Town halls, not just Whitehall: why council-led action holds the key to fixing Britain's unfit homes

Ask anyone who inspects housing for a living and you will get a blunt answer: the idea that our homes can no longer be trusted to keep us safe is not a headline, it is the day job. A recent Guardian editorial on 23 July echoed Sam Johnson-Schlee's warning that our confidence in the basic safety of our homes is under threat, but for environmental health officers working in housing, that threat has long been a lived reality. Their daily caseload is made up of properties that are dangerously hot in summer, bitterly cold in winter, or steadily poisoned by damp and mould.

The striking thing is that this state of affairs is not down to ignorance. The problems are well understood; what has been missing is capacity and commitment. For many years, the letter argues, there has been a shortage of resources, including the environmental health staff needed to inspect homes in the first place, alongside an absence of political will to tackle the issues at anything like the required scale. Without inspectors, hazards go undetected; without determination at the top, even detected hazards drift on unresolved.

So yes, a new approach is needed, as the editorial suggests. But the letter's most compelling point is that we do not need to invent one from scratch. In the 1970s, local authorities took the lead on collective action to improve housing, and it is councils, the writer contends, that should once again be the place we look to get things moving. Town halls as the engine of housing renewal, rather than bit players waiting for instruction, is a genuinely different model from the fragmented approach of recent decades.

There is hard evidence that this model worked. After the 1981 English House Condition Survey exposed a high rate of disrepair across the housing stock, the government of the day responded decisively, introducing generous repair grants and channelling £1bn through subsidies. It was a deliberate policy choice: fund renewal properly, and the stock improves. The lesson is not that a particular grant scheme should be copied verbatim, but that central government backing for council-led action produces results.

The counter-lesson is equally instructive. The private sector housing renewal programme, which carried on that tradition of support, had already been scaled back to £376m by 2009-10 before funding was discontinued altogether as austerity took hold. Set that vanished programme beside the £1bn of earlier subsidies and you can see, in two numbers, the scale of the retreat. Decades of thinning support have left the current government inheriting a stock riddled with the hazards the letter describes.

What would putting things right actually involve? The letter is clear that it will require funding on two fronts: money to help homeowners carry out repairs, and investment to ensure councils have sufficient staff with the right skills to identify problems and act on them. The two cannot be separated. Grants without qualified officers to administer and enforce them will not reach the worst homes, and enforcement capacity without financial support to offer owners simply produces confrontation rather than improvement. Small wonder the writer suggests that figures such as Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner would do well to revisit the past to see what can be done.

For renters, the practical stakes are obvious: whether damp, mould and temperature extremes in a privately rented home are tackled swiftly often comes down to whether the local authority has the staff to inspect and the tools to act. For landlords, a revived council-led renewal agenda would cut both ways, bringing potential support for repairs but also far more vigorous scrutiny of conditions. And for the market as a whole, the argument is a reminder that a healthier housing stock is not something that happens by itself; it is built, historically at least, by well-funded local authorities doing the unglamorous work of inspection, grant-giving and enforcement. If this Labour government is serious about homes people can trust, the past may be the most useful place to start.