Twenty-five years ago, in 1986, the first issue of EHN reported on a ‘famine’ in improvement grants. A bold front-page story reported many authorities limiting discretionary improvement grants to disabled or elderly people and long waiting lists. Dr Stephen Battersby, assistant director of the then Institution of Environmental Health Officers, spoke of a ‘savage reduction’ in money available for housing.
At least there were still grants and, until 1988, secure tenancies. But cuts to local authority funding in the late 1980s saw mandatory grants reduced to a trickle, along with council house-building. They were finally killed off in 1996 and not restored by an incoming Labour government.
The Conservatives have returned, in a coalition, and we now have a housing emergency. In many ways it is worse than that of the late 1980s, when a housing market crash and rising interest rates led to a surge in homelessness.
An excellent Dispatches programme, Landlords from Hell (see pages13 and 15) explained how trends uncorrected for three decades have escalated into a fully-blown and wholly predictable crisis. They are – a continuing insufficient supply of new homes, a dearth of affordable social housing and an over-priced and increasingly unattainable owner-occupied sector. The private rented sector – a form tenure for those with no choice – has increased by 40 per cent in the last five years. It now houses more than 3 million people – many wretchedly.
Governments, and local authorities, know that our most aged property houses the most vulnerable; that more than 30,000 people die of excess cold in severe winters, that the only form of private sector rent control is the market and that those who complain to landlords risk, perfectly legally, not having their assured tenancies renewed.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Dispatches, was the lack of local authority enforcement activity it revealed – even in a west London borough where hundreds of people are paying to live in garden sheds. A shockingly low level of slum landlords are being bought to book and – coming soon – insecure council tenancies; ‘social’ rents up to 80 per cent of market levels and even deeper local authority cuts. The housing crisis is going to get worse.
Tags: Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Environmental Health News, General environmental health
