CPD module: How to communicate with residents to help improve indoor air quality in homes

Social landlords can play a key role in helping tenants to reduce the health risks from poor indoor air quality in their homes. Under Awaab’s Law, housing providers in England will from October have a legal duty to investigate and fix dangerous damp and mould within set timeframes. This law is due to be extended to other health hazards such as hygiene and excess heat in subsequent years. Meeting this legal requirement will require sensitive engagement with residents, and will create opportunities to have broader conversations about improving air quality in their homes. The Housing Ombudsman has made it clear that councils and housing associations should treat tenants with respect and empathy in such conversations.

This CPD module, in association with safety device specialist Aico, will examine how providers can develop a respectful, transparent and trusting approach to engagement. It will explore how tenants can be supported to reduce the levels of pollutants in their homes and how concerns can be respectfully addressed.

Poor indoor air quality has long been recognised in healthcare as a major health risk, but public knowledge of these risks is generally poor. It can exacerbate the symptoms of adults and children with respiratory illnesses, including asthma, as well as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It can increase the risk of strokes, heart attacks and pneumonia.

There are a range of sources of poor indoor air quality, including particulate matter such as dust and smoke, volatile organic compounds from cooking and aerosol sprays, including cleaning products, and damp and mould (see box: Sources of poor indoor air quality).

Monitoring the indoor air quality in tenants’ homes can help them understand the correlation between their respiratory health and air quality. It helps landlords to get better information and allows for discussions with customers about how air quality can be improved.

Tenant engagement should be community-focused, transparent and respectful. Torus Foundation’s indoor air quality project worked with local organisations to deliver health promotion initiatives. This project recruits local volunteers who live on its estates to provide peer-to-peer support to tenants. Many tenants have more trust in their local community and are more likely to listen to residents than their landlords or public authorities.

Tenants can also be engaged in conversations about indoor air quality at events or in community groups. As this project was focused on child health, staff and volunteers attended children’s centres, schools and coffee mornings to meet parents. They also distributed leaflet flyers. All contacts should be followed up with visits to tenants’ homes, or somewhere else convenient for them, to explain the links between poor indoor air quality and health, and the role of monitoring. Consent was also obtained from participants involved in the project and safeguards put in place to protect participants’ identity. The project was evaluated by Lancaster University, but data was anonymised before sharing with researchers.

Staff should be trained on the health risks of poor air quality, how it can be monitored and what can be done about it. This training should be cascaded to new staff and volunteers as they come on board. Information packs can offer guidelines to staff on how to respond to questions that tenants frequently ask about monitoring equipment, the health risks of poor indoor air quality, and how to reduce them. Staff and volunteers engaging with tenants can also be given monitors for their own homes so they can experience using them.

• Ingress of outdoor air pollution
• People smoking indoors
• Wood-burning fires
• Scented candles
• Volatile organic compounds from cooking
• Cleaning products
• Aerosol spray, such as deodorants
• Paint
• Damp
• Mould

Tenant engagement is about collaboration between tenant and landlord to improve the tenant’s environment and sharing information in a transparent way. It is not about landlords hiding anything or keeping information on their homes to themselves. Tenants should know their landlord can see their readings, which can be shared with them to work together to improve air quality inside their homes.

Helping tenants understand why you are monitoring the air quality in their homes helps build trust. As part of Torus Foundation’s project, tenants were able to access reports on the indoor air quality of their homes at any time by scanning a QR code on their phones and had a point of contact for any queries or concerns.

Giving tenants access to their air quality detectors’ reports helps them to see links between poor indoor air quality and their health problems, and decide for themselves about making any changes. These reports also provide the basis of discussions between staff and volunteers, who can offer advice on what tenants could do to reduce any identified health risks.

In the Torus project, such an approach can be highly personalised. As a landlord, Torus might see a rise in the levels of particulate matter in a household at a certain time. Following a discussion with the tenant, it can be established that they were having a barbecue at that time, but had left a window open in their home. A rise in volatile organic compound levels in the morning could be found to correlate with an exacerbation of asthma in a child. Through discussion with the tenant this could be linked to an aerosol deodorant and a suggestion to use a roll-on deodorant instead.

An evaluation of the project by Lancaster University found a “general story” of improved indoor air quality in the three areas it covered: Liverpool, St Helens, and Warrington. It also pinpointed “outliers” for most pollutants that could be further supported. Its evaluation found a “modest decrease” in daily mean relative humidity after the intervention of 2.6%, 3.7% and 1.7% in the three areas covered in the project. Daily mean CO2 levels also dropped by 8.8%, 4.7% and 2.4% post-intervention, the evaluation found. Reports on the evaluations have been made available to Torus’ tenants.

Efforts should also be made to alleviate anxieties around the use of any monitoring. Tenants might need to be reassured that monitoring devices do not have microphones and that landlords are not spying on them.

The Housing Ombudsman has cautioned against “using language that leaves residents feeling blamed”.  For example, increased ventilation is known to reduce incidences of damp and mould. But tenants may have legitimate reasons to keep their windows closed. They may live in areas of poor outdoor air quality, such as next to a main road, or be concerned about anti-social behaviour. In the colder months, they might be worried about the cost of heating. Families with children with additional needs also do not want to open their windows. Households without tumble dryers, and those who cannot afford to run them, dry their washing on airers or radiators inside their homes.

By having a respectful conversation, landlords can understand what support tenants might need. If they are struggling to pay their heating bills, landlords might be able to offer advice or energy vouchers, or signpost to support. Torus offered to put safety catches onto windows to allow them to be opened safely.

Tenants on very busy roads were advised to open windows for shorter periods and when traffic levels were low. Households who dried clothes inside were advised on appropriate ventilation. All this advice should be offered in a respectful way.

Transparent and respectful tenant engagement can play a key role in landlords’ work to comply with the requirements of Awaab’s Law as it is rolled out. From October, all social landlords will have to investigate and fix damp and mould in their homes within a set period. The government plans to expand the requirements of this law to cover a wider range of hazards, including excess cold and heat and hygiene hazards.

Landlords should, however, ensure conversations about indoor air quality are broader than being about damp and mould. While this is the focus of the first phase of Awaab’s Law, a narrow focus would miss the opportunity for a wider conversation about other health risks from other sources of poor indoor air quality.

The use of monitoring devices can play a role in tenant engagement by helping to raise tenants’ understanding and see what the problem is. It can also make it easier to track how any changes they make reduce poor indoor air quality and how those changes correlate with improvements in health conditions.

• What values guide your engagement with tenants?
• How can my organisation’s engagement with tenants be more personalised?
• How do you find tenants who would most benefit from improving indoor air quality?
• How does indoor air quality vary across your portfolio?

While the health risks of poor indoor air quality are well known to the healthcare community, public knowledge of them is poor. Social landlords’ efforts to reduce the health risks to tenants from poor indoor air quality in their homes require skilful and sensitive tenant engagement.

Tenants in need of support can be identified through a community-based approach to engagement that is respectful, open and transparent rather than contractual. Successful tenant engagement can involve multiple approaches, including leaflet fliers, the use of peer-to-peer volunteers and staff attendance at community meetings.

Tenant engagement involves enabling and empowering tenants to access and share information with their landlords about the indoor air quality in their homes. Tenants’ legitimate concerns should be respected. Landlords should work with them to explore ways of improving indoor air quality with an open, transparent and personalised approach.

Respectful tenant engagement will play a key role in helping landlords comply with the requirements of Awaab’s Law as it is rolled out. But conversations about poor indoor air quality should be kept broader than a narrow focus on damp and mould. 

Next, answer the questions below. Get all the questions correct and you will receive a certificate confirming your award of 30 CPD minutes within 10 working days via email. Get any questions wrong and you can retake the test by refreshing your web browser.

• Delivery of an indoor air quality campaign in social housing: Tenant experiences, Torus Foundation
• Delivery of an indoor air quality campaign in social housing: Learning about delivery, Torus Foundation
• Spotlight Report on damp and mould – it’s not a lifestyle, Housing Ombudsman Service

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