“We need to provide more housing, and it’s a good idea to make good use of office buildings if they are vacant and surplus to requirement,” he told Big Issue. “But because it is deregulated, a lot of things that are usually done through planning don’t happen. Requirements around space standards, window arrangements, layout etcetera.”
The UCL team surveyed and interviewed more than 1,000 residents living in PDR housing across England. Nearly half (45%) said they could not keep comfortably cool during hot summer weather.
More than a third (36%) said outside noise stopped them opening windows to cool or ventilate their homes, while a fifth (22%) said outdoor air pollution prevented them doing the same.
Conditions were worst for homeless families placed in temporary accommodation by councils. Despite the name, the accommodation is rarely short-term: nearly six in 10 households surveyed by UCL had already been living in these converted buildings for more than a year.
“Those in temporary accommodation had the worst and reported the most problems,” said Clifford. “So you’ve got the most vulnerable in society in some senses in the worst housing, which isn’t necessarily helping their life chances.”
Survey respondents described unbearable conditions to researchers.
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“When it is hot or humid we can’t physically breathe on our floor, we all have to have all the fire escapes open, which is illegal for a start,” one resident said.
“You can’t open the windows because of security issues; therefore, there’s no air in here,” said another. “It’s a Catch-22.”
Clifford said that councils are in a “difficult conundrum.”
“They’re desperate to try and find places for people, and here are some places that are available,” he added. “They’re reluctant to stop using these buildings. But if we just required better minimum standards for all housing to begin with I think you wouldn’t have the existence of these really shockingly low-quality homes.”
Providing more money for councils’ housing enforcement teams is another important step, he added.
Poor conditions extended well beyond overheating. Compared with national housing averages, residents of PDR conversions were far more likely to report street noise (38% versus 10.6%), a lack of space (31% versus 15%) and damp or mould (23% versus 6%). Almost six in 10 (58%) had no access to any outdoor space.
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Clifford warned that the problem will become more acute as the climate warms and argued that planning rules need to do more to ensure homes are built to cope with hotter summers.
“We’re going to be having hotter and hotter summers under climate change,” he said. “These flats are the extreme end of that, and it was striking what residents were telling us about how unbearable it was in the summer. But there are also flats that come through the normal cladding route, which aren’t ideal either.”
“We really need to think about what we’re building, because it’s there for decades, and it needs to be climate resilient.”
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