Private Sector Housing and Health: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Regulation Intended to Protect the Health of Tenants

This book is an evaluation of the effectiveness of housing enforcement and tenant protection in England’s private rented sector using policy analysis to evaluate regulatory provisions and local authority guidance to identify the advantages and limitations of existing policies. From the environmental health practitioner perspective, the targeted health problem is occupiers privately renting from negligent or criminal landlords who are subsequently exposed to hazardous conditions arising from disrepair.

Paul Oatt’s analysis looks at the powers local authorities have to address retaliatory eviction when enforcing against housing disrepair and digs deeper into their duties to prevent homelessness and powers to protect tenants from illegal eviction. He then explores the potential for tenants to take private action against landlords over failures to address disrepair, before finally discussing proposals put forward by the government to abolish retaliatory evictions and improve security of tenure with changes to contractual arrangements between landlords and tenants, based on successive stakeholder consultations. The policy analysis looks at these aspects to define the overall effectiveness of housing strategies and their implementation, examining causality, plausibility and intervention logic as well as the unintended effects on the population. Equitability is examined to see where policy effects create inequalities as well as the costs, feasibility and acceptability of policies from landlords’ and tenants’ perspectives.

The book will be of relevance to professionals interested in housing and health, as well as students at universities that teach courses in environmental health, public health, and housing studies.

Paul Oatt BSc (Hons) MSc CEnvH FCIEH is a Chartered Environmental Health Practitioner with 20 years’ experience as a local authority Environmental Health Officer up to Management Level. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Environmental Health, and an MSc in Public Health, Health Services Management. Paul is experienced in public health interventions relating to housing and pollution through the improvement of standards of both owner-occupied and privately rented housing. He is the author of Selective Licensing: The basis for a collaborative approach to addressing health inequalities (Routledge, 2020). Paul is a Fellow of the CIEH and an Associate member of the Faculty of Public Health at Middlesex University where he currently lectures on the subjects of environmental health, housing, construction and housing enforcement. He also provides training courses on Housing and Environmental related subjects including Damp and Mould, HMO regulation and Housing Enforcement.