{"id":318,"date":"2026-03-26T06:48:58","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T06:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/?p=318"},"modified":"2026-03-27T12:09:01","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T12:09:01","slug":"health-and-safety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/health-and-safety\/","title":{"rendered":"Health and Safety"},"content":{"rendered":"

Health and safety in housing is rarely out of the news, and something which I have covered on this blog quite a bit.\u00a0 A while ago, I was involved in a project (led by RHE Global) for the Westminster Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on the Housing Health and Safety Rating System under the Housing Act 2004, Part 1. The project, ran by RHE Global, was designed to develop new operating guidance for local authorities and new enforcement guidance (among other outputs).\u00a0 I lead on the enforcement guidance; Henry Dawson<\/a> led on the operating guidance.\u00a0 To be honest, I had sort of forgotten about it, until yesterday when I spoke at an RHE conference on the HHSRS and was told that both pieces of guidance had been laid before the Westminster Parliament.\u00a0 Although I’ve got to say that I’m incredibly proud of that intervention, this post is not about me (really).<\/p>\n

Wales is in a curious position of being bound by the Housing Act 2004, Part 1, unless they decide to change or repeal it.\u00a0 The existing Welsh operational guidance<\/a> and enforcement guidance<\/a> date from 2006, I think.\u00a0 That is 20 years ago – you read that right: 20 years.\u00a0 Quite a bit has happened over those 20 years in Wales, one may think.\u00a0 In terms of the operating guidance, we are probably in a better research position to make assessments in Wales than we were in 2006; and Henry said yesterday to me that it may not simply be a case of the operational guidance being transposed from Westminster to Wales due to housing stock differences.\u00a0 In terms of enforcement, we know that quite a bit has changed (and, as I have advocated on this blog, should<\/em> change).\u00a0 My colleagues and I have suggested that there may be a shift towards a more hardline enforcement approach (whether that is replicated across Wales is a moot question), and away from an informal “working with landlords” approach.\u00a0 Given the focus on social housing quality, it may be that the\u00a0laissez-faire<\/em> approach to enforcement against RSLs, which used to be the case (leave it to the complaints process – although see previous posts on the PSOW approach<\/a>), has changed.\u00a0\u00a0The enforcement statistics<\/a> don’t necessarily help us, although they suggest that: “In 2023 to 2024, action by local authorities resulted in the resolution of 985 Category 1 hazards”.\u00a0 They don’t say how that was recorded, and what type of enforcement action was taken in order to obtain that number of “resolutions” (that isn’t a comment on the statisticians producing this data).<\/p>\n

So, here’s the thing: we know that the quality of housing in Wales is a major issue; we know that RSLs may not be dealing with health and safety issues in the way in which, ideally, they should; the tools at local authority’s disposal are over 20 years old.<\/p>\n

That can’t be right.<\/p>\n

(ps – sorry about the font – it seems to have changed for some reason, and I can’t get it back).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health and safety in housing is rarely out of the news, and something which I have covered on this blog quite a bit.\u00a0 A while ago, I was involved in […]","protected":false},"author":7123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21,19,25,22,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness","category-landlord-and-tenant","category-private-renting","category-regulation","category-social-housing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":320,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions\/320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}