Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee 18 March 2025
In the best of worlds, landlords do not want to have this issue. Reputationally, they cannot afford to have this issue, and, for the health and safety of their tenants, they clearly should not want to have any problems of damp and mould.
It goes back to something that I said earlier. Landlords and tenants need to work collaboratively on this. Landlords must offer as much support and help as possible to their tenants to make their home warm and comfortable, to maximise their benefit income and, as far as can be managed, to have whatever welfare grants and help they need to heat their home, and so on. If landlords and tenants work together on this, we are far more likely to get a good result. If a tenant feels that the landlord is not blaming them but trying to support them, they will hopefully be more likely to say, “Look, I’m really struggling. I thought that I could manage this, but I’m not managing it.”
Landlord and tenant working together is the outcome that we hope for, but the state of the house in the first place is the absolute must. It must be free of damp and mould to start with, and it must be well maintained. I am thinking of even very small things. Where I stay, my gutters are not being cleaned as regularly as they used to be. That may sound like a very small thing, but, if a gutter is blocked up, the likelihood is that damp will seep into the walls of my home and perhaps internally.
These are very basic things, but we need to get much better at doing them. I certainly welcome all the initiatives that good landlords are putting into practice.