#11 - Simon Jones: Whispers of Reform, The Battle Against Mould and The Promise of Awaab's Law

Awaab's Law is out for consultation and a visit to home with Damp and Mould got me thinking.

In this week's podcast, I talk about the story of Jen, a mum struggling to keep on top of mould in her home and the effect on her and her family. I also talk about the asset manager and their battle to keep on top of the issues on the estate and elsewhere under her management.

For every case of extreme damp and mould that makes it into the news or generates an emergency response from a housing provider, there are countless more, sitting in this middle ground, just getting by.

I discuss the challenge of the grey area in the middle, some of what is wrong with the sector in providing adequate ventilation and what is next.

Future Homes Standard Consultation

Managing and Addressing Damp and Mould in Housing

Awaab's Law Consultation
 

Transcript

Simon: 0:01

Welcome to Air Quality Matters. And it's just me this week. I was in a house last week with condensation and mould problems and it got me thinking about the consultation out at the moment for our abs law. For those not following housing in the UK, I'll explain what that is a bit later. This house I was in was not a horror story actually that was a couple of doors down but this house in particular stuck with me because it wasn't so remarkable, but for me it paints a picture of where we are with housing at the moment.

Simon: 0:51

I was on a walk around with an asset manager of a housing association, as I often do all over the UK and Ireland. I was there for the day to discuss how they approach managing their stock and dealing with, for example, damper mould. As part of my strategy work with them on ventilation, we'd gone to see a couple of properties, one of them particularly bad, but this is not what this is about. She, the asset manager, had the idea of why we were there. We should stick our heads in and see a lady just up the street, so she rang in advance. We were met at the door by Jen, a mum of two two boys, I guess four and six. Based on the house. Jen's husband was at work and Jen was part time and was home that day. They moved into the estate about three years ago, just before Covid a two bed with a garden, and they couldn't have been more excited. Jen was telling me they had been on the housing list for ages and felt very lucky to be offered this home. The boys babies really back then now had a space they could grow into, both indoors and, importantly, outdoors. Needless to say, when you looked at the back garden, it resembled more of a soccer pitch and a play area than a garden. Their house and the rest of the estate, with about 450 homes, are managed by the Housing Association and was built somewhere around the early 2000s.

Simon: 2:22

This is a busy home, as you can imagine, but Jen and her husband have great pride in it. You can tell it's tidy and clean. Every bed was made. When we walked around, cups and pots put away and the surfaces were clean Honestly put my house to shame, if I'm honest with you. Soon after moving in, though, they noticed a lot of conversation and then eventually mould forming, first around windows and then eventually started to appear behind beds and other pieces of furniture. They tidalously cleaned their home and there's an all-pervasive smell of cleaning products and air fresheners, to the point that by the time I left if I'm honest with you I was glad to get outside. Just not a nice feeling. And this environment not walls covered in black mould, but an overwhelming sense of chemical laden air and underlying smell that just wasn't right has been their life for two or three years and it's taken their toll. For those of us that regularly visit homes like this, you know exactly what I'm talking about A kind of thick pea soup of stale air, fragrance, bleach in the background and that unmistakable background smell of mould. You can't see it unless you dig a little, but it's there. The youngest child has asthma and has missed school several times with flare ups and, as Jen told me, the stress is affecting them and their family. She puts it her home has become a place of worry and anxiety and stress. She loves this house, her friends and neighbours, but the bottom line is the situation and the environment are making their life poorer, not better.

Simon: 4:11

There's a second character in this story, sarah. Sarah is the asset manager for the estate and more besides. Everything in the area goes through her and she's close to being overwhelmed. She is a nice lady and obviously cares. You can tell not just about her job but a sense of responsibility that she feels she's not meeting. She inherited this state about five years ago and it's been a nightmare From a ventilation perspective. At this stage she doesn't know which way is up. Some properties are fine, others are hell on earth and many, many homes somewhere in the middle, like gens, they don't believe the ventilation ever really worked here. Still at this stage they've replaced so many types of fans in the properties. She and they, the housing association, don't really have a plan for a way out of it.

Simon: 5:09

On top of that, as she pointed out in Gens House, even though she knows there's a problem, as she pointed out, did you notice the fan was isolated and several of the windows were closed? I did, admittedly. She said the fans make a lot of noise but don't seem to do too much, so she can understand why she turns them off. But at the same time, even if they did work, she's using them in a way that wouldn't provide decent ventilation anyway. She pointed at the fan in the bathroom. Actually, while we were there, she said that's the second fan in five years in this house, and I'm not sure any of them ever really worked. We go up into the attic and see a wasteland of flexible ducting and old centralised fans lying on the insulation. What's there now is a mix of cooker hoods, intermittent fans in the WC and a decentralized continuous extract fan whirring away in the bathroom, tied into existing ducting. In fact, the whole house, as with the rest of them on the estate, sit in this middle ground between natural ventilation and other systems complying with none of them.

Simon: 6:27

There's a third character in this story, and it's actually me. I know this particular estate. In fact, one of the dead fans lying in one of the attics I probably sold to this development over 15 years ago. I've been involved in many thousands of installations of ventilation systems over the years that this particular estate and others like it were actually very important to me. They were projects where I formed much of my world view around what was wrong with this sector, and now I would not repeat the mistakes that I'd seen on projects like this.

Simon: 7:05

This project was a shit show. There's no other way to describe it. There was a contractor that went bust, a consulting engineering firm that couldn't have given a rat's ass about ventilation at the time and contractors that weren't much better. In fact, as a simple supplier of a product, I didn't have much control over outcomes at the time, but I spent countless hours up and down ladders trying to make a silk purse out of a sales ear a losing battle, I can tell you. And building control what building control? This very project from poor tile vents to flexible ducting, to non-compliant designs, to no sign off, to honestly it goes on With countless other projects like this drew a line in the sand for me as a supplier. We started to do things very differently in the sector and take control of the outcomes on site, and I hope it changed in some way how suppliers were viewed and could influence the quality of outcomes in our small corner of the world at the time.

Simon: 8:07

Fifteen years later, sarah, the asset manager, and Jen and countless others like them have been picking up the pieces ever since for this broken sector, and for that I'm sorry for them. This project speaks to a broken system and housing providers lost in the wind. On how to fix this, an answer with certainty to what next question? And families like Jen's who aren't remarkable, who won't make the news, but year after year literally have to wipe up and mop up the mistakes of this broken system for paying the price and Jen's situation frames for me a situation that countless housing providers face when it comes to this. In this case, stamp and mould, but, more broadly, ventilation and air quality strategies. Housing providers, in earnest or by default, sign up to provide adequate ventilation, but when it comes down to it, would find it hard to articulate what that really means, how their policies and procedures and workflows coordinate to ensure that they deliver it, and how to roadmap the assets that don't from A to B.

Simon: 9:31

I spoke about this on LinkedIn this week. I was talking about adequate ventilation. It's the state's view that ventilation regulations are met if ventilation does the following. In other words, you are providing adequate ventilation. If the system extracts water vapor and indoor air pollutants from areas where they are produced before they spread, it meets regulation and provides adequate ventilation if it supplies a minimum level of outdoor air for occupants' health. You're providing adequate ventilation if you're capable of rapidly diluting air in habitable rooms by following guidance for purge ventilation. At the same time, you should minimize the entry of external pollutants, produce low levels of noise and offer easy access for maintenance and, at the same time, provide protection from cold drafts. The first two are the basis in the case of moisture balance in buildings and the mitigation of damp and mould, absolutely essential. How much air do I need this building to move permanently to reduce the buildup of moisture and other pollutants, and do I exhaust it effectively from rooms like bathrooms and kitchens before it spreads to the rest of the home? Two very simple asks that I can assure you are met far less often than you would think.

Simon: 11:14

In the last few days we have seen Aweb's law out for consultation. And for those listeners that aren't from England, this was the tragic death of Aweb Ishak that shocked everyone, but the circumstances that caused it, unfortunately, were not shocked to anyone. In housing, the death of a child is always heartbreaking, and more so when it's entirely preventable. Aweb was aged just two and died as a direct result of exposure to mould in a social home his family rented in England. His parents raised concerns about their living conditions time and time again. The landlord not only repeatedly failed to act, but actually blamed the family for causing the hazardous mould. Aweb's parents have sought justice for their son and all residents of social housing. Quite rightly. The petition for Aweb's law was launched by his parents and their campaign means that tenants will now have law on their side when landlords fail them.

Simon: 12:24

This consultation seeks views on the specific requirements to be set and how these obligations will impact on residents and landlords, in particular, time scales for initial investigation of potential hazards. Requirements to be placed upon landlords to provide written summaries of investigation findings. Time scales for beginning repair works and time scales for completing repair works. Time scales for emergency repairs and the circumstances under which properties should be temporarily decanted to protect residents' health and safety. And, finally, requirements to be placed upon landlords to maintain adequate record keeping throughout repair works. This all comes set against the backdrop of increased scrutiny in England on landlords through the Housing Ombudsman and the Regulator for Social Housing, new policies and standards like the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023, the Housing Health and Safety Rating System Review and more besides. Expectations are high that things need to change and that they will be in the last 12-18 months in England to be dynamic in the housing sector, to say the least, with a flurry of activity at governance level, stock condition reporting and more.

Simon: 13:59

But now comes the hard bit. Now comes the what? Next question how do we roadmap social housing stock that has been chronically under invested in for decades, from a position of underperformance to where it needs to be. Bearing in mind, this is only one of the battles that housing faces. Ventilation and its ability to control and remove moisture from a building is a critical pillar in the moisture balance of buildings. Lack of ventilation is not always the cause of the problem, but good ventilation can always help. And, as surprising as it might be to some, caught up in the tornado that is the dampen mould crisis in housing, when it comes to air quality in the home, dampen mould is not the biggest risk to health and wellbeing, and by getting ventilation right we also deal with many of the other pollutants that affect our health in both the short and long term. And for houses like the one down the road from Gens House, the ventilation there was providing less than a quarter of the ventilation rates. It should and will be improved, I'm sure, along with the other costly measures that they have to deal with. But what about Jen and the countless likeer that, thank God, are not living in a home like how it did all the many like it, but get by day to day doing what they can when they can, not making perfect decisions themselves but at the same time not being provided with the ventilation they deserve either. As housing associations fight to improve the overwhelming number of cases they are finding and triage and budget accordingly, where do households like Jen fit into this? I'm working with the housing provider in Jen's case and she and others in the estate and the wider housing associations assets will now fall into a broader strategy of cyclical maintenance, responsive repairs and empty homes policies and more besides that. Consider ventilation. Now I'll share details of our law, the Dampen mould advice from the government in the UK and the link to the future home standards in the links below.

Simon: 16:24

If you haven't checked out the episodes in the last couple of weeks with Ian Moody and Pavel Walgoxki, they're great. Do go and check them out. And could I ask a favour if you haven't already subscribed, and leave a review if you feel like it. It helps with the reach of the podcast and, as always, this is an air quality and ventilation community. Reach out, tell me what you think and I'm always happy to take a recommendation for somebody to chat to. I should say it hasn't gone unnoticed by me that the podcast has been a bit bloke heavy. That's not for once of trying. I'm surrounded by amazing women in this sector and it shows how in demand they have been getting some of the time in their diary to appear on the podcast. But that's changing, so watch out the next couple of weeks. Got some amazing guests. Thanks, as always, for listening. I'm Simon Jones and this is the air quality matters podcast.