Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether he has made an assessment of the implications for his policies of March 2019 research by Generation Rent which found that local authorities surveyed had issued improvement notices to private landlords in only 5 per cent of cases where a tenant had complained in 2017-18; and if he will make a statement.

The research was published on 18 March 2019. No assessment has been made at this time.

Improvement notices alone do not represent the full scale of local authority enforcement action where serious hazards are identified in residential property. They are one of a range of enforcement tools available for local authorities to use to address serious hazards, which also include informal action, carrying out emergency repairs, and, in extreme cases limiting or stopping the use of a property. Local authorities use the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS), introduced by the Housing Act 2004, to assess property conditions and must take appropriate enforcement action where the most serious hazards are present.

We announced in October 2018 that we were commissioning a review to assess how well the HHSRS works in practice and ensure it is fit for purpose.