Last week I did a post called poor housing = poor health. This looked at a report out which showed that poor housing conditions are believed to cost the NHS at least £600 million per year.
I now learn of another new report – this one is a bit more detailed (and costs £30) . This report, commissioned jointly by Shelter Cymru and the Building Research Establishment (BRE) Trust, is specifically about housing in Wales. It makes the following points:
- The total cost to society of poor housing, including factors such as children’s poor educational attainment and reduced life chances, is estimated at around £168m a year (thats just in Wales!)
- the total cost of bringing all poor housing in Wales to an acceptable condition would be around £1.5bn
- approximately half of this would be associated with dealing with cold homes and a further quarter linked to reducing fall hazards
- the payback time to the NHS if all this work were carried out would be 22 years
- some areas could be paid back in much less time, for example investment in addressing dangerous stairs would be paid back in 5.7 years
- 20 % of homes with the most serious health hazards could be made acceptable for less than £520, and half for less than £1,600
The figures really do stack up, not to mention the improvement to people’s lives and society generally. I do hope that action is taken on these reports and efforts made to improve our sub standard housing stock.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, this could be combined with grants to improve the carbon footprint of properties (for example by giving improved insulation and maybe some form of solar heating) which would help the government fulfill its environmental targets.
You can read a bit more about the report on the Shelter website, and buy the report online at the BRE bookshop.
I quite agree that this is a problem for some tenants, and indirectly for all of us, since our taxes go to pay the cost to the NHS of their resulting health problems.
It’s for this reason that Friends of the Earth, and others, are campaigning for minimum standards of energy efficiency for let properties. Their joint statement may be read here http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/joint_statement_warm_homes.pdf
There is help available to landlords to pay for energy improvements, such as the LESA, and soon there will be the Green Deal – where the costs of these improvements will be paid for by the tenants, via their fuel bills.
How can these offers best be promoted to landlords?
Thank you for commenting @linniR. Landlords are traditionally a ‘hard to reach’ class of people, and unfortunatly many of the worst landlords are unlikley to do much even if you do reach them.
I do the best I can with this blog!
I agree with @linniR. Those are some significant figures and I think you make a good point. I read your earlier post and this was a nice follow-up post.
You can see a copy of the tax breaks that LESA provides on the website for the London Landlords Accreditation Scheme here http://www.londonlandlords.org.uk/portal/index/
And what is going on in Wales????????? First they re-write the homelessness code of guidance because central government dont get their act together and now this!!!!!!!!!
Maybe we should all move to Wales