Cold and Damp Homes

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of cold and damp homes.

Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Western; this is the first time that I have served under your chairship. I rise to speak about a crisis that continues to affect millions of people across the UK and goes to the very heart of the inequality, inefficiency and injustice embedded in our housing and energy systems.

I welcome the Government’s new warm homes plan, which includes the warm homes social housing fund and the warm homes local grant, through which social housing residents, lower-income householders and renters will receive funded energy efficiency upgrades, including insulation and low-carbon heating. However, there are a number of opportunities to truly protect all from living in cold or damp homes.

As part of its United for Warm Homes campaign, Friends of the Earth published a joint report in 2024 with the Institute of Health Equity, “Left Out in the Cold”, which is one of the most comprehensive documents on the issue. It reveals that 9.6 million households in this country—nearly one in three homes—are at risk of living in cold, damp and energy inefficient homes. Many of them are in constituencies like mine.

Leeds is home to a vibrant mix of residents: young professionals, students, families and retirees. It has a range of housing, much of it Victorian and Edwardian stock that is woefully under-insulated. In my constituency, Leeds Central and Headingley, 44.8% of constituents live in private rentals, compared with a national average of 19.4%. Citizens Advice found that one in three private renters could not heat their homes to a comfortable temperature over winter 2024, with millions living in damp and mouldy conditions. Last summer, 40% of renters—4.3 million people, including 1.16 million children —were living in a home with mould or damp. That is very concerning, given the impact that cold and mould can have on people’s physical and mental health, as well as the high energy bills that people face when they need to heat draughty homes.

This crisis does not start and end in winter. Cold, damp and poorly ventilated homes cause year-round problems, from exacerbating asthma and bronchitis to increasing anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions. My office frequently receives damp and mould cases and works closely with the private rented sector team at the council to resolve them. All too often, constituents are told that the issue is their fault. They are typically blamed for drying laundry indoors or for not opening windows.

The problems usually worsen over time and become much harder to fix. My constituent Angela reported damp last year, but the issue persisted into this year. By then, water was dripping from the living room and kitchen ceilings. She had been diagnosed with a lung infection, which the GP linked directly to the damp conditions in her home. She was eventually forced to live exclusively in her bedroom, which was the only room that was less affected.

My constituency is home to the highest population of students in England and Wales. Student accommodation is often rife with damp. Large house shares are often the only economical option for full-time students. Student houses of seven or more struggle to balance keeping the house warm with ventilating it from drying laundry, cooking and bathing. I have heard from students in my constituency who are not even given autonomy over their heating, which their landlord controls remotely.

Students are living with year-round cold symptoms that are due to the quality of their housing. As their tenancies run year to year, damp issues are often painted over, both physically and metaphorically, by landlords who know that a fresh cohort of tenants will be in within 12 months. Ongoing respiratory issues, possessions ruined by damp and cold, the feeling of insignificance and being disregarded by the landlord—these are not the standards that we should be setting for students’ quality of life in this country.

Indoor air quality is a large part of the problem. Breathe Easy Homes, which is delivered by Care and Repair in partnership with Leeds city council and the integrated care board, works to address issues with indoor air quality that can trigger attacks in children with a diagnosis of asthma or other respiratory conditions. The team is working hard to ensure that all families have safe living conditions, but the battle with damp is relentless.

It is not a new statement that cold and/or damp homes exacerbate existing health inequalities. However, too many people are forced to survive in day-to-day, all-consuming living conditions. Today’s debate is an opportunity to focus on how the warm homes plan can go further to ensure that all barriers are removed to securing warm homes for all. That includes the 9.6 million homes that are at risk of being cold, damp and energy-inefficient.

The Government’s warm homes plan will be a vital step to delivering home upgrades for millions of people, to make their homes warmer and healthier, and reduce their bills. We also welcome the Government’s plans to extend Awaab’s law to the private rented sector through the Renters’ Rights Bill and to update minimum energy efficiency standards to energy performance certificate rating C in the private rented sector.

A researcher at the University of Leeds, Rebecca Sale, is examining the impacts of poor indoor air quality. Her research shows how we spend up to 90% of our time indoors. Indoor air pollution can be hard to manage; the pollutants are invisible and are produced from everyday products and practices. The quality of the air is important for atmospheric services in the home, which includes the provision of suitable air for respiration, the regulation of heating and cooling, and the state of the air for comfortable living.

Indoor air quality is much less recognised than outdoor air quality. Damp and mould may be particularly prevalent in UK households due to draughty and leaky buildings. That partly relates to the legacy of coal burning in homes, which necessitated high levels of ventilation. Rebecca’s research explains how it can be hard to achieve a balance between insulating homes to improve energy efficiency while also allowing ventilation to maintain good indoor air quality. New building standards and regulations have meant that buildings are highly insulated and airtight. Although that makes homes warmer in winter, in hotter periods there is an increased requirement for ventilation. Insulating a home or making it more airtight can increase the incidence of mould if moisture is not being ventilated out of the home.

Older people, pregnant women, children and babies are especially vulnerable to the health impacts of indoor air pollution. A well-known and extremely important example is that of Awaab Ishak, the two-year-old boy from Rochdale who tragically died in 2020 as a result of respiratory arrest caused by the damp and mould in his family home. We know how important indoor air quality issues are, so I thank the Government again for extending Awaab’s law to the private rented sector, in which many children live.

Many older people still struggle to heat their home during winter, particularly those who are just above the pension credit limit and so no longer receive the winter fuel payment; I have met many people in that situation on the doorstep. It is therefore clear that we need an all-round, holistic and comprehensive approach to overcoming the problem of cold and damp homes.

Upgrading homes is one of the key ways in which the Government can put money back into people’s pockets while improving living standards. For the warm homes plan to be successful, it must ensure that upgrades are affordable for low-income households by providing grants tapered by household income and introducing Government-backed low interest rate loans for households that cannot afford to borrow money to carry out the work that is needed.

We also need to overhaul the consumer protections landscape to ensure that people are confident in the process and can easily put things right if they go wrong. We are encouraged by the announcement from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero that it will address the current patchwork of protections that allow rogue traders to operate in this area. The Government need to provide access to free, independent and personalised advice throughout the home upgrade journey, including additional case-handling support for vulnerable households, which may need more support. Additionally, energy-inefficient homes are responsible for some 14% of the UK’s carbon emissions. Meeting our net zero targets will be impossible without tackling them.

I urge the Minister and colleagues across the House to join me in calling for a fully funded nationwide warm homes plan; a legal commitment to bring all homes to EPC rating C by 2035; fair support for renters and the most vulnerable, particularly our youngest and our eldest; and recognition that this is not just a housing issue, but a public health issue, an economic issue and a moral issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I welcome the Minister to his place and congratulate the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) on securing this debate.

It was the English Army officer and playwright Guy du Maurier who wrote that every Englishman’s home is his castle. In that phrase, he summed up the immense feelings of pride and belonging that people should feel about their home. Whether they are homeowners or renters, it should always be the case that everyone in this country—every child, every parent, every pensioner—can live in a home that is warm, dry and safe. I know that all colleagues in this House will agree that that should be the bare minimum.

The hon. Member’s timing in calling this debate is, as usual, perfect—it is almost as good as his timing in arriving at the debate with 30 seconds to spare. Maybe he should think about entering a marathon with sprinting like that—

[Alex Sobel]

This Sunday!

[Paul Holmes]

Good luck to him—I hope he sends his sponsorship details to every Member in the House. He outlined a very important case. Whatever party and constituency we represent, we will all have received the bog-standard response from a housing association or council saying that residents who have damp and mould have had their mould wash put in, and they need to keep their windows open and they need to stop using the tumble dryer indoors.

It is not good enough. All Members in this House need to push harder on the sector, and we need to push harder in raising the concerns of our constituents who have those problems. We must all do better, and there is much more to do.

In that spirit, I refer to the fantastic speech of the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse). She set out the clear conflict in the social sector between building more homes and ensuring investment to keep standards up in the housing stock. Those concerns have been raised by the sector with me, as shadow Housing Minister. I would not go as far as to say that I agree with the hon. Lady that it is impossible, but it is certainly a lot harder. I myself used to work for the largest housing association in the United Kingdom. We consistently had a line back to the previous Government; we wanted to be ambitious, and we absolutely wanted to commit to making sure that we had decent homes. The issue is that, with homebuilding targets relying on the old profit model, not-for-profit companies get stuck trying to deliver those targets. We need to do better at making sure that the sector is supported.

I am a great fan of the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi). She said that there is still a taboo around social housing. She is absolutely correct. I am proud to have grown up on council estates in New Cross, Bermondsey and then Lewisham. My parents still live in their council house. In all parties, we should express our support for people who live in council housing. For many, it is a great step up and a security blanket. I would be the first to admit that the last Government did not go far enough in supporting the housing and social sector. I am determined to change that, because I was created and grew up in the sector myself.

Every home should be a place of pride, safety and stability. That sense of pride is shattered when people are handed keys to a new home built with shoddy workmanship, incomplete fittings or insufficient insulation, or when people’s homes are not looked after properly, with poor repairs and maintenance regimes of housing associations or private landlords. They need to be supported more. On new builds, the last Government did important work to make new homes fit for the future, including by improving insulation standards, but where insulation is still lacking, we need urgent action. I welcome the new responsibilities given to Ofgem to oversee repairs and remediation in this area.

This debate is not just about building new homes to a suitable standard; it is also vital to legislate for the proper and safe maintenance of the existing and ageing stock. I am pleased that in the last Government we passed the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2024, a landmark piece of legislation that strengthens the powers of the regulator of social housing. The Act introduced Awaab’s law, setting strict limits for social landlords to deal with hazards like damp and mould. The tragic death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak—I used to share an office with his MP, before he left this place, so I saw the tragic case borne out in real time—was caused by prolonged exposure to mould in his home and is a heartbreaking reminder of what can go wrong when we fail to act.

Such a tragedy should never have happened, and we must ensure it never happens again. There must be nowhere for rogue landlords to hide—either private landlords or social landlords. While of course holding this Minister and Government to account, I will continue to work with them to build on the progress we have made in protecting tenants from dangerous living conditions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Sobel]

Thank you, Mr Western; your chairing this afternoon has been excellent, and I hope to serve under you in many more debates. I thank all Members who have taken part: the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi); the hon. Members for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon); the Opposition spokespeople, the hon. Members for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) and for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes); and most of all the Minister. I have contributed to a number of debates in which he has been exceedingly gracious and generous in what he has offered. It is very clear that he recognises the scope and scale of the issue that we face, and I am really pleased with the range of measures that he outlined. It is a league above where the previous Government were, but we need a driving focus on removing the barriers to providing warm and dry homes for those on the lowest incomes. That needs to be our main priority, because they are the ones who are still suffering the most.

Many Members mentioned the fact that many older people who may be just above the pension credit threshold are struggling to pay their fuel bills. We are only in May, and there are many months until the winter, but I hope that the Government, in addition to introducing measures that will result in lower energy bills in the future, might look again at that issue for the group who are just slightly above the threshold. Perhaps the Government could look again at the taper or threshold for winter fuel payments. As the Minister said, the worst tenure overall for cold and damp homes is the private rented sector. We need to go further and faster on action to ensure that landlords provide warm and dry homes, because everyone deserves a decent home.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of cold and damp homes.