The incentive to maintain and update such housing largely derives from homeowners’ desire to live in reasonable comfort and safety and to maintain the value of their asset, although local authorities can enforce certain repairs if the condition of the house threatens others nearby. When such houses are sold, if the new owners have to borrow from housing finance institutions, the lenders will also insist that the house is (or is made) structurally sound, because they also have a vested interest in its value.
However, standards for what are deemed acceptable living conditions for residents are laid out for existing rental housing in the UK. Tellingly, the relevant guidance is termed ‘A Decent Home’.15 Thus, two key terms that are central to the arguments in this book are up front. ‘Decent’ is explicitly a normative term: there is no possible objective definition and (in a housing context) it implies value judgements that are made about what a society collectively feels is right, what conditions within a house should be for the people living there, and what conditions are unacceptable because they cause too much physical and mental distress. The use of the word ‘decent’ in any legislation is extremely important because it implicitly recognises that ‘indecent’ conditions arise when market forces are unregulated.16 It is significant, for example, that debates about work and incomes across the world, led by the International Labour Organization (ILO), refer to ‘decent’ work or jobs. Again, the normative aspect is explicit: it is about work that is reliably paid, has safe and non-exploitative conditions and includes elements such as pension and health rights. The other word, ‘home’, is of equal significance because it is not the word ‘house’. It immediately signals that the issues are not seen as purely technical and that there is a recognition of the abstract and emotional aspects of dwelling in a specific building, of issues such as privacy, safety and the need for family life. The related UK Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) states that its purpose is to regulate how ‘the dwelling as a whole, and each individual element in the dwelling has an effect’ on the ‘basic physical and mental needs for human life and comfort’.17
The Decent Homes guidance has four main elements. These are that the home must be in a reasonable state of repair: this includes external walls; the roof; windows and doors; chimneys; central-heating boilers; gas fires; storage heaters; plumbing; and electrics. It must also have facilities and services that are ‘reasonably modern’: these include a kitchen with adequate space and layout to contain all the required items (e.g. sink, cupboards, cooker, worktops); a main bathroom and an indoor toilet (with a nearby washbasin) that is not accessed through a bedroom; adequate insulation against external noise, if needed; and, in blocks of flats, adequate size and layout of common areas. Another requirement is for effective insulation and efficient heating so the home is warm enough to be reasonably comfortable. The most complex element of the guidance is that a decent home ‘meets the current statutory minimum standard for housing’. This is measured against 29 criteria in the HHSRS (Table 3.1) with a scoring system depending on the perceived likelihood of the hazard actually causing harm to the people in the home. High scores mean that the hazard must be remedied. The conditions that led to the appallingly high mortality and morbidity rates in urban housing in the GN in the not-so-distant past are all listed in this table. These are 1 and 2 (damp and mould growth, and cold); 11 (crowding and space); and 15, 17 and 18 (domestic hygiene, pests and refuse; personal hygiene, sanitation and drainage; and water supply). It is worth noting that hazard 11, relating to overcrowding, is understood to go beyond tangible physical criteria and includes other crucial aspects of a home (rather than a house), as it also accounts for ‘the psychological needs for both social interaction and privacy’ (emphasis in the original).
Table 3.1 England and Wales 2006 Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS): potential influences on ‘The basic physical and mental needs for human life and comfort’
There are further conditions about housing that relate to these issues about privacy and social interactions. There are ‘national bedroom standards’ that determine how many bedrooms a family should have. Separate bedrooms are theoretically required for a couple living together as partners, single adults aged over 21, and children of different sexes aged between 10 and 21. A bedroom can be shared by any two children of the same sex and from the same family, although a young adult who is not a family member needs a separate bedroom. If a woman is pregnant, it is understood that this will soon affect the number of bedrooms required.18 There are also standards about space requirements per person; these were set out in 1935 as a response to ‘overcrowded conditions in the private rented sector before the Second World War’, but they are very rarely enforced and data are rarely collected.19
These standards evidently have enormous implications for housing costs for families with children. Thus, it is these households, who are at the heart of any sustainable society and to whom politicians tend to refer constantly as a symbolic touchstone for the values and norms that they wish to represent, who in reality are seen as a costly strain on the urban system in Europe and North America. In the UK, as shown in Chapter 2, there are millions of urban families who do not earn anywhere near enough money to buy housing and who cannot afford to rent the decent housing that their societies, with all too recent histories of shocking rental housing conditions, rightly deem is required. Only government subsidies make their homes possible. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of this point for contemporary cities and their future prospects – it is possible that the future of the family in the world’s biggest cities is bound up with questions of housing affordability. This point is returned to in Chapter 9.
As already noted, the housing standards encompassed by the UK’s ‘Decent Homes’ and HHSRS relate only to rental housing. Moreover, their enforcement is mainly focused within the social housing rental sector – that is, where non-market, subsidised rents are being paid either in old-style ‘council housing’ or in the many, newer variants of social housing run by the non-profit sector with various government subsidies to keep rents down. It is obviously easier to enforce anything with parties that are reliant to some extent on financial support from the enforcement agency. However, the private, market-oriented rental sector is a very different problem. In a neoliberal capitalist society, interference with private property and profit tends to be seen as a difficult matter and the political ethos is that it is to be avoided where possible. This view is also fostered by the various extremely powerful and well-resourced lobbying groups from the private-sector building and rental sectors which do their best to encourage legislation that improves their profits and to discourage any that might constrain them. Local authorities are not actually empowered to take action about some poor housing conditions in the private rental sector, because it is private; nor are the expectations that local authorities will act as strong as they are in the social housing sector. Indeed, the ‘Decent Homes’ guidance states that, in the private rental sector, tackling poor standards should rely on ‘a range of assistance, advice and encouragement to homeowners … using enforcement powers only as a last resort’. Only when so-called Category 1 hazards – conditions listed in Table 3.1 as type A, B or C – are so serious that the severity score for the risk to the occupants is high do they theoretically have to be dealt with via enforcement. When the score is lower, enforcement is discretionary.
Once the enforcement of laws is discretionary, their impact will vary according to local and national political factors such as ideology and budgets. These also vary over time as elections come and go and as national and global economic changes affect budgets. In 2016 in England, for example, there was a Conservative government ideologically opposed to welfare payments and ‘red tape’, an austerity budget had led to deep cuts in central government grants
