Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee 18 March 2025
Good morning, and thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today.
The examples that we have already heard this morning are pretty horrific. Although many more tenants are reporting damp and mould to the landlord in a way that they would not have done in the past, because of the tenant-blame culture, I am not certain that they are getting the responses that they should be getting.
However, I am also not certain that this is about landlords not wishing to deal with the matter. I do not know why, because I am not a technical person, but I feel that our homes—our present existing housing stock—are in a very poor way and unable to cope with the problem. I do not know whether that has to do with how they were built, or whether it has to do with climate change and increasingly damp conditions. I imagine that most of these things will come in somewhere, but we certainly do not seem to be able to deal with the problem satisfactorily.
Anecdotally, I have heard of a neighbour being told that they needed to open their windows more and another neighbour being told that they were opening their windows far too much. Whether those words were actually said, I do not know, but that was the perception that the tenant was left with. We seem to have a long way to go if we are looking to get landlords and tenants to work collaboratively to get rid of this problem.
Is it about a lack of maintenance of existing housing stock? I do not know, but it is a very worrying problem and we do not seem to be anywhere close to dealing with it effectively.