Why is London’s rental housing so bad?

One of the most depressing things about living in the capital is dealing with its rental market. Spend any time scrolling through the listings on Rightmove or Zoopla, and you’ll see thousands of properties unfit to live in: tiny, cramped flats with rotting joinery and black mould creeping up the walls. But people do live in these places — in a city with a housing crisis as acute as London’s, there isn’t any alternative. 

It’s a growing problem. As of 2021, the number of renting households in the city had climbed to 30% as of 2021 (up by a quarter since % in 2011), with 11.1% living in “unsuitable accommodation” (defined as having fewer bedrooms than occupants require). Compared to most other major European cities, England has a lack of protections for renters, but landlords in the capital nevertheless have a legal responsibility to ensure the home is fit for human habitation — meaning it’s “safe, healthy and free from things that could cause serious harm”. 

But crucially, a landlord’s failure to make sure their accommodation is liveable only becomes an offence when they refuse to comply with enforcement measures set by the council. To get to this point, tenants first have to make a complaint, and then — if severe enough — the council has to send round a housing-focused environmental health officer (EHO). These are degree-educated, regulated professionals who inspect a property to look for potential hazards and ensure any improvements are made. So far, so straight-forward.

But why, then, are there still thousands of London families still living in squalid conditions? This question is urgent: medical professionals report serious health impacts for Londoners, especially children, resulting from poor housing conditions. And in August, an inquest will determine if poor conditions in a social housing flat contributed to the death of a 15-week-old baby.  So what is driving this failure to keep homes in a liveable condition?

One EHO for every 7,500 rentals

A big part of the answer, The Londoner has found, is a major lack of enforcement capacity. We asked London’s 33 boroughs to provide data on the number of EHOs they employ, compared to the number of rental homes in their area — 15 boroughs responded. What we discovered was shocking: an average of just one EHO for every 7,566 rental homes, a figure which experts told us is representative of the capital as a whole. 

Speaking on condition of anonymity, officers at London boroughs told us that enforcement of standards in rented housing has been “wiped out” by cuts, leaving tenants to deal with “horrific” conditions alone. These areas contain 867,100 rental homes — 378,200 social homes and 488,900 in the private rented sector — meaning there’s just one fully qualified EHO for every 7,566 rented properties (one for every 4,266 privately rented homes, and one for 3,300 socially rented homes).

As funding has shrunk, boroughs have increasingly turned to agency staff or less-qualified officers to enforce standards. As a consequence, some local authorities now have no environmental health officers at all in housing.

One recently retired leader of a housing enforcement team tells The Londoner that in some boroughs this means that “nothing will happen” if tenants complain about poor quality housing. “The councils just don’t have the resources to follow it up. The complaints just stack up and tenants give up on them. People make the best of it, or just move.”

Another, currently serving, EHO adds that even at councils with proportionately higher staff numbers of EHOs, they are too stretched by reactive complaints to carry out investigative work — seeking out the worst-quality properties, where tenants might be afraid to complain. 

“What’s really missing is the intelligence work: policing unlicensed HMOs [houses in multiple occupation], which is where the worst conditions often are. I’ve seen a case with several small children and many adults in a four-bed property. It was absolutely horrific, the bathroom had been smashed out, the boiler didn’t work and there was no hot water. But without intelligence work that just goes under the radar.”

“A lot of boroughs will just send an advisory letter to the landlord, because they don’t have the resources to actually enforce the law. I know from meetings with colleagues at other boroughs that there are places where they haven’t issued a civil penalty notice [which leads to fines or other sanctions] for two years or more, because they just don’t have the staff. They’re just firefighting and trying to survive each day.” 

A varied picture

Drilling into the data also reveals huge disparities in councils’ enforcement capacities. Some boroughs have introduced licensing schemes, where landlords have to pay for a license in order to let a property out. This creates an income stream which can fund enforcement, and pay for a larger workforce.  For example, Westminster employs 24 housing-focused EHOs — a ratio of one staff member for every 1,000 private rented homes. Brent, meanwhile, employs just one officer to cover a staggering 33,400 private rental homes. This is borne out in the enforcement action that takes place, too: research by the London Renters’ Union (LRU) revealed, for example, that Newham, which has the capital’s oldest borough-wide licensing scheme and, as a result, an extensive enforcement team, issued £318,700-worth of fines between 2018 and 2021. Meanwhile Haringey, which has only eight EHOs, did not issue any fines at all in the same period.

The retired housing enforcement leader says: “You need to remember that 40% of local authority funding disappeared in the last 15 years, and 80% of the money that’s left goes on children and adult services. So if you don’t generate income in a service now, it disappears. Private-rented-sector enforcement has disappeared and been wiped out — except in the boroughs where there is a licensing scheme, because that brings in revenue.”

Associate Professor Jill Stewart, a former EHO who researches the sector and teaches a course on environmental health at the University of Greenwich, tells me that the rise of officers with more limited qualifications raises questions about the level of expertise in an area that can be highly technical. “It has become more difficult to recruit housing EHOs and some boroughs are using agencies or staff without the formal qualifications,” she said. “But these other staff, who are they, what is their training? How well do they understand the law, and the technicalities of a building? We just don't know, which is a big problem but we are working on this as a profession.”

“They told me all they could do was send me an application for homelessness to fill out"

Often nothing happens when tenants in boroughs with few EHOs make a complaint. “I complained to my council about dangerous disrepair in my property. They told me all they could do was send me an application for homelessness to fill out,” says one member of the union from west London. In a different case brought to the attention of the union, a renter describes calling the council during an illegal eviction, only to be told that they “couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t given another number or any other way to get in touch with my issue”. And stories abound of landlords evicting tenants for complaining about serious damp and mould, or for asking for repairs — with council officials seemingly unaware of (or unwilling to use) their powers to intervene.  

These aren’t rare occurrences. Jackson Caines, who works on housing issues at Harrow Law Centre, tells The Londoner: “I think in Harrow it’s fair to say that we don’t have effective enforcement of the private rented sector. [EHOs] tend to send advisory letters to landlords rather than carrying out inspections or enforcement. The letters I’ve seen are quite weak and don’t warn them about their legal responsibilities and the powers the council have to enforce them. The council clings very strongly to a philosophy that it isn’t their role to take immediate formal action. They feel like they have to work with landlords and give them a chance, rather than robustly enforcing the law, or championing tenants’ rights.”

A spokesperson for Harrow responded that the borough does have “a robust enforcement strategy in the private rented sector”. “Where there is evidence of landlords flouting the rules and putting the health and wellbeing of tenants at risk, we will take the toughest action. The majority of our landlords comply with the law and our approach is also fair. Where we find issues, we work with landlords to give them the opportunity to address issues first,” the spokesperson said, adding that the borough had taken 217 formal enforcement actions across the last year. “We encourage tenants to raise issues through the official channels so that we can investigate and take the necessary actions required.”

What does the future hold?

The government’s Renters Reform Bill, which is currently progressing through the House of Lords and is likely to receive Royal Assent this summer, will increase powers of enforcement over private-sector landlords and increase tenants’ rights — including a removal of no-fault evictions, which allow landlords in England to end tenancies without providing a reason. 

But experts warned this law would not be effective unless enforcement capacity is rapidly scaled up. “I think a lot of people working in this space are really nervous because they're just thinking, ‘We'll have these new responsibilities, and we don't have enough staff now,’” says Dr Stewart. “It's quite a bleak picture, and it's going to take long-term investment and a major turnaround plan to get where we need to be.” 

Caines agrees. “Without sufficient resources, effective procedures and well trained staff, the new law will just be words on a page,” he says. “If I was new to the housing scene and I read the laws we have currently, I would think the system was great — and that local authorities have all these powers to crack down on rogue landlords. But we see there is a big gulf between theory and practice. And I worry that unless there are big changes, that will be the case with the new act as well.”

Note: the boroughs which responded to the FOI request with data were Tower Hamlets, Southwark, Brent, Richmond and Wandsworth (joint service), Kensington & Chelsea, Croydon, Westminster, Bexley, Lambeth, Haringey, Waltham Forest, Barnet, Redbridge, Merton and Hounslow.