The good life for everybody

The De Frene Road Market Garden, in south-east London, is a community-led, mental health project. Will Hatchett sees it as a model for a potential network of mini-utopias

In 2025 an episode of depression resulted in a highly significant change to my life. Social prescribing led me to a one day a week, one-year placement in a community market garden in south-east London. The experience was transformative. 

From the outset, De Frene Road looked great to me. The market garden occupies a half-acre plot surrounded by suburban houses. Within this space are squeezed fruit trees, raised beds, bee hives, a chicken run, a clay oven, green houses, a pond, a willow tunnel and a meeting space. 

Run by volunteers, on behalf of a charity, De Frene Road is a sanctuary and a place of beauty. The market garden offers some products, such as cut flowers, for sale, but that is not its primary purpose, neither is self-sufficiency; its main job is to help people whose mental health, for whatever reason, is challenged. It’s the good life – for everybody.

The new user is not confronted by a forbidding list of rules. The project’s ethos is unspoken and has developed over a long time – equality and value-free human interaction which does not label people and makes no demand on them other than voluntary participation. The food is vegan. The garden’s practices are designed so that they would not alienate a person from any religious or cultural tradition.

De Frene does not immediately present itself as a therapeutic environment. In my opinion, it offers a practical version of a utopia – a glimpse of what life should and could be like for all of us.

Faith, hope and beauty

One of the first things the visitor will notice is god’s eyes – pendants of brightly coloured wool, some fading, hanging in the trees. These are votive offerings and tools for prayer made on spindles of twigs, commonly found in South American countries in which indigenous beliefs co-exist with Catholicism.

They are expressions of faith, hope and beauty, not incongruous in a world that has become, in our so-called New Age, re-sensitised to nature and to pre-Christian beliefs. Subliminal, ambiguous, they are part of the magic that suffuses the plot. De Frene unlocks creativity, for most of us buried and discouraged since school. Creativity, providing purpose, is a prerequisite of happiness. Humans deserve no less.

De Frene Road packs a lot into a small space and is organised to help the maximum number of people, of all ages. Its vibrant colours and scents stimulate the senses, while the craft making, preserving of fruits and planting of next year’s seeds that go on in its sheltered spaces awaken memories, both of our own childhood and of a human childhood – the pre-industrial past that is just beyond the touch of memory, when south-east London was cloaked by the greenwood, hay meadows and open farmland. 

This connection requires no thought or intellectualising; it is a magical process, an alchemy, that comes life when one walks up a sloping path between the bay-windowed 1930s houses of an ordinary sreet, crosses the threshold and enters the plot.

Non-invasive horticulture

This kind of horticulture is non-invasive. Practised with the help of a poly tunnel and raised beds, it doesn’t use chemicals to fertilise soil or kill pests; often stray, self-seeding plants are left in beds for their beauty or pollinator value. 

The garden is neat and orderly. But it has plenty of habitats for insects – formal and informal bug hotels. Salvaged materials wait for re-use – synchronicity will provide the right piece at the right time for a DIY build.

De Frene Road’s mature apple trees, and one pear, survivals from the plot’s original use as allotments, provide its main character – a sylvan glade. It’s a return the past, because, as evidenced by street names – Perry Vale, Pearfield Road – the local area was once famed for fruit production.

Has post-scarcity anarchism, the hippy dream of the 1960s, actually arrived and will AI, rather than representing an existential threat, actually drive it – freeing humans from repetitive tasks, like writing up dull meetings and formulating crisp action points? 

Those who propose revolutions are normally utter pessimists – every technical innovation is a threat or will only benefit the rich; it’s never the right time to rebel – the agents of change must patiently wait for the next instruction or piece of correct language to be handed down from Revolution HQ.

A quiet revolution

I beg to differ. I think that a revolution is quietly happening in our midst. There is a growing network of community gardens and orchards in every large city – different versions of self-help communities. Some are attached to parks, museums and libraries that were stripped of funding by the post-2008 austerity programme and found that they could only function by using volunteers.

It’s a fair bet that virtually all of this new social infrastructure conforms to the practice of sustainability. Adaptive humans, without being told to do so, have created local, communal responses to diversity destruction and global warming throughout our towns, cities and conurbations. 

In terms of ‘mental health’ isn’t it possible that the diagnostic acronyms increasingly attached to people are offshoots of an industrialised, over-segmented, medical model, based on the physical capital of specialised ‘units’? To think is to be ontologically challenged; we all have mental health issues, don’t we? Surely holistic responses are best.

A modest proposal

How about we all spend a day a week turning car parks into orchards, with wildlife ponds; growing stuff that we need – not on our own land, but communally-owned spaces, suburb by suburb, street-by-street? It would be a true form of care in the community. What’s the worst that could happen? People would smile more. Boundaries would blur.

Would this obviate the need for psychiatric services – no, of course not. But such a network of mini utopias would increase the sum total of human wellbeing and make the physical environments that we inhabit, in cities, productive and beautiful. 

Beneath the cobbles is a beach. Other futures are possible. In every skip is a summer house. Why shouldn’t every community have a De Frene Road, or, at least, an adapted locally fit-for-purpose version? 

I wrote some poems during my eye-opening year and discovered that other service users liked to draw and paint. The result was a collaboration, producing an illustrated publication. The poetry collection Mind Healer can be purchased, with all proceeds going to Sydenham Garden, the charity that runs De Frene Road.

Renters’ rights – logical evolution or ‘mutant layer cake’?

This year could stand as a watershed in post-war housing policy on rented housing, moving towards a fairer, healthier sector. But that’s not a given. The reforms add hard-to-interpret additions to already complex law and impose multiple new duties on cash-strapped councils. Will Hatchett reflects

A national conference, RHE Global’s Housing 2026, could not have been more topical. The event was well-timed because the Renters’ Rights Act, which will give private rented sector tenants greater security of tenure in England and aims to improve the often below standard conditions in which they live, is now close to coming into force.

It could come to be seen as a milestone in a policy area that has yo-yoed between the ideologies of the two major parties since 1945. But only if it succeeds.

The act will be deemed successful if it protects tenants and improves housing standards while not causing the landlords’ flight from the private rented sector that has been warned of by their representative bodies. If those things are the case, the RRA will enjoy longevity and attract bi-partisan support. 

Failure could be, well – very bad. The UK has created a toxic tenure pattern under successive governments – increasingly inaccessible owner occupation, vestigial social renting and expensive and insecure private renting. If small landlords do leave the PRS en masse, because of the act, already stretched services could be overwhelmed by homelessness. Meanwhile, lower-tier tribunals already clogged with work could buckle under the weight of new cases, leading to even lengthier and expensive delays both for landlord and tenants.
There is a great deal at stake.

End of no-fault eviction

Let’s not be pessimistic or apocalyptic. The abolition of no-fault eviction for controlled tenancies has been long fought for and almost universally welcomed. Lobbyists have sought, in England, a central register or database of landlords for decades; we now have one – and it could provide a gateway, ultimately, to a passport-style system of landlord licensing. Housing campaigner Kwajo Twenoboa reminded the conference that you need a licence to drive a car, but not to be a landlord and he pointed out: “It’s easier to become a landlord than to open a chicken shop”.

The act contains a welcome duty to enforce (with the caveat that imposing a civil penalty of £7000 on an otherwise co-operative landlord simply for not producing a document by a required date could be counter-productive). 

Speaker Linda Selvy-Cobb, principal manager of DASH Services, welcomed the profile that the RRA has given to housing enforcement within local authorities. But awareness of the act among landlords, tenants and the general public is low. The Government has not seen fit to publicise the new law very widely, putting the onus on councils to do so.

There are also loopholes. Lettings agents – currently gate keepers for the most vulnerable – remain in a shocking void of unaccountability. The worst are deaf to tenants’ concerns and, through negligence, can incur life-changing penalties and liabilities for landlords.

The new legislation has introduced a welcome ombudsman for private tenants, but the service fails to cover tenants in temporary accommodation in the PRS. Both failings could be corrected by secondary legislation or private member’s’ bills. 

Need for regulatory discretion

Critics of the RRA point out that, from 1 May, EHOs will have powers to award significant civil penalties to landlords, while the legal underpinnings of the act will only just have come into force. Some landlords are going to say: “I didn’t know anything about this”. The National Residential Landlords Association called for at least six months of preparation time between the publishing of final regulations and the law coming into force. The measure was not adopted. In the absence of a period of grace, it will be up to councils to educate and motivate landlords and to enforce fairly, to avoid accusations of ‘penalty farming’. 

Older EHOs will remember New Labour’s Enforcement Concordat of 1998 and the Regulators’ Compliance Code of 2008. Both urged a ‘light touch’ and the use of enforcement only as a last resort. They may wonder how this aligns with RRA’s duty to enforce. 

Legal expert and former head of public protection and strategic director, Tim Everett, reminded delegates that there are fashions in enforcement culture. He said that stretched resources mean that a light touch would now be regarded an unaffordable luxury by most local authorities. He urged councils to adopt a single enforcement policy covering all of their regulatory services, as the best way to avoid successful challenges in courts and lower-tier tribunals.

Bonanza for lawyers

In designing a rational housing system, no-one would start from where we are now. Conference speaker Suzanne Smith, a small landlord and legal expert who has written a lay person’s guide to the RRA, aptly described housing law as a “mutant layer cake”. Successive governments have alternately stripped away or added protections for tenants.

Those adding them have not repealed previous law (limited Parliamentary time and five-year Parliamentary terms don’t allow that). Consequently, we now have the RRA while sections of the Protection of Eviction Act of 1977 and the Housing Acts of 1985, 1988 and 2004 remain in force; legal remedies are available through civil penalties, lower-tier tribunals and county courts. It’s a mess.

The result is that no-one feels on secure ground when defending their legal rights. It’s a bonanza for housing lawyers, ambulance chasing solicitors and pop-up legal ‘experts’ promising fortunes to new entrants to the rental property market if they pay for expensive advice.

On the other hand, extensive evidence bases, the science of risk-assessment and AI-assisted algorithms were not significant factors in drawing up previous watershed acts affecting PRS tenants, in 1957, 1965 and 1988.

This underpinning could help to make the RRA robust and long-lasting, as could the government’s policy objective to bring the totality of rented housing under a common framework of standards, protections and rules, over the next decade. 

Goal of tenure neutrality

Given the history of housing legislation, it is perhaps surprising that the RRA is as coherent as it is. Luke Spanton, head of cross-tenure standards at MHCLG, who spoke at RHE Housing 2026, was a local authority EHO earlier in his professional life. Unusually for a senior civil servant, he understands the ‘sharp end’ – the blend of legal knowledge, nous and pragmatism that make for effective enforcement. This has been reflected in the detail of the legislation and the way that it has been created with the close involvement of practitioners, including RHE Global being commissioned to carry out a major review of the Housing Health and Safety Rating System.

The ambition of the 2026 housing reforms is far-sighted. Underlying the RRA, the Decade of Renewal for social housing, reissued in January, Awaab’s Law, the HHSRS and the new Decency Standard is a desire to move towards a tenure-neutral rented sector, more akin to a European housing system than the UK’s, which, in recent decades, has prioritised the financial well-being of owner occupiers over affordable and secure housing for all. The year 2035, when the Decency Standard will be enforceable in the PRS as well the social rented sector is not an end point, but a way marker towards that ideal.

A mature rented sector would ensure properties covering a spectrum of rent levels. The greatest protection would be in the parts of the sector catering for those with the least choice and the least social and financial capital. That would be the opposite of what we have now – a system in which London councils are spending £5.5 million per day on temporary accommodation and around 1.3 million people are on social housing waiting lists. 

Will we get there? Speakers at RHE Housing 2026, commenting at the event’s closing roundtable, were loath to make prophecies. They agreed that we won’t know for a decade or so – hopefully by the time of RHE Housing 2036.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 specialising in local government. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

The art of tergiversation

 

Book Review: Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, by Phil Smith, ‎ Triarchy Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0956263131

Phil Smith’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways is extremely hard to categorise. That is one of its strengths. The digressive text could lead us to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up verbal collages; to J. G. Ballard’s depictions of the dystopian edge lands of west London, or to the ‘psychogeographic’ writings of Will Self and Iain Sinclair. 

Contained within it is a travelogue. Smith, assuming the identity of ‘crab man’, re-traces the 200-mile journey of a real-life Edwardian oak tree planter, an engineer called Charles Hurst in the east midlands. But this is only one element of an impressive bricolage of philosophy, poetry and manifesto.

For this reader, the book is more reminiscent of the eighteenth-century fiction and journalism of Sterne, Fielding and Defoe than the colder eyes of Self and Sinclair – poetic and unabashed in its ambition, it has a warmth and social inclusiveness that they lack. This is a journey that we want to be on. Its good-natured trickster verbosity echoes the tone of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published in 1759, arguably the first ‘experimental novel’.

Endlessly digressive, the text, whose endnotes occur playfully at the half-way point, is a multi-layered concoction of prefatory matter, codicils, appendices, an ‘Orrery’ and a concluding ‘panography’. It’s a Russian doll, wherein (F) denotes a footnote, (FF) denotes a footnote to the footnote, (FFF) a footnote to the footnote to the footnote.’  Like a modern-day Sterne, Smith informs us, with a wink, on page 11, ‘I wrote all the documents here. The rest is a literary device. But you are the characters.’

Textual symbols

The book uses textual symbols a framing device – Plaque Tournante, a junction where decisions change everything, Tripods, an opportunity for reverse archaeology, Grid – a place of homogenisation. This indicates its didactic intent.  Mythogeography, which provides the book with its armature, can be seen as an evolution from psychogeography. This, in turn, derived from the writings of Lettrist philosopher Guy Debord in the 1950s, and was adopted by the French Situationists in the 1960s.

Debord’s concept of the ‘dérive’ or ‘drifting’, means ‘an unplanned journey through a landscape’. It was the unlikely underpinning of a radical political movement in France, re-interpreted on English university campuses and in art schools, where, one could argue, it became an academic rather than political phenomenon.

Its exponents strongly opposed the codification of landscapes by planners and architects and the consumerist homogeneity layered onto places by the state – as observed by Smith in the ‘plastic horror’ of the visitors’ centre of Sherwood Forest.

He observes, on his journey, an ‘inner city mix of wasteland and workshop, beached-whale ruins and reticent estates, retail units shaped like stunted temples and Hand Car Washes returning high-tech industrial trainees to a labour intensive economic banditry’.

Smith, an associate professor the School of Humanities and Performing Arts at the University of Plymouth, is a prolific author and playwright, associated with the world-renowned TNT Theatre. He was an originator of mythogeography, as part of the site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites.

This unique and rewarding grab bag of a book reclaims the political intent of Debord, adding English humour to French seriousness. It concludes, appositely, with a quotation from the Oasis song Wonderwall: ‘And all the roads we have to walk are winding. And all the lights that lead us there are blinding. There are many things that I would like to say to you. But I don’t know how.’ Exactly.

Extreme events – from Rio to Birmingham

Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods are increasing in frequency and intensity. An online conference in April places a welcome spotlight on responding to extreme events

It’s all too easy to make statements like “the world has reached a tipping point” or to announce that global warming, pollution and the destruction of nature form a triumvirate of doom.

 Perhaps they are unhelpful. Such warnings, which have become amplified in the decades since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, encourage both denial and inaction. We could simply give up, go back to our duvets and sip a sugary drink through a plastic straw. But we’re not going to, right?

A timely online conference Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events, to be held in April, has attracted a buzz and speakers and interest from all over the world.

Organised by the Healthier Housing Partnership and hosted by Birmingham University, the conference will include 32 speakers and case studies from 14 countries. Focused on community-based solutions, it is aimed professionals and civil society organisations and academics worldwide.

The whole planet is affected by extreme events and they are coming to more of us, more often. In wealthy countries, we’re being lashed by storms and hurricanes with increasing frequency. The cities that we live in, or go to on holiday, may be unbearably hot at certain times of year – or in, some cases, subject to cyclones or actually surrounded by burning forests. The messages couldn’t be clearer.

Last year, torrential rain in East Spain brought over a year’s worth of precipitation in eight hours. Floods caused 232 deaths. This year, cities in Southern California were struck by devastating wildfires. 

Community empowerment

Rightly, the Californian fires were well reported. Most people weren’t told, however, by the same news channels, that Chile, in South America, had suffered the country’s worst ever wild fires in 2024 or that Canada’s national conflagrations that year produced the global warming effect of a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions in India.

Preparations and adaptions for extreme events can be relatively low-cost and low-tech. Those are the ones that will endure when the relief has ended and international NGOs have left the scene. They are also the most sympathetic with improving biodiversity and local capacity building.

Nusrat Nasab, CEO of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) Pakistan, will tell the conference that in Pakistan the agency produces village disaster risk management plan, involving talking to elders.

Local solutions are being adopted – for example, using large boulders to reinforce river banks and planting schemes that protect slopes from flash floods causing landslides and soil erosion.

Nusab says: “Empowered communities are more resilient. The west always looks to the government for help. Here, it’s more about the people themselves.” 

This great example and many more, will be showcased at the Building Resilience conference.

Register for Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Exreme Events

For more information contact Will Hatchett. E-mail wahatchett@gmail.com

Pic: The Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants is improving resilience to climate change in Senegal. World Habitat

Birmingham conference leads international fightback

Pic: The Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants is improving living conditions and resilience to climate change in Senegal. World Habitat

An international online conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham, places a welcome spotlight on responding to extreme events that threaten housing and health worldwide. Its focus is on community-based solutions.

Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods are increasing in frequency and intensity. The United Nations estimates that 90 per cent of disasters are related to weather. 

It's the job of academics to record such occurrence, so that we can learn from them. Sadly, they are easy to ignore. For two decades following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 their messages were fogged by denial and obfuscation. Now national exceptionalism is being used as a reason for inaction.

Increasingly, those working in the fields of construction, environmental sciences. international development, planning, public health, and energy, water and transport infrastructure are fighting back. It’s now recognised that strategies must work across multiple fields and that they are only sustainable if they are owned by the people affected most.

An international online conference in April, Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events has attracted speakers and interest from all over the world. Organised by the Healthier Housing Partnership and hosted by Birmingham University, it will include 32 speakers and case studies from 14 countries.

From Rio to Birmingham

The conference usefully re-frames ‘disasters’ as extreme events – predictable phenomena that we can plan for. It will draw lessons from events as diverse as ex-tropical Cyclone Ellie in Australia, the aftermath of an Indonesian earthquake, Spain’s worst flooding for decades and the needs of displaced populations in Nigeria.

Opening the conference will be Prof. David Hannah, UNESCO chair of water science and it will include speakers from Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia and DARAJA, providing early warning service Kenya and Tanzania.

One of the key messages of the conference will be that the extreme events that destroy houses and entire cities and displace millions of people do not fall into discreet categories. They frequently combine or are causally linked.

Melting ice in the world’s highest mountains should cause us as much concern as the shrinking polar ice caps. In Asia, it’s estimated that up to two billion people in eight countries are threatened by increasing glacial melt in the Himalayas. But that’s only part of the problem.

Nusrat Nasab, CEO of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) Pakistan will tell the conference that, in 2022, the combine effects of heavy monsoon rains and glacial runoff following a heat wave, led to Pakistan’s worst ever flooding, killing up 1,739 people. A third of the country was affected. She says: “I call Pakistan the ‘house of hazards. In the mountains, floods wash away everything. In the coastal areas it stays for months.”  

Millions displaced

Dr Jamila Wakawa Zanna will explain that war, civil conflict and climate change often interact, in a deadly nexus. A UK-based academic at the University of Birmingham, she also works for Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA).

Globally it’s estimated that 72 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to extreme events. In Nigeria alone, up to four million people are internally displaced. In the north, it’s caused by conflict driven by religious extremism. In the south, it’s primarily flooding, ethnic clashes and land disputes. 

Government camps are often over-crowded and unsafe. Even those run by international NGOs are often culturally insensitive, especially to the needs of women and the elderly, who are especially represented among internally displaced people.

Zanna comments: “External aid organisations don’t ask us what we need. They give us what they think we need.”  

Eureka moments

In the poorest countries, people and assets are not generally insured. Consequently, the financial costs of an extreme event will be estimated as far lower than those of an equivalent in a wealthy country.

Health impacts and fatalities are hard to measure in countries lacking primary healthcare, epidemiological statistics and death certification. It’s common, in such parts of the world, for bodies buried beneath concrete rubble never to be recovered. Consequently, in the west, victims and consequences in low and middle income countries are often invisible.

We tend to ignore what happens a long way away. it’s all too easy to assign yet another extreme event to a dusty, seldom visited part of the brain – a third of Pakistan underwater, another earthquake somewhere in Asia, a savage, record-breaking cyclone devastating a Pacific paradise. A eureka moment, comes when we acknowledge that Gaia, our living, breathing planet, is out of whack and trying to throw us off, burn or drown us.

Such revelations are coming to more of us, more often. In the global north, we’re being lashed by storms and hurricanes, with anthropomorphic names with increasing frequency. The cities that we live in, or go on holiday to may be unbearably hot at certain times of year – or in some cases, subject to cyclones or surrounded by burning forests. The messages couldn’t be clearer. 

Closer to home

This year, Californian cities were encroached by wildfires that seemed to have been designed by Evangelists concerned by the Biblical ‘end times’, with the help of Hollywood’s finest CGI technicians. 

Rightly, the ‘disaster’ was well reported. Most people weren’t told, however, by the same news channels, that Chile, at other end of the continent had suffered the country’s worst ever wild fires in 2024 or that Canada’s national conflagration that year produced the global warming effect of a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions in India.

Closer to the UK, Paloma Taltavull de La Paz, a professor of applied economics at the University of Alicante, will tell the conference that, last year, torrential rain in East Spain brought over a year’s worth of precipitation in eight hours. Floods caused 232 deaths.

Planning and work to protect low-lying land around Turia Riiver in the Valencia region, begun following the deadly floods of 1957, had been abandoned long before the current generation of politicians took control. Flood victims have launched legal actions. They are calling for resignation of regional president Carlos Mazón for failing act promptly on meteorological warnings.

Local is best

Adaptive solutions can be simple, low-cost and low-tech. Those are the ones that will endure when the relief phase has ended and parachuted-in NGOs have left the scene.

They are also the most sympathetic with improving biodiversity and local capacity building. In Pakistan, the world’s most climate affected country, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat produces village disaster risk management plans. They involve talking to elders, who can remember which areas are prone to flooding.

Local solutions are being adopted that are being duplicated across Asia and Africa – for example, using large boulders to reinforce river banks and planting schemes that protect slopes from flash floods causing landslides and soil erosion. In 2020, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat Pakistan and the government of Gilgit-Baltistan in north-east of the country launched a $4.2 million project to plant 50 million trees across the region.

This great example of protecting human settlement from extreme events, and many more, will be showcased and discussed at the Building Resilience conference in April. Nusab says: “Empowered communities are more resilient. The west always looks to the government for help. Here, it’s more about the people themselves.”

Regiser for Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events

For more information contact Will Hatchett. E-mail wahatchett@gmail.com

“Climate change is the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced. These threats should unite us no matter from which part of the world we come.”

David Attenborough, speaking to the UN Security Council, 2021

“Professional fragmentation needs to be reduced if we are to better prepare for and respond to extreme events. The Building Resilience conference is a welcome contribution to that process.” 

David Jacobs, Chief Scientist National Center for Healthy Housing

 

Wicked problems of the private rented sector

Improved renters’ rights are coming closer. Landlords predict a shrinking private rented sector. One thing is certain, new legislation gives councils a raft of new duties and responsibilities at a time when they face unprecedented demands.

Royal assent for the Renters' Rights Bill, which was announced in the 2024 King's Speech is moving closer. Now in the House of Lords it could become law by Easter, or the summer. The new law contains a change that has become a talisman for housing campaigners and that the last Conservative government resisted.

So-called no fault or retaliatory evictions, made under Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988, will end on day one of the act coming into effect. Private landlords, in theory, will no longer be able to ‘get rid of’ tenants who have the temerity to complain about poor conditions or rent increases.

The bill, when passed, will extend the Decent Homes Standard from social housing to the private rented sector and prohibit the use of rent increase clauses, requiring landlords to issue a Section 13 notice to increase the rent. Rent increase will be limited to once per year, capped at market levels. Tenants on benefits and those with pets should find it easier to rent.

The new law will create a digital Private Rented Sector database, which, again, campaigners have sought for many years, and a new ombudsman service. Councils will be able to extend property licensing schemes, which impose additional responsibilities on landlords, without approval from the secretary of state – a change that many will welcome as a useful tool for levering up standards over large areas.

Paul Oatt, FCIEH, a local authority private housing regulation expert welcomes the abolition of Section 21 eviction, which has already been implemented in Scotland. He notes: “When a tenant receives a Section 21 eviction their landlord does not have to give a reason. From a human rights perspective, it’s very difficult fort them to go court to defend their tenancy.”

The new law will allow a landlord to evict because they want to sell their property or for a family member to move in – but, in these cases, it will prevent them from re-letting for a year, or face a potential financial penalty. Civil enforcement penalties, available to councils since the Housing and Planning Act of 2016, whose receipts they can recycle into enforcement services, will be increased.

Housing law is a mess

Oatt admits that housing legislation is a mess. To the benefit of lawyers, sections of the Housing Acts of 1985, 1988 and 2004 will still apply when the Renters’ Rights Act comes into force. The act, he notes, will give significant new responsibilities to already over-loaded local authority regulatory services, many of which are facing the simultaneous prospect of merging with their neighbours, to become unitary councils. Local authorities  have been suffering from skills shortages, and difficulties in recruiting good staff for years now. Having to spend large sums of housing budgets on temporary accommodation is bringing some to the verge of bankruptcy.

The Renters’ Rights Act will extend Awaab’s Law responsibilities to act promptly on damp and mould to the private sector – which is laudable, he says, but an enormous responsibility. Just as councils struggle to eliminate hugely costly issues of damp and mould and flammable cladding to their own housing stock, the new law may stimulate solicitors to pursue no-fee class actions to an enormous group of new claimants, private sector tenants.

Commentators fear that landlord tenant disputes resulting from the new legislation will swamp an already overloaded legal system. Oatt sympathises with landlords who, he acknowledges, may now face costly delays. He says: “I think that’s a fair concern. I’ve literally just finished off a tribunal case that’s been dragging on since 2020. Tribunals are in an absolute mess.”

The application of a ‘pass or fail’ test on the presence of mould in privately rented properties, he says, contradicts the risk assessment basis of the housing health and safety rating system. More seriously, a much-needed exercise to update HHSRS has been delayed.

The intention of the new legislation is certainly to reduce injustices for tenants. But lawyers, he notes, are inventive and housing law is like an enormous piece of knitting – pull on one thread and you’re going to make hole somewhere else. Oatt says: “whenever you enact a policy and try to resolve an issue you create other issues – this is the nature of housing legislation because the housing market is so volatile.”

In particular, he fears the return of no fault eviction by the ‘back door’, through landlords’ invoking Section 6B of the Housing Act 1988, allowing them to seek vacant possession of property for which a local authority has served a notice requiring major works.

Lawyers and landlords

Tenants’ campaigners have generally welcomed additional protections offered by the new law. It evolved from the Conservatives’ Renters (Reform) Bill, introduced in 2023 and was considerably strengthened by amendments introduced by housing minister Matthew Pennycook.

The private rented sector has doubled in size since the early 2000s. It now houses almost five million households and is the second largest form of tenure after owner occupation. The sector is dominated by small landlords. According to government figures, 43% of landlords own one rental property, representing 20% of tenancies. Social housing stock has plummeted over the last few decades, while owner occupation, an obsession of both major parties, has never have been a suitable tenure for those who require mobility or whose income is uncertain.

We have ‘worst of both worlds’ housing, which has evolved through market forces. The “buy-to-let boom’ housing, which swelled the private rented sector from the late 1990s, is subject to economic cycles. The current situation places some of the neediest people in society in the hands of amateur landlords, to the detriment of both, and means that millions of families with children are living in housing whose physical condition is often poor and face the sword of Damocles of frequently being required to move.

The Law Society has welcomed the ban of no-fault evictions and an end to rental bidding wars. But it says: “The government must outline how it intends to equip courts with adequate resources to handle rising demand, while dealing with existing backlogs.”

It has also called for expanded grounds for landlords to repossess properties using Section 8 eviction notices, for penalties against rogue landlords to be strengthened and more funding for recruitment and training of council enforcement teams.

The National Residential Landlords Association, the UK's largest landlord association, supports the application of the Decent Homes Standard to the PRS, the extension of Awaab’s Law and measures to tackle discrimination.
But it has warned of the “potentially devastating” consequences of the Renters' Rights Bill on the supply of homes to let and rent levels.

Oatt notes that in the 1960s and ’70s, when Labour passed legislation to protect tenants’ rights, private landlords claimed, erroneously, that increasing security of tenure and controlling rents will lead to a meltdown of the PRS. He doubts that the sector’s size, 19% of UK housing stock, will, in reality, decrease but he concedes that the new law could lead to a churn in ownership, so small landlords are replaced by larger ones.

He observes that there are ‘tame’ and ‘wicked ’problems’. The tame ones (like fixing a broken car engine) have clear -parameter and known solutions, wicked problems (solving climate change) are complex and multifaceted, with no clear solution, involving multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests. Housing problems, he says, are wicked ones.

 

Is food safety broken? If so, how do we fix it?

Food safety enforcement in England could be on the verge of its largest change since the nineteenth century. Some fear privatisation and ‘regulatory capture’. Others argue that technology-driven innovation is long overdue. 

It’s been a newsy year for food safety. In January, the UK was unable to implement its promised frictionless, single trade window, featuring newly-designated border control posts and digital health certificates, in time for the return of controls on EU animal and plant imports. The result was long queues of lorries and chaos. It was more Dad’s Army than James Bond.

EHOs in Dover warned of illegal pork being smuggled into the UK in unprecedented quantities in white vans, prompting fears, in the Daily Mail, of an outbreak of African swine fever. In March, the Guardian reported that hospital admissions from salmonella, the most common form of food poisoning, were at all at time high. Some commentators attributed the surge to Brexit catastrophically reducing physical safety controls and the stripping of capacity from local government over the austerity period.

In October, stories in the catering trade press proclaimed ‘Move to self-regulate could reduce safety visits’, then ‘Scores on doors scandal to “torpedo” FSA plans for food safety shake-up’. An undercover BBC investigation had discovered hundreds of premises, including a branch of Sainsbury’s mis-declaring their food hygiene rating scores. Food is always political, and policy decisions are often hijacked by events.

It would be possible to conclude from this year’s headlines that the UK’s food safety system is ‘broken’. Public health commentator Sterling Crew doesn’t think that the system is broken. But he does believe that it needs some reforms, to bring it up to date.

Crew, a chartered fellow of the CIEH has a 40-year background in food regulation, manufacturing and retailing. Today, he observes, supermarkets account for 95% of grocery sales, in a sector that is dominated by ten giants. Yet, he notes, the model for food safety enforcement has changed little since the 1875 Public Health Act.

It was designed for an era in which environmental health officers trod local beats inspecting abattoirs, cowshed and pie shops. He says: “I was very happy when I became a local authority EHO, over 40 years ago. But I did not think that the methods of the job had really changed since Victorian times.”

Local versus national

The anomaly of locally-based enforcement system, set against increasingly national, and global, food supply and retailing chains has been clear for several decades and it is growing more acute as local authority budgets continue to shrink. In response, in 2009, the UK’s Food Standards Agency, which was set up by New Labour in 2000, established a voluntary system of ‘primary’ authorities. Under this system, national retailing chains could choose a single council to act as a lead and referral point for advice and enforcement. The scheme was expanded in 2017.

The legislation that created the FSA allowed it to become a national enforcement body, but its political masters have chosen, up to now, not to give it that remit. The agency has intimated, at times, that it would be appropriate for it to regulate big business, leaving local authorities to focus on the sole traders and SMEs that make up the majority of the UK’s 600,000 food businesses.

In 2015, the FSA set off down that road. Under a controversial plan called Regulating Our Future, the agency would hold a national database of risk-rated registered food businesses. For the first time, data from third party, private sector audits would be incorporated into the primary authority system. Later, the agency envisaged, large businesses would be charged for food safety inspection, shifting the cost from local government.

The plan met with widespread opposition from many traditionalist EHOs, who viewed it as a heresy – a ‘privatisation’ of food safety inspection and a threat to local accountability. It was delayed and ultimately prevented by the huge national disruption caused by Brexit – events hijacking policy again.

Not dead, but resting

Regulating our Future has not disappeared from the FSA’s thinking. It has just been resting. It re-emerged, in a slightly modified form, in 2021 as Achieving Business Compliance. Conceived as a blueprint for a future regulatory system, ABC includes ‘enhanced registration’ of food businesses, co-ordinated by the FSA, and national regulation of big businesses, incorporating third-party audit data.

The system has been trialled by the FSA with, Aldi Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose. According to the agency, the data available from supermarkets’ third-party audits offers greater insight into their adherence to food safety rules than the existing local authority regimes. But ABC is just as controversial with many EHOs, as its predecessors Regulating Our Future and the primary authority system and, for the same reasons – they fear loss of local control and accountability and the potential for ‘regulatory capture’.

Discussed by the FSA board in in September, the latest iteration of ABC is that the legal enforcement body for UK’s ten largest supermarkets chains would become their primary authority as soon as next year. In the second phase, secondary legislation and changes to the Food Law Code of Practice would extend the FSA’s powers across retail, manufacturing and food-to-go sectors – a significant ‘nationalisation’ of enforcement, removing the cost of a large proportion of the cost of food safety services from councils.

Such a dramatic re-configuring to of the enforcement architecture, breaking the Victorian template and reducing the role of councils, would have to be a decision made at government level, either late in this Parliament, or the next one.

Crew does not fear such a change, if it is intelligently applied. He says: “In my opinion, the UK benefits from one of the most well-regulated, safest and authentic food systems in the world. But, despite that, we still have challenges to address. There is a need for a strong and capable regulator particularly with a global supply chain.”

He notes that Edwin Chadwick, who was the prime mover of food safety and sanitary reform in the nineteenth century, did not foresee Deliveroo, ‘dark restaurants’, globe-spanning food multinationals and artificial intelligence. Data is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century, he reasons. Why not use it and share it better?

He says: “Environmental health practitioners both in LAs and the private sector are passionate about the values to protect public health. I have seen many public and private collaboration initiatives that have improved public health, and I hope to see many more.”

Dwindling resources

He adds: “I do have major concerns surrounding the dwindling resources within local authorities We have seen a dramatic drop in the employment of EHOs. With strains on resources, I believe the regulatory framework needs to act smarter and take advantage of some of the new innovation in the sector.

“One way to do this is to incorporate the findings of voluntary third-party audits into the assessment of inspections. We could also take advantage of using remote inspections and audits. We saw some of these new innovations adopted during the Covid19 pandemic.”

Crew is a fervent admirer of the local authority EHO. He has been one himself. He argues that such a nationalised approach could be accompanied by much-needed and long overdue local reforms – why shouldn’t passporting, or prior approval, be required for running a food business? The mandatory display of food hygiene rating scores in England, as in Wales and Northern Ireland, he adds, would massively enhance the effectiveness of the scheme.

Long-term he believes that the biggest threat to food safety is not regulatory architecture but in filling future job roles and the resilience of the food safety profession. He says: “I am convinced that the biggest challenge ahead of the food sector is in retaining and recruiting talent, especially in the technical arenas. I think there are great rewarding careers available as an environmental health practitioner. We should all do our upmost to encourage people to join us.”