Henry Dawson, senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University, said that updates to the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS), developed for the government by RHE Global, will make it more useful and usable for landlords, tenants and professionals across the property sector.

He said: “HHSRS will be much more comprehensible. Previously, landlords and tenants received reports and they often didn’t understand why these numbers and letters were important to them. HHSRS will now be less impenetrable for those who haven’t been trained in it. Hopefully, [we will] see it being used far more widely.”

He noted that the new training curriculum for assessors will include the requirement for CPD to be maintained. HHSRS now explicitly included mental health impacts of hazards and the contribution of flooding to damp and mould.

A 2017 CIEH survey found the HHSRS assessment process to be hard to apply and time-consuming, making enforcement decisions difficult. Two-thirds of respondents wanted HHSRS to be revised or simplified, while 20% wanted it to be scrapped and a new, simpler standard adopted.

Following a scoping review in 2019, the government commissioned RHE to revise and update the HHSRS Operating Guidance and to improve its scoring system and training. The work involved Cardiff Metropolitan University and other universities, legal practices, multi-sector representatives and a roadshow that connected with nearly 900 respondents.

Delivered in 2023, the project created new operating guidance and revised hazard profiles, with worked examples, quick-reference summaries and a new manual and competencies for HHSRS assessors.

The concept of categories 1 and 2 hazards remains, with Category 1 triggering a legal duty to act. Twenty-nine hazards have been reduced to twenty-one. Complex explanations have been removed, and a traffic-light banding system has been devised to make scoring easier to understand.