Home Should Not Make You Sick

Investigative journalist Pete Apps examines the human cost of structural failure in social housing, from broken complaints systems to homes that make people ill.

At a glance

•       Tenants contacting a journalist are, in almost every case, doing so as a last resort after months or years of unresolved complaints. What looks like distrust or non-cooperation from a tenant has frequently been earned through repeated failures in the formal system.

•       The mental health consequences of living in a home that is making you ill are severe and consistently underacknowledged. The home is the one place people expect respite; when it is the source of harm, there is no escape.

•       The Renters’ Rights Act, building safety reforms and the forthcoming Decent Homes Standard all represent genuine steps forward, but none addresses the deeper structural driver: housing being treated as an investment asset rather than a social need.

Hosted by Jenny Danson, Founder and CEO, Healthy Homes Hub

Show notes

In this episode, Pete Apps, award-winning investigative journalist and contributing editor at Inside Housing, draws on more than a decade of reporting on the UK housing crisis to examine what it means, in human terms, when a home becomes a source of harm. From failing heat networks and chronic damp to the broken complaints systems that trap tenants in cycles of unresolved harm, Apps sets out the human cost of structural failure in social housing.

Apps traces 40 years of housing policy through what he describes as a philosophical shift: the gradual dominance of housing as an investment vehicle, underpinned by banking deregulation and the demutualisation of building societies, rather than as a social provision comparable to health or education. He argues this ideology, more than any single policy decision, explains why affordability has collapsed and why social housing carries a stigma that state education and the NHS do not.

On the Renters' Rights Act, Apps acknowledges the significance of abolishing Section 21 no-fault evictions, introduced in 1988 and a primary driver of the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, while cautioning that landlords may respond by shifting supply towards short-let or rent-to-rent models, reducing available stock and sustaining upward pressure on rents.

Apps is direct about where he would focus policy effort: London’s 33 boroughs spend approximately £5 million per day on temporary accommodation, money that flows predominantly to private landlords and agents. He argues that redirecting that expenditure towards building up a permanent public sector housing stock would be both better social policy and better economics.

He also reflects on the position of frontline complaints staff, noting that compassion fatigue is a real and understandable consequence when individuals are expected to absorb the effects of systemic failures they did not create and cannot resolve alone.

Resources and further reading

•       Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It by Pete Apps

•       Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Pete Apps, winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2023

•       Pete Apps – Substack

Practical steps for housing providers

Review complaints data not as a volume metric but as a narrative resource. Identify tenants who have raised the same issue more than twice and examine what the response process actually delivered at each stage, not what was logged as delivered.

Acknowledge that by the time a relationship with a tenant has broken down, the breakdown has almost always developed slowly over time. Rebuilding trust requires a different approach to re-engagement than standard case resolution processes typically provide.

Audit current responses to heat network failures, persistent damp and mould, and flooding incidents. Where temporary fixes are being applied repeatedly to the same properties, escalate these to a structural review rather than a further reactive response.

Invest in the wellbeing of frontline complaints and housing management staff. Compassion fatigue is a predictable consequence of sustained exposure to unresolvable cases and is worth addressing through supervision, case management support and regular reflective practice.

Examine temporary accommodation spend and consider whether any portion could support longer-term housing solutions. Even modest shifts in how emergency housing expenditure is structured can reduce dependency on the private market over time.

Consider the gap between stated organisational values around listening and resident voice, and what tenants report experiencing. Structured conversations with residents who have had poor complaints experiences, rather than satisfaction surveys, will produce more useful intelligence.