With the recent statements by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves MP, about the £22 billion “black hole” ‘discovered’ in the nation’s finances (and her consequent remedies) and the focus of the Secretary of State for Housing, Angela Rayner MP, firmly set on a huge house building programme fuelled by reform of the planning system private rented sector reform seems to have taken somewhat of a backseat on the journey to resolving the national housing crisis.

Allowing for the fact that the new Government has been in place for less than a month so more new policy announcements will certainly be in the pipeline, there is a degree of certainty that both central government and local government will be seeing cuts in the short term at the same time as the Government seeks to save the NHS from collapsing under the weight of increased usage by the public.

At the same time, the PRS will likely come under more pressure in terms of supply (and hence also, price point) as the immigration backlog is dealt with and less reliance is placed, and government funds spent, on hotels and hostels as temporary accommodation. In addition, as section 21 evictions are banned and the move is made to using the section 8 process, the court infrastructure will need to be invigorated in order to cope.

Meanwhile the housing responsibilities of Local Authorities will carry on growing despite their ongoing resource struggles. However, could one way of both helping the NHS and Local Authorities with resource capacity be for those authorities to use property licensing to improve housing-related health outcomes?

Earlier in July, the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) wrote to Angela Rayner to ‘urge’ the new Government to “make it easier for councils in England to use licensing schemes to improve housing standards.” It was pointed out by Mark Elliott, President of the CIEH, that “There is currently a peculiar disconnect in the legislation whereby local authorities can introduce selective licensing schemes to address poor housing conditions but cannot include a directly enforceable requirement relating to housing condition as a condition of the licence itself.” Mr Elliott wants this to change.

He also suggested the Government should increase the term of a discretionary selective or additional licensing scheme from the current five years to ten years as well as scrap the 20% cap on the size of such licensing schemes.

Given the Government is already conscious of the need to improve standards in the PRS and will be applying Awaab’s law (on damp and mould) to the sector as well as applying the Decent Homes Standard in acknowledgement that both of these would substantially improve health outcomes and living standards it is likely that the selective and additional licensing will remain key factors in this drive.

Alone these schemes won’t solve the housing crisis but they do enable councils to carry out proactive property inspection programmes during the term of a scheme, require improvements to properties to be made following those inspections and thus they help reduce the burden on the healthcare system whilst allowing the council to retain existing resource capacity. In Home Safe’s work alongside Great Yarmouth Council, for example, in their selective licence scheme, proactive inspections discovered that around a third of the relevant PRS homes had damp and mould issues.

The selective and additional licensing regime is an existing infrastructure that does not need to be built anew but which, run effectively, can produce visibly improved health and well-being outcomes.