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Housing Health and Safety Ratings System

Your local authority may carry out an inspection of any privately rented property under the standardised Housing Health and Safety Ratings System (HHSRS). Inspections such as this are made to ensure that there are no deficiencies in the property or the way that it is maintained, which could adversely affect your tenants or indeed members of the general public.

What is the Housing Health and Safety Ratings System?

The Housing Health and Safety Ratings System (HHSRS) is an evaluation system developed to assess specific risks to health and safety that might arise in any given dwelling.

The inspections and tests cover a number of broad areas relating to the condition of the building itself and its fitness for use as a letting property including:

  • physical issues relating to damp, mould, excess moisture, pollutants, lead piping, or potential for carbon monoxide generation;
  • the adequacy of the water supply, sanitation arrangements, drainage, and refuse arrangements;
  • psychological discomfort including noise levels, security, and overcrowding; and
  • potential for accidents – electrical or gas appliance and supply safety, maintenance of stairs, safety of windows and sanitary fittings, and the like.

In a posting dated the 15th of March 2021, Stafford Borough Council set out details of the 29 specific housing hazards examined and evaluated in an HHSRS – noting that hazards identified as having a serious or immediate threat to health and safety are judged to be Category 1 hazards while those that are less serious or urgent are Category 2 hazards.

Implementation

Following an inspection, your local authority may make a series of recommendations or issue an enforcement notice for work to be carried out to rectify deficiencies in the standards of accommodation offered by the let property.

Under the HHSRS, local authorities have extensive powers which may range from:

  • giving advice on how to put things right;
  • setting a timeframe for repairs to be carried out;
  • prohibiting the property from being used for letting purposes until repairs have been made; and
  • in the worst case, ordering the demolition of the property concerned.

You could face criminal proceedings if you fail to carry out the recommendations of a Housing Health and Safety Ratings System inspection although appeals against the findings are possible.

Your obligations as a landlord

As a landlord, you have a number of obligations relating to the safety of your property – and, by extension, the health and safety of your tenants.

Many of these obligations relate to some of the areas covered by safety inspection and it is obviously in your best interests to keep your property in a well-maintained state, both to ensure that you stay within the law and to ensure that you can attract and retain tenants to your property.

Further reading: Landlords’ Guide to Health & Safety and Landlord Legislation Guide.

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