it can be done. The core issue with DFG—beyond the fact that the amount of money you get has not really risen in line with how much more it costs to build at the moment—is that, again, it is an area of negotiation between a tenant and a landlord. It is not something that most private renters, especially, feel comfortable asking for. Even though the law is essentially on their side and you have to just state that you want to live there, most private renters feel scared to do that. Hopefully, with the Renters’ Rights Bill and the section 21 changes, that will change. But I know personally, as someone who has rented for a long time, and from all my friends what it is like when you ask for a repair, which is what DFG looks like to a private landlord, almost always. The national housing survey says that 44% of private landlords don’t want to rent to someone who has a need for adaptation. That is a shocking statistic, and it is not about awareness-raising or just needing to let landlords know it is okay. That is a rights issue, where if a private landlord thinks, “I don’t want to have to bother, so I am not going to.” DFG is another area where you negotiate and where you need casework and support, either from people like you or from legal support. Hopefully, over time with the Renters’ Rights Bill people will have more power, but fundamentally that is not the only thing that we can do to make homes accessible. We have to use every other lever, whether it is new builds or retrofit. It will be difficult, and people need to get more money for it.

Just to confirm—I am sure you will say yes to this—do you agree with the Older People’s Housing Taskforce report recommendation that the Government should immediately implement the adoption of part M4(2) of the building regulations? If so, what benefits would this have?

Yes, of course we would agree. We always talk about accessible homes, and yes, that will particularly help older people and disabled people, but it is about the whole lifetime homes thing. We kind of neglected the lifetime home sentiment a while ago. It will be beneficial for families. As part of a big campaign of ours at the moment, we have spoken to lots of developers and they want it to happen, so it is a level playing field. Everyone we have spoken to supports it—all the big ones. It is one of those things where everyone in the room agrees it is a good idea, and now it is about how we move forward to make sure we get it done. We estimate that something like 885,000 people could now be living in an accessible home if it had been mandated three years ago, in July 2022. From our perspective, yes, we think it is great, we want it go ahead and we feel it is very promising. We hope that the changes to the Ministry will not mean any further delay to that.

Just for the record, what is the estimate of the uplifting cost associated with meeting those standards, versus the cost of retrofitting if you were trying to do it after the event?

We do not know the exact number, but we spoke to a large developer the other day and they were keen to say that it is not about how much it will cost. It is about how you may have fewer houses on a development per situation of that land mass. They felt that that it is the way it should be talked about. We should not be framing it as about how much it costs, because the impact is greater for the individual. As I said, it is a level playing field. Every developer will make one less house on the thing, and that is the way they want to talk about it as well. I think we should all be starting to think about it in that way.

When you are thinking about stats and costs, Habinteg and the LSE did some research, and you are losing about £94,000 of economic and social benefit for every wheelchair-accessible home that is unbuilt. If you are thinking about long-term cost, it is a good place to start.

You may have heard what Sir Michael Marmot was saying earlier about overcrowding. This is a question for Helen. The Health Foundation found there are over 100,000 households that are both overcrowded and in poor condition. Do you have any practical suggestions for how we could tackle that problem that are not just about increasing the supply of larger households? We know that over time we need to do that, but what things can make a difference now?

It is very difficult, because it is not exactly my area of expertise in terms of how an environmental health officer or someone would deal with it. It could be a case of identifying that household, visiting them and trying to make them aware of the risks of being overcrowded. We know that overcrowding can lead to other problems such as damp and mould. There is also an added fire risk, because if you have to escape from a fire, your chances of escape are far worse if you have loads of belongings and so forth in your home. Maybe there is a need to contact and just make the family aware of how they can adapt and make sure that the risks they have to health and so on are not exacerbated by what they are doing. That is just my initial reaction; I am not an expert on what local solutions may be delivering at the moment, sorry.

I have a couple of points on that. I have touched on the need for referrals, but members get discouraged as there is very little feedback once you have made a referral to another council department if you enter a property and find a problem. We need to improve cross-departmental working. It is also about generally identifying where these properties are. Very often landlords themselves have no idea, whether they are social rented or private rented properties, that they are being over-occupied. When we do get in, it requires compliance, which overcrowded properties are unlikely to solicit because they are usually cognisant of the situation that they are in. However, there are many things that drive that situation, hence the cross-departmental working. Things like licensing allow us to place a cap on occupation in a private rented sector property. Anything that helps to facilitate the licensing of residential properties allows us to place a clear cap on the number of occupiers of the property, but it also funds the environmental health officers to go into the property and carry out proactive inspections in areas where we are most likely to have these issues, to identify the problems and then work with the tenants to find solutions for their rehousing through communication with other council departments.

I guess, in short, if you control rents better, people will be able to afford homes that better suit their needs.

I have a final question on the housing health and safety rating system. I think it was last updated in 2004. We have just spent 90 minutes talking about all the changes since then with risks and so on. What would you like to see changed? What would be a better process of keeping it up to date?

From the CIEH perspective, we would like to see the update brought in, and we support the changes that have been announced publicly that will be carried with the HHSRS. We are very keen to see those brought in sooner rather than later. We have concerns over the number of people trained in the use of HHSRS and we would like to see more training. In particular, as you move into larger-scale landlords, letting agents and social rented accommodation providers, there is more scope for training. Our members remain divided on what the HHSRS should look like and how it should be updated, so I will not venture any further opinions in that area.

BRE are very strong supporters of the current system, to be honest, and we support a lot of the outcomes of the review of HHSRS including more training and more tenant advice in an effort for it to be more understandable. We are certainly not in favour of the amalgamation of hazards. We have 29 different hazards and each has its own set of supporting science and statistical evidence behind it. When you are trying to combine assessments, if you are looking at falls for example, the assessment officer has to go through an assessment of falls on the level, falls on the stairs, and falls between levels and then somehow combine each of those into an overall scoring system for the risk of that accident arising and what the outcome would be. There is no statistical basis, from hospital episode stats, to enable a correct probability and outcome to be recorded. We have grave concerns about that and we do not think that it will actually simplify the system. The system is, none the less, 30 years old. We are not saying we need to wholly review the science for all the hazards that we have mentioned today, for example overheating and damp and mould. Since HHSRS has come into force, we know a lot more about indoor air quality. The risk factors, with Awaab’s death, for example, may change. He is sadly not untypical: we are getting more and more aware of people going into hospital and having ill health because of damp and overheating. It could be that we need to see whether the hospital episode stats around those hazards should be reviewed in some way. We may be underreporting damp in our stock, so that is why we are urging a review of the science for some of the hazards that are causing concern, with climate change and so forth.

I thank all of you for coming this morning. I think it is fair to say that for the Government’s policy on addressing poor housing conditions, they need to know about the situation across England, the impact on our ageing population, the range of accessibility and the impact on people in the private rented sector. Thank you all; we look forward to your engagement as this inquiry continues.