The end of the ‘accidental enforcer’

The private rented sector (PRS) must professionalise if it is to protect tenants and support long-term investment. But professionalism cannot be one-sided. Regulators must evolve alongside landlords if the Renters’ Rights Act (RRA) is to succeed.
 
It’s generally agreed that the Renter’s Rights Act represents a new era for private renting in England. Politically it’s a switch back to a kinder, more protective state, away from neo-liberal environment that gave birth to last defining law for the PRS, the Housing Act of 1988. The introduction of Rent Smart Wales has already shown what is possible

But there is a problem. Era change always leads to EHOs and other housing professionals deciding to quit or to change job.  This could lead to a deficit of skills and organisational knowledge when they will be needed most –  in the years leading up to the Decent Home Standard (DHS) being applied to the PRS, in England in 2035.

Responsible private landlords and their membership bodies acknowledge the need to professionalise to meet the more stringent standards that the new law requires. Professionalism has become a buzzword, defining the change that is required. There is a consensus that the RRA may cause ‘accidental landlords’, perhaps owning one or two properties, to leave the sector, leading to consolidation to a market characterised by larger players with more access to capital and expertise.

Surely the same should apply to enforcers. It’s still the case that many of those who work in PRS enforcement, even some heads of service, do not hold a relevant housing-specific qualification – a shortcoming on the part of the councils that employ them. This situation has become increasingly untenable.

Detailed, complex law

The 2004 Housing Act, introducing HMO licensing and the housing health and safety rating system (HHSRS), is now welded to the RRA in terms of enforcement; but many other acts impinging on tenants’ rights remain in place. The sheer complexity of the law relating to the PRS, and its enforcement infrastructure, through courts, lower-tier tribunals and expanded civil penalties demands a high level of knowledge and the ability to evaluate, tactically and strategically, the many options available.

Food safety benefits from strict liability laws which can make enforcement in this area less likely to become entangled in challenge and interpretation than housing. Social housing is moving towards a strict liability model – social landlords have mandatory repair and safety obligations under the Decent Homes Standard (DHS) and Awaab's Law on damp and mould, in place since October 2025.

However, in the PRS, which is governed by multiple pieces of legislation, enforcement is of a dual nature, governed by both standards and professionally assessed risk. For non-HMOs, rights of entry are subject to the interpretation of different clauses of Section 239 of Housing Act 2004 – now made less clear by still untested RRA amendments to Section 239.
Access to rented property based on intelligence is easiest for an experienced EHO with good knowledge of the law, effective communication skills and keen eye-sight – is the hallway smoke alarm dangling off the ceiling? That often indicates wider concerns.

Once entry is gained, there are different enforcement possibilities. For the HMO, one has access to yes or no offences under HMO Regulations; for the non-HMO, new absolute RRA offences are buttressed by the ability to serve notices under the now improved risk-based methodology of the HHSRS.

Useful tool of licensing

In the influential online arena, private landlords resistant to reform are spreading a negative message. They claim that an ‘over-regulated’, fragile PRS risks collapsing and that councils are unconcerned about tenants and will merely use the civil penalties of the RRA as a funding source. These views are travesties with little relation to reality. But they risk achieving influence through constant repetition.

Increasingly, councils are adopting selective and additional licensing, which can now be implemented without secretary of state approval, as a way to find rogue landlords and to lever up standards. Twenty-eight of London's 32 boroughs are expected to be operating selective licensing schemes this year, and university cities, such as Manchester, Salford, Reading are rolling out borough-wide additional licensing.

It's an excellent tool, allowing the PRS to be integrated into physical improvement and economic regeneration, but, in order to use it, councils must ensure they have appropriately skilled and qualified staff. It is essential that their enforcement teams are up-to-date on knowledge of the law and its applications and that councils don’t lose the resources, including skilled, experienced professionals, that they have painstakingly built up over the years.

Alongside a duty to enforce, councils have been given the means to recycle fees and penalties income into enforcement services and plenty of training options are available, including post-professional courses, such as those offered by RHE Global, and new specialist degree apprenticeships. The elements are in place for the long-awaited RRA to be transformative. There should be no place for accidental enforcers.

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.

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.

Continuing scandal of invisible deaths

More than two people a week are killed by a partner in the UK – mainly women. Most of the victims are invisible. 

Welcome new legislation places a duty on social landlords to identify and act on signs of domestic abuse. 

Hidden in coroners’ reports and databases, deaths caused by domestic abuse are so common that they are rarely even reported. Most victims are female and we live in a society that recognise male violence as a norm – watch any episode of EastEnders, witness the recent crass remarks of home secretary, James Cleverly, on date rape drugs. 

According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, 1.7 million women and 700,000 men experienced domestic abuse in 2022. The latest Home Office figures, for 2020/21, show 113 deaths from this cause – more than two per week. Three-quarters of victims were female, a quarter male. Close to half of the deaths were caused by stabbing, the second most common method was blunt force trauma.

The public, rightly, is horrified when a baby or child is beaten or starved by those responsible for their care – according to the NSPCC, an average of 58 young children dies each year, due to abuse or neglect. The most horrific cases, like the recent ones of Victoria Climbié or Arthur Labinjo-Hughes are routinely covered on the front pages of newspapers, with heart-rending photographs. The papers demand, on our behalf, “how could we have prevented this tragedy?”.

Adult deaths caused by abusers who are family members don’t seem to prompt the same visceral emotional response and a collective call for action. Its partly because they are so common. It’s also because systems that could facilitate learning what went wrong and acting on it aren’t working.

Coroners’ preventable deaths reports don’t recognise domestic abuse as a category. The main focus of Community Safety Partnership, another reporting mechanism, is on crime and disorder. The Home Office is brilliant at collecting statistics. It captures, chillingly, who killed whom, with that. Legally, it is responsible for collating the data from domestic homicide reviews, which have been in place since 2011.

It is supposed to identify serious failings and common themes and to communicate lessons to the media. These, in turn, should be picked up by public bodies – such as the police and probation services, social services, councils and housing association. But it isn't happening. The Home Office is not culturally suited to such a role.

Wider definition of domestic abuse

In the UK, reporting and learning mechanisms are lagging far behind new and welcome legislation, in an environment which has become sensitised more than ever to gender-based and institutional violence. Instigated by Theresa May’s government, the Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 was a much-needed and long overdue piece of legislation. It created a statutory definition of domestic abuse including emotional, controlling or coercive, and economic categories and it established a Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales.

This act’s influence, and a culture change, can be seen in Social Housing (Regulation) Act of 2023, which followed a white paper in 2020. The act – a reaction to the negligence and stripping out of regulations that caused the tragic Grenfell towerblock fire of 2018, sets out a charter laying out tenants’ rights, alongside a newly-empowered social housing regulator, professional training requirements and the welcome concept of consumer standards.

Section 136 and 137 of the white paper specifically mentioned domestic abuse and policies and practices on domestic abuse are required from social landlords, following a dedicated consultation, in the consumer standards. They are required to protect tenants, not just from physical conditions but from abusers, within a new set of professional parameters.

Domestic abuse expert Dr Kelly Henderson welcomes the fact that this narea of danger has been, albeit belatedly, included within the sphere of housing management. Her PhD research was on the role of housing in a coordinated community response to domestic abuse. 

She has worked in social housing management up to director level and now runs a company, Addressing Domestic Abuse, that trains and advises local authorities, housing managers, tenants, police forces and the Home Office. Henderson and legal expert Anna Bennet of Devonshires explained to Inside Housing magazine last year that whereas, before, the focus was on tenants bringing a complaint to their landlord, new standards mean that managers must act on any signs that may be related to domestic abuse.

She stresses: “I think it's important to get the point across that domestic abuse can happen to anybody, regardless of their income, but that you have fewer opportunities to escape abuse if you don't have resources.” Social housing landlords a special responsibility. In the best cases, they have their ears to the ground, they form communities. They are in a good position to identify and help to prevent domestic abuse – if they can’t, who can?

Signs of a problem may be far more subtle than bruising or other indications of physical violence. For a housing manager it may manifest in a non-obvious way, in terms of a tenant’s repair history or in patterns of rent arrears.

She says: “Imagine if there's been three bathroom door lock repairs in a year, that could be a red flag. Does the tenant have control of money and their mobile phone? A tenant might say something in a throwaway comment like ‘you need to ask my partner about this’.”

Of course, such signs may have nothing to do with domestic abuse. The most important skill is listening. She says: “It’s important for you to know about the help services that are available in your area and to explain them. But the worst thing you can do is for the victim to feel ‘I've said no to support once, so I can't ask again’. It's about keeping the door open. So that that when person feels that they are ready, they can come back.”

She adds: “The victim may not want to go down the route of taking legal action. They might just the abuse to stop and to move to a new home and start again.” 

Need to tackle causes

Policies should facilitate management transfer for the victim or, in some cases, the perpetrator – too often it is the victim, usually a woman, who loses her home. And they should be proactive and preventive. She says: “The cause of domestic abuse is perpetrators and we need to tackle the cause. What we are largely doing at the moment is picking up the pieces after them and putting the victim in a refuge.” 

Frequently, she says, domestic abuse is incorporated by landlords into policies on antisocial behaviour. It’s a topic that requires its own specific response. But merely having a policy doesn’t mean that the duty to protect tenants has been fulfilled.

For many landlords, consumer and rights-focused social housing management has just begun. Inevitably, the cultural change that it signals won’t happen overnight. Arguably, a professional re-set is required, which has far-reaching implications. She says: You can't just have consumer standards, introduce domestic abuse, and then not have domestic abuse awareness as a required skill in professional training.” 

Local authorities are resource starved, with many competing priorities, and there aren’t enough shelters. She says: “I think the government needs to invest more money into refuges and to give local authorities ring-fenced funding to provide appropriate services.” 

But money and law, in themselves, are not enough. A holistic community response is required. She says: “It's not just one organisation’s responsibility. It’s something that we all have a duty to act on. If you work in the housing sector, you need to know that it's part of your job to recognise and respond to domestic abuse. That's what I would like to happen.”

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

 

Forgotten hero of health and social housing

Few politicians have had such a profound positive impact on the health of the people of Britain as Christopher Addison, our first health minister. He deserves far more recognition.

In an era of minnows and mayflies – politicians whose main agenda is to enrich their families and friends and to court popularity with right-wing newspapers, it’s useful to be reminded that other worlds are possible. In other words, there have been examples of people in high office, in the UK, who have sought to improve society and its institutions for the benefit of the most disadvantaged and who have followed principles that are broader than mere self interest. Liz Truss is not one of them, neither are John Redwood or Jacob Rees-Mogg.

But one such individual was Christopher Addison (not the comedian). A doctor and surgeon who came from a wealthy Lincolnshire farming family, Addison was elected as Liberal MP for Hoxton in London in 1910. His motivation? He had been born into a privileged family and he wanted to help poor people. Sounds improbable? This man walked the walk. In the UK we value delusional flamboyance in our political leaders. We like hucksters. Dull people (Addison was a bit dull, to be honest) are overlooked. Rishi Sunak is dull. But he's the wrong kind of dull – a bean counter who is clueless in the realm of emotional intillgence. Addison was the right kind.

In a career spanning four decades, two political parties and two world wars, Addison's loyalty, his skill in dealing with real-world problems and his unwavering values (yes, there are such things) made him a trusted confidant to three prime ministers – David Lloyd George, Ramsey MacDonald and Clement Attlee. He was a member of Lloyd George's inner circle that that held breakfast meetings to sort out the nation's problems during the First World War, the ‘kitchen cabinet’, and he was so close to Attlee during the next war that the two men were called ‘Clem and Chris’.

Addison set up the Medical Research Council in 1920, legislated for nurses' registration and chaired a committee, in 1931, that recommended the creation of national parks. He shepherded two key health acts into life and was responsible for a piece of legislation, the ‘Addison Act’, that led to the building of an estimated 200,000 council houses. It's a pretty amazing legacy.

How many hundreds of thousands of people have enjoyed better and healthier lives because he was able to translate his princples into practice? But there is no museum in Hogsthorpe, his birth village in Lincolnshire, celebrating his life and achievements. He is mainly remembered through the Addison Act, and a piece of anatomical terminology, ‘Addison's plane’, relating to the abdomen. Other than that, he is almost completelty forgotten.

The reason for his relative obscurity is that Addison was a details person, a pragmatic, behind-the-scenes fixer. While highly principled, he wasn’t a showy orator or a glory-seeker. He just got things done and he came into his own in wartime, when UK governments assumed wide-ranging, command and control powers over people’s lives.

Addison is talent-spotted

When Dr Addison was elected to serve working class Hoxton as an MP, aged 41, he was already a highly-respected fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, as an anatomist. This new role must, initially, have been a culture shock for a man from a well-off rural background. Plugged into the medical establishment and a master of minutiae, he was soon talent-spotted by Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George. He helped Lloyd George to get the 1911 National Insurance Act onto the statute books. It provided compulsory, state-run financial assistance for sickness – Addison’s first health victory.

During the First World War, he was appointed to a key role (ironically for a doctor), in July 1916, as Minister of Munitions. He facilitated healthier conditions for munitions workers and commissioned state-funded estates to house them, with wide streets and generously-sized gardens. This was Addison’s second health victory, excluding those of his medical career.

He was a natural choice to be appointed by Lloyd George, now Prime Minister, as Minister for Reconstruction, in July 1917. The tide of the war was turning and pressing questions pre-occupied the government – where would demobilised soldiers live, what would happen to the economy when ramped up war production was wound down, how would reconstruction be funded and what about social welfare?

The Poor Laws and workhouses still provided a harsh and punitive safety net for the poor. Lloyd George envisaged a radical post-war resettlement. He envisaged something like a ‘welfare state’ after the war – personal social services would be underpinned by state benefits and hated workhouses would be consigned to history. The Local Government Board, the Victorian branch of the civil service that ran the Poor Laws, stood in Lloyd George’s way. The PM simply abolished it, appointing Addison as the man to wind it down.

His bold vision was for a new Ministry of Health. This unprecedented creation would work alongside councils, which would improve and replace slum housing and ensure safe food. Tuberculosis, which thrived in in insanitary, overcrowded living conditions would provide a particular focus for its work. Addison became Britain’s first health minister in 1919, when the Local Government Board was dissolved. The previous year, his Maternal and Child Welfare Act required councils to provide day nurseries for working women – Addison’s third health victory.

His fourth and arguably greatest health victory, the Housing and Town Planning, or ‘Addison’ Act, of 1919, was designed to facilitate a large-scale, post-war house building programme, through a new mechanism, an exchequer subsidy. Addison intended at least half a million homes attractive, affordable rented homes to be built. Less than half that number were achieved. But the act literally changed Britain’s landscape. It must rank as one of the most far-sighted and effective health-promoting measures of the twentieth century.

Eye-catching estates

Small local building firms could be used to construct houses and councils could contribute financially, by levying a rate of up to one penny. Designs were modelled by council architects on the pattern of the Tudor Walters report of 1918, which, had been informed by the arts and crafts housing built by the London County Council, and munitions estates, including Well Hall in Greenwich and Gretna and Eastriggs, in south-west Scotland.

Featuring houses built in short rows, with pitched roofs, large gardens and communal ‘village greens’, the cottage estates of the 1920s and ’30s are still eye-catching. It was healthy, attractive, affordable rented housing for people on low incomes, efficiently-delivered, long before council housing was stigmatised, starved of funding and abandoned by Conservative and Labour governments.

Addison’s fourth victory was to be short-lived. In 1921, amidst alarm from the Treasury about rising costs, Lloyd George slashed the housing programme and humiliatingly demoted his former political ally to ‘minister without portfolio’. Playing up to right-wing newspapers owned by Lord Rothermere, that were soon to turn on him, he accused Addison, in Parliament, of possessing “an unfortunate interest in public health” and of being “too anxious to build houses”.

It's sad when two politicians who function effectively as a political unit – Owen and Steel, Blair and Brown,  Sunak and Johnson (they brought out the best in each other) – fall out. Usually, the cause is ego and thwarted ambition – one of the duo begins to resent the other one. In this case, Lloyd George – organisational genius, highwire artist and ladies man – simply ratted on his friend. The so-called ‘Welsh wizard’ valued poll ratings more than his principles and friendships. There is no nice way to put this – he threw Addison under a bus. He did this so as not to lose the backing of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror and Rothermere's bizarre political organizaton the Anti-Waste League – a weird combination of the current-day Taxpayers' Alliance and the Nazi party.

Addison was puzzled. He did not resign immediately but brooded for three months, before throwing in the towel. A year later, he lost his seat, in the 1922 general election that obliterated the warring Liberal party – a shock from which it has never recovered. These were Addison's ‘wilderness years’. It was a time for him to tack stock and reflect on what was important. He returned to the family farm in Lincolnshire, and wrote a two-volume primer on socialism and a stinging critique of Lloyd George’s cynical and self-defeating policy u-turn, The Betrayal of the Slums.

In this cogently-argued book, which is still in print, he pointed out that the housing programme’s budget had been arbitrarily reduced to £200,000 for whole of Britain, while the government was spending more than £200m annually on war services. Addison wrote: “The cost of this neglect is that we are committed to an increasing expenditure on combating the results of deplorable housing conditions.”

Return to Parliament

When Addison returned to Parliament, it was as Labour MP for Swindon in 1929. Drawing on his farming background, he served as an agricultural advisor to Labour Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, later reviled as a ‘traitor’ by the unforgiving Labour party. He served, briefly, as a minster of agriculure, in 1930.

MacDonald's hold on power was tenuous. The fascist-leaning Daily Mail had helped to bring down his minority governent in1924, with a forged document, the Zinoviev Letter, alleging a communist conspiracy involving the Labour party.

The global economy was on the ropes. Politics were volatile. In a strong parallel with today, the authoritarian fringes of fascism and communism were finding a home in western democracies. When MacDonald joined the Conservatives in a National Coalition in 1931 – viewed as an infamous move by the Labour party – Adddison resigned from the front bench. He identified as a socialist, but he was not a member of the pacifist, appeasement-favouring wing of Labour, whose leading light, George Lansbury, led the Labour party from 1932 to ’35.

Addison lost his Swindon seat in the 1931 election, regained it in a by-election in 1934, but lost it again in 1935, even though Labour, now led by Attlee, did quite well. It was the end of his time as an MP, but not as a Parliamentarian. He was granted a hereditary peerage in 1937. As Baron Addison, he became one of small number of Labour lords.

In 1945, being one of the oldest statesmen around and a popular figure on all sides, he became Leader of the House of Lords. This was a politically crucial role. His main job, which he skifllfully accomplished, was to steer radical Labour legislation, including a radical nationalisation programme, through the Conservative-dominated upper chamber.

In 1920, as health minister, Addison had commissioned the Dawson report, that had recommended that the UK's hospitals were unified into a single national system and that general practitioners combined preventative and curative medicine. It must therefore have given him enormous satisfaction to advise Attlee and Aneurin Bevan, as the National Health Service Act of 1946 took shape.

The Dawson report had gathered dust on a Whitehall shelf for 25 years, but now, because of Labour's landslide victory of 1945, what was soon to be known as the National Health Service, was being created.

Bricks and mortar legacy

In 1951, Addison tried to persuade Bevan not to resign as labour minister, over the imposition of prescription charges. It was one of his last political interventions. He was ill by then, with the pancreatic cancer that caused his death, aged 82, in December.

Hundreds of people sent messages of condolence to his memorial ceremony at Westminster Abbey, including Winston Churchill. Addison was criticised by his socialist colleagues for his lifelong friendship with Churchill – they had both served Asquith’s Liberal reform agenda at the beginning of the century and, in the 1930s, opposed appeasement with Hitler, against the mood of their parties.

Addison was no Parliamentary firebrand – even his resignation of 1921 received little attention. He preferred to stay in the background, helping to turn the wheels of government. It's strange to relate that biographies of the ‘big beasts’ of politics that he helped and served alongside barely mention him. He must be one of the most least known significant British politicians of the twentieth century.

It could be said that his most tangible legacy was the council housing of the inter-war period, embodying his conviction, which is as relevant as ever, that investing in sound, affordable rented housing can help to level up social inequalities and reduce the incidence of wholly preventable illness.

In the first health minister’s second constituency, Swindon, there is an Addison Crescent, one of more 90 streets in Britain, all in areas of social housing, that bear his name. I think that Addison would be pleased by that. Perhaps bricks and mortar is best legacy to have.

Will Hatchett has been a social policy journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own. This blog draws on his chapter on Christopher Addison in Pioneers in Public Health: Lessons from History, Ed. Jill Stewart, Routledge, 2017.

Pic shows Addison Road, Allenton, Derby, thanks to Municipal Dreams

This blog was written for RHE Global

On poor housing and what is a profession

A series of tragedies have placed a spotlight on the specialised skills required of those who manage social housing. But what does it mean to be a ‘professional’?

The Grenfell fire of June 2017, which killed 72 west London residents, and the tragic death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in a housing association home in Rochdale in 2020 have led to a much-needed debate on the knowledge requirements and ethical standards that should be required of social housing managers.

The Grenfell residents lost their lives because their persistent and well-justified fire safety concerns were ignored by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO). Awaab’s father had complained to Rochdale Boroughwide Housing about the damp and mould that infested his house three years before his son died. He was told to paint over it. And we should not forget the six victims of the wholly preventable Lakanhal House tower block fire, in 2009, whose landlord was Southwark Council.

The Social Housing Regulation Bill, tabled last year, will restore powers to the Regulator of Social Housing to enforce standards that had been weakened in 2010 by then housing minister, Grant Shapps. The bill has been consistently attacked by housing campaign, Grenfell United, as lacking in teeth. It was only a coroner’s damning verdict on Awaab’s death from a severe respiratory condition, published last November, that impelled housing secretary Michael Gove to introduce an amendment that has been called ‘Awaab’s law’. The coroner, Joanne Kearsley, warned that there is risk of future deaths occurring, unless action is taken.

The amendment will require a foundation degree, or level 5 qualification, for senior housing executives and a level 4 qualification for housing managers. It’s estimated that this will require 25,000 housing staff to go back to college, which represents a milestone for social housing management.

This positive move, which has been described as the biggest reform to professional standards in social housing’s history, is welcome, but it only goes half-way. It’s interesting here to compare the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH), as ‘professional’ bodies. Both have their roots in Victorian legislation. The forerunners of both had instituted their own systems examinations, administered by boards, by the early twentieth century. But that doesn’t make you a ‘true’ profession. Is estate agency a profession? Or journalism?

‘True’ professions

Long-established and acknowledged professions, such as the law, medicine and accountancy, require a body of knowledge and training and, also, occupational roles that are only available to individuals who are members of their professional body. In the UK the designation ‘chartered’ is regarded as benchmark of professionalism. An organisation can only confer that title on a practitioner if it has been granted a royal charter, placing it under the jurisdiction of the Privy Council.

The wheels of officialdom turn slowly. Neither the CIH nor the CIEH gained their royal charters until the 1980s and it was a further decade before the CIEH offered chartered status to its members.

Members of its precursor, the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association, had been discussing the desirability of professional recognition virtually since the beginning of the association, in 1883. In November 1912, a reader, JC Dawes, wrote to the Sanitary Journal calling for professional status for practitioners of ‘sanitary science’. The journal’s editor, HH Spears, responded, somewhat sarcastically: “It will be very useful for the public health worker of the future to know that they are in the vanguard of science, when they are fumigating a room with fire and sulphur, or spraying disinfectant, when removing fever patients to hospital, or working a smoke machine to test drains.”

Spears continued: “All talk about science is so much flapdoodle when applied to the sanitary inspector. However great a scientist he (sic) becomes, he will still be the eyes and nose of his superior officer.” Spears was acknowledging a structural issue that was to impede the professionalisation of environmental health until the 1970s. Legally, sanitary inspectors worked “under the direction” of medical officers of health, who were medically qualified and enjoyed superior salaries and legal status and security of tenure.

Link was broken

The First World War, in which many sanitary inspectors worked for the Royal Army Medical Corps, did not change this situation, nor did the creation of a health ministry in 1919. The link was finally broken in 1974, when medical officers of health transferred to a new employer, the NHS. But newly-christened and comprehensive environmental health services were shattered by severe cuts to public spending caused by oil crisis of the mid-1970s. Arguably, they have never recovered.

Housing managers, too, worked predominantly in local government for most of the twentieth century. While they were never managed by a professional cadre of superior status, working for local government has never attracted the cachet enjoyed by those who practice the law or medicine, even though a commonality is the fundamental and life-saving nature of these occupations.

For housing this may have contributed to the deaths of the Grenfell residents and Awaab Ishak, who was born in a damp and mould-infested house and who never had a chance to be healthy. Members of professions have clout – they are respected and listened to. If they fail in their duties, they are demoted to civilian status, at a huge cost to salary and reputation. The well-paid managers of the Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) and the CEO of Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, who has since been dismissed, did not risk shame and stigma if they ignored the repeated pleas to be noticed of those lives they were responsible for.

I said earlier that that the requirement for the training of housing managers only goes half-way to what is required. Why? The law stipulates qualifications for housing managers, but it won’t require registration with a professional body, as is the case for solicitors or medical professionals, who can be struck off or suspended for misconduct. Neither housing nor environmental health, which are both now practised in all sectors, will enjoy true professional status until this step is reached.

It may never happen. The reasons are embedded in social attitudes as much as legislation. Housing and environmental health have their professional roots in local government which has been battered by cuts for decades. Neither body has a swanky set of oak-panelled rooms in Westminster – a repository of its intellectual capital and iconic objects.

And neither has a library. The CIEH disposed of its once-cherished library in 2017. Such matters may seem trivial. But tradition and a sense of shared history are actually essential to any profession. For an organisation whose members are vital to public health, you lose them at your peril.

This blog is posted on the RHE Global website

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

Photo: Armley, Wikimedia Commons, John Casewell