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Tenants face “numerous and often insurmountable barriers to justice” when trying to sort out defects in their homes, academics have concluded.
Shelter commissioned academics from the University of Bristol and the University of Kent to look into gaps in current legislation surrounding health and safety in homes.
In their report the academics argue that health and safety law in people’s homes is “piecemeal, outdated, complex, dependent upon tenure, and patchily enforced”.
“Tenants wanting to remedy defects face numerous and often insurmountable barriers to justice. The law needs to evolve; no longer should occupiers be treated as posing health and safety risks, instead they should be treated as consumers of housing with enforceable rights to ensure minimum standards are adhered to.
“The state needs to accept its role as the primary enforcer of those standards.”
The report recommends a new Housing (Health and Safety in the Home) Act which is “tenure neutral, modern and relevant to contemporary health and safety issues, and which encourages and provides resources for pro-activity by statutory authorities”.
Local authorities have had to operate under “conditions of austerity” and as a result they have had to make “difficult choices about spending increasingly limited income”.
Local authorities have avoided taking enforcement action because it tends to be “expensive and contested”, the report’s authors said.
Local authority “reluctance” to enforce housing standards was flagged by all the respondents to the academics’ survey, including those who worked in local authorities as environmental health officers.
One environmental health officer told the report authors that if they had carried out a survey of Grenfell Tower and decided it was a serious fire hazard, “I rather suspect I’d be told to get real, not overreact, that it had complied with building regulations, had been inspected by the fire service etc”.
The report argues that legislation has given “very limited attention” to tenants or owners and legal aid has “largely disappeared”, particularly for disrepair issues. Claims for damages through legal aid are only allowed if there is a “serious risk of harm to health”.
The authors heard from experts that “very many people go without a remedy at all” if there are issues with disrepair in their homes.
The report said “serious consideration” needs to be given to increasing the role of the fire authorities in fire risk assessments “to ensure that fire safety decisions are made independently of cost factors”.
There were 947 people who completed the academics’ survey, including 642 renters or home owners, 45 legal professionals, 13 social landlords and 130 private landlords.