Asthma Friendly Homes

How a new health and housing collaboration in Tower Hamlets is testing a structured approach to preventing childhood asthma, reaching families through their front door rather than the hospital ward.

At a glance

• Awaab’s Law is producing early signs of faster remediation and greater cross-sector accountability, but the structural challenges of overcrowding and ageing housing stock in areas such as Tower Hamlets remain largely unsolved.

• The Healthy Homes Hub is piloting an Asthma Friendly Homes model in Tower Hamlets with four housing providers and the local NHS Integrated Care Board, building on Walsall Housing Group’s established ACING Asthma programme.

• The project aims to generate an evidence base for community-level, prevention-focused intervention that can inform national policy and a replicable blueprint for other areas.

Dr Abigail Whitehouse returns to the Healthy Homes Hub podcast to reflect on a year of progress in health and housing, and to discuss a new initiative she is leading as NHS clinical partner alongside the Healthy Homes Hub.

Since Awaab’s Law came into force, Dr Whitehouse has observed faster responses to mould and damp reports and a stronger sense of shared accountability between health and housing bodies. She is clear, however, that the law alone cannot resolve the deeper structural pressures in areas such as Tower Hamlets, where an estimated 27% of social housing is overcrowded and the waiting list for a property is among the longest in England.

In the absence of structural solutions, she highlights accessible interventions: repairing non-functional extractor fans, improving ventilation habits, and referring families to services such as Shine and Wise. Critically, she argues that the framing must never place responsibility on families. The aim is to support better choices within existing constraints.

The new Asthma Friendly Homes project draws on the community champions and early-identification model developed by Walsall Housing Group, training housing staff to ask basic health questions during routine visits and signpost families to appropriate services. Dr Whitehouse draws a parallel with the Asthma Friendly Schools programme, positioning homes as the next logical setting for the same public health approach.

She makes the case for building an evidence base that can demonstrate the value of non-health interventions to NHS commissioners and policymakers, noting that children growing up in poor housing today face the risk of chronic respiratory conditions, including COPD, in adulthood. The project’s goal is a replicable national model, and a measurable reduction in the number of children in Tower Hamlets for whom mould and damp is a reported health concern.

Practical steps for housing providers

•       Review damp and mould reporting pathways to ensure they are accessible to residents without reliable internet access or digital literacy, and test them directly with residents before assuming they are functioning effectively.

•       Train frontline staff, including surveyors, repairs operatives and housing officers, to ask basic health-related questions during home visits. A question as simple as whether any child under five in the property has experienced breathing difficulties can trigger earlier referral to health services.

•       Audit extractor fan functionality across the housing stock, particularly in bathrooms and kitchens, and prioritise repairs in properties with a history of damp or condensation reports. This represents a low-cost, high-impact intervention.

•       Review ventilation adequacy in properties with known overcrowding, recognising that standard guidance on heating and ventilation may not be sufficient for the number of occupants present.

•       Explore the development of a community champions model, working with residents who have direct experience of childhood asthma to build trust and reach families unlikely to engage with formal health or housing services.

•       Establish or strengthen relationships with local Integrated Care Boards and primary care networks to agree shared referral pathways connecting housing teams with health professionals.

•       Collect consistent data on the proportion of tenants reporting mould and damp, and consider how this can be linked to health outcome data over time, to build the local evidence base for preventative housing investment.

Host: Alex Willey, Project Director, Healthy Homes Hub

Guest: Dr Abigail Whitehouse, Paediatric Respiratory Consultant and Senior Clinical Lecturer in Children’s Environmental Health, Queen Mary University of London; Co-Lead, Barts Charity Children’s Environmental Health Clinic