Many of us are aware, not just from TV screen images of queueing ambulances outside hospitals but from our own personal experiences or those of family or friends, that our health service is under very serious strain. If more proof were needed then the news that, such is the backlog, 6.5 million people in England alone are awaiting hospital treatment, should be proof enough.

How, you may well ask, does that concern the private rented sector? Well, let’s start with the November 2021 revelation from the Building Research Establishment in their report The Cost of Poor Housing in England that poor quality housing in England has an annual “cost burden to the NHS caused by hazards” of £1.4 billion with the costliest issue (£857 million per year) for the health service to deal with being health issues caused by excess cold. Moreover, the 2nd costliest treatment bill was caused by the most common hazard - trips or falls on stairs (often caused by disrepair to or missing handrail or balustrade). This amounted to an astonishing 1 million patient treatments in 2018. Astonishing because, after all, handrails and balustrades are not expensive or difficult to repair or install. Beyond the specific burden on the NHS the report also points out that there are cost burdens to wider society coming from the mental health problems, poor educational achievement, and long term care requirements that can result from poor quality housing.

We are now more aware than we were that resource pressures (both lack of finance and lack of staff) on local authorities are such that, increasingly, they are being forced to concentrate scarce resources on social care provision than on wider public services which are either cut altogether or have funding severely reduced. This is made clear in the just published (June 2022) report, commissioned by the Dept for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities - Local Authority Enforcement in the Private Rented Sector - which highlights the barriers faced by local authorities in enforcing against poor housing standards. These barriers include a lack of sector intelligence/data within enforcement teams about the private rented sector in their areas, lack of departmental capacity in terms of both the numbers and the experience of existing officers following years of cutbacks and recruitment freezes.

The Government’s “sales pitch” for the newly published Rental Reform white paper which lays the ground for upcoming PRS legislation clearly has better health outcomes as a desired consequence of rental reform and the DLUHC is now also looking to make good on equality legislation by mandating that private landlords must make disability adaptations to properties (where reasonable) where the need for adaptation has been made clear by a disabled tenant. This is so that disabled people will have fewer barriers put in their way preventing them from being able to participate fully in wider society whether via a work life or social life.

The Scottish government has recognised the importance of private landlords in the community well being sphere by including them in their 2019 Housing and Dementia Framework because the outcomes for tenants living with dementia who live at home are better where private landlords ( as well as other housing providers) are able to contribute to the ability of a dementia patient to live successfully in their home.

We’ve said it before (and we’ll likely say it again in future) but, it remains the case that the whole housing market is changing and the private rented sector has an obviously huge part to play in that change and so, yes, the PRS has a consequently huge part to play in community well being and better health outcomes for tenants - for wider reasons than simply the sake of the NHS (even though that would be reason enough).