Around 10 million people in England currently live in a home that presents a serious threat to their health and safety – defined by the government as ‘non-decent’ homes.¹ About 1.8 million adults are living in damp and/or cold housing and, of these, more than one in ten people are living with health conditions potentially caused or exacerbated by poor housing, causing them to be ‘at risk’ of COVID-19.²
The Good Home Inquiry will run until 2021 and will explore why so many of England’s homes are in poor condition and hazardous to health. This will include analysing past and present housing policies, wide-ranging consultations with experts and housing sector stakeholders, and talking to people with lived experiences of living in a poor-quality home. You can read more detail about the structure of the Inquiry here.
The Inquiry will make evidence-based recommendations for new and amended housing policies that would make it easier to upgrade, maintain and improve our homes.
The Inquiry supports the Centre for Ageing Better’s goal of reducing the number of homes as ‘non-decent’ by at least one million by 2030.
¹ Based on analysis commissioned from The National Centre for Social Research. Analysis uses data from the Understanding Society survey. Housing condition figures used measures derived from waves 8 (2016-2018) and 9 (2017-2019). People with either a respiratory or heart condition were derived from the wave 9 (2017-2019). The 1.8m figure is calculated by taking the estimate that 4% of adults are living in damp and/or cold housing and applying it to the population as a whole.
² Centre for Ageing Better (2020) Home and dry: The need for decent homes in later life
