The government has finally updated the Housing Health and Safety Rating System. This has been discussed for some time and, indeed, the update has been hanging around since the days of the Sunak government (or earlier) waiting to see the light of day. This is a substantive reworking of the regime and one of the largest since it was introduced in 2006, save for some additional guidance produced in the wake of the Grenfell tower fire to assist with risk assessments in tower blocks.
The changes come into effect through the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, which came into force on 22 June with the revised statutory operating and enforcement guidance and additional associated guides being published [https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/housing-health-and-safety-rating-system-hhsrs-guidance] alongside this on 23 June.
In some senses the HHSRS has not changed. It still involves hazards being assessed against the likelihood of occurrence and the level of harm to generate a hazard score which then leads to a category one or two hazard.
However, there have been moves to simplify the system.
First, the hazard list has been cut from 29 to 21. The reduction is mostly consolidation of overlapping categories rather than any softening of scope. Explosions and structural collapse, for example, are now folded into an expanded Fire hazard, so a property with questionable gas appliances or a structural defect is still caught, just under a different heading. The commonly cited PRS hazards — damp and mould, excess cold, fire safety, electrical safety — all survive as named hazards in the retained 21. There was a desire to reduce to 20 hazards but there was not sufficient ability to group them.
Secondly, the old A-J letter bands are gone. In practice these were almost unused anyway and so dropping them was an obvious simplification. Assessments now produce a numeric score which falls into High (1,000 or more), Medium (100 to 999), or Low (under 100). Roughly speaking, the old Bands A-C map to High, D-G to Medium, and H-J to Low, but the mapping is approximate and the numeric score is what counts.
Thirdly, there are also new baseline indicators for each of the 21 hazards and I think these are likely to be of immediate value for pre-let and periodic inspections. I imagine most landlords and agents will want to rebuild their inspection checklists around them fairly quickly. The indicators are a bit of a wasted chance in my view. There was originally a suggestion that these would be front end to the HHSRS and properties that met them would not be assessed further. But this is not what they are. They are intended to allow assessment by untrained persons only. That could of course be landlords and agents, and indeed the landlord and agent guide actually has a checklist to enable such an assessment. But the guidance also suggests unqualified council staff could carry this out, presumably to spare the time of more qualified persons to carry out full assessments. However, the existence of the baselines gives a clear understanding of what standard landlords should aim for and it will be hard for a local authority to enforce works on landlords who are meeting these.
There is a new landlord and agent guide along with a full suite of illustrated case studies published alongside the statutory guidance. These are worth a proper read rather than a skim as they have been given careful thought and are a detailed and useful guide to the HHSRS and property standards more generally.
One of the most crucial changes for landlords, is on enforcement. Where a local authority inspection identifies a Category 1 hazard, the council can now impose a civil penalty of up to £7,000 on the spot, without first serving an improvement notice. Although they would of course be expected to do both. The traditional two-step route of improvement notice followed by prosecution is still available but is no longer a precondition for a financial penalty on the worst hazards. That is a meaningful shift in risk profile for landlords who have historically relied on the improvement notice stage as a chance to remediate before any penalty can be levied. These civil penalties can only be used in the worst cases where a landlord could have dealt with the hazard in a practical and cost effective fashion.
This will require the local authority to assess:
- How long the landlord was aware of the hazard for;
- Whether they could have taken steps to deal with this in a practicable fashion at reasonable expense;
- Whether steps have been taken to reduce or remove the hazard; Whether a third party was required to provide consent and what steps were taken to secure it;
- Whether the tenants have provided access.
- However, a landlord who owns a house and has been notified of a serious hazard and has made no steps to reduce or eliminate it is at real risk of a penalty under these provisions.
The updated HHSRS provides benefits for landlords and agents in terms of clarity. It is intended to speed up the assessment process for local authorities by reducing the amount of work required. Whether this will actually work out remains to be seen.
This blog was first posted on LinkedIn by David Smith on 28 July. You can subscribe to David’s updates here.
David Smith is a Partner in our expert Landlord & Tenant team.
Contact David by emailing dsmith@bishopandsewell.co.uk or call on 020 7631 4141.
