Category: Uncategorized

Categories
Uncategorized

Speakers for London Labour Party Meetings

In advance of the Mayoral Election next year, the London Labour Housing Group has put together a panel of speakers available to visit CLP and Labour Party meetings to speak on housing in London and the ways to campaign on the issue.
Housing will be a major part of the Mayoral Election, with the desperate need for more affordable and social housing becoming ever more acute, deteriorating conditions in a stretched rented sector and house prices that bar all but the very wealthiest from owning their own home.
The mayoralty is gaining more power and more direct access to investment at the same time as we have an incumbent notoriously unwilling to use the levers of his office and organisation to deliver real change for London.
The last general election showed that campaigning on housing can have a decisive effect on keeping London Labour. In Westminster North, Hammersmith and Eltham (to name but three) marginal Labour seats were held on the basis of vigorous campaigning on housing issues.
If your members want to understand the issues better, convince more people on the doorstep and learn some of the most effective ways of winning people over and getting out the vote, then email us on [email protected].
In this Mayoral Election every vote counts – and votes for us even in the most Tory of areas can contribute to a Labour win.
 
Just to let you know:

  • We’ll do our best to attend every request, but can’t promise we can provide someone every time.
  • All speakers on the panel are available in a personal capacity and do not represent Ken Livingstone’s campaign or the London Labour Housing Group.
Categories
Blog Post Uncategorized

Calling all Labour Conference-goers – support LHG contemporary resolution!

Information for all Constituency Labour Parties and delegates attending LP Conference this weekend.
The Conference Arrangements Committee met earlier today to consider the contemporary resolutions submitted by CLPs and affiliates. The CAC decided that the resolution submitted by Labour Housing Group counts as contemporary and will go forward to the Priorities Ballot on Sunday 25 September.
The Labour Housing Group is asking CLPs and their delegates to Party Conference to vote in favour of having Housing as one of the Contemporary Resolutions to be debated.  The Resolution submitted by LHG is below.  The Resolution is ‘contemporary’ because the Government’s relevant figures on the increase in levels of homelessness and unemployment and the dramatic fall in home building were not published until either August or start of September, making the issues ‘contemporary’ according to Party Conference rules.
Tackling the Housing Crisis
We note with alarm the recent sharp jump in unemployment by 80,000 to two and a half million people, the sharp fall in house building to just 23,400 homes last quarter – the 18% jump in homelessness over 12 months and the £1.3 billion pa rise in Housing Benefit payments.
Together, these figures are an indictment of a Government which is ideologically obsessed with cutting investment but is blind to its inevitable consequences –  increased homelessness and  joblessness, rising market rents, and the inability of young and middle aged households the opportunity to either buy or rent a decent home.
We ask Conference to call for an emergency programme of investment in quality new homes, which will provide employment, generate tax income, reduce homelessness and the cost of emergency accommodation, and reduce expenditure on unemployment and housing benefits.
A tax of £1bn a year from Bankers bonuses would cause little hardship to the recipients, and yet could fund around 50,000 extra new homes every year which could be available at well below market rent levels.
Given the huge increase in housing benefit going to fund private landlords, we also call for regulatory change to shift the financing of private sector landlord investment away from purchasing existing second hand homes (in competition with first time buyers), and towards investment in New Properties. This will result in an increase in quality supply, and better opportunities for younger and middle aged families to purchase a home.

Categories
Uncategorized

Housing to the rescue?

A new guest poster for Red Brick, Dee St. Holmes, argues below that by tackling the housing crisis, we tackle many more social and economic ills beside. Hearty agreement with that here. She argues that the coalition for fundamental change in our housing system is growing, as housing problems spread – affecting more, richer and more influential parts of society.
Our society is becoming one of ‘haves and have not’s’ at a worryingly fast pace. Public services that were fought for and implemented after the Second World War as a way to ensure everyone’s basic human needs were met, are being ripped up, none more so that housing.
After the war, when this country was on the brink of bankruptcy, the Government committed to a public house-building programme that dwarfed anything before or since. Political will, based on the threat of riots (or indeed a revolution after all, the ‘masses’ had returned from war and knew how to get hold of and use arms) ensured money was committed and used for the common good. People were proud to live in the new houses and a Conservative Government-commissioned report in the 1970s proved that council house tenants had the fastest growing ‘social mobility’ rates out of any other group of people.
Fast forward to today and we have a radically different picture. Social housing (as it’s now commonly known largely due to the large-scale transfer of stock from councils to housing associations) has been residualised to a shadow of its former self. The language of Government when referring to social housing tenants is one of feckless, criminal, anti-social, undeserving, people who should count themselves lucky to be in a tax-payer provided benefit. The recent riots illustrate this to a shameful degree. Housing as a human right seems to be a concept becoming relegated to history. Are we witnessing the final days of any form of publicly subsidised housing? The tide against it seems unrelenting.
However, I’m forever the optimist and one thought has crept into my mind. Everybody needs housing. No two ways about it. When people on £40K, £50K, £60K cannot afford a home in our capital city, the problem of housing starts affecting people who have higher voting levels and hence people who have political power. The housing problem moves beyond the realms of the poor and the homeless, where it stays on the margins, and into the realms of the very middles classes. Now it most certainly should not take this to make housing a national priority, but I think is happening.
Housing is receiving significant media attention and the Housing Minister is increasingly looking shallow and nervous as his headlines are exposed as just that with no substance behind them (house-boats being the latest example). However, make no mistake, the consistently stagnant economy will turn the Government’s eyes to house building as a way to stimulate growth and there will then be of plenty of spin for them to reverse their narrative on housing.
Labour should therefore get on-board now and shape the debate. Housing is an issue that has been relegated to the private realm for decades but it is pushing its way back into the public realm – and Labour should be the party associated with championing people’s housing concerns. Waiting until ‘an election year’ is no good – people need a political party that starts fighting the issues at local and national levels now. Labour can be people’s voice on housing; from the grassroots to the ‘squeezed middle’ it seems slightly fixated on. It is a uniting issue and one that has the power to win or lose the next national election. Labour has a lot to be proud of on housing, but it could have done a great deal more when it was last in power. Now is the time to make-up for that – millions of people are looking for answers and the coalition Government has none, yet, so why waste time? Make housing the priority it needs to be and the public policy that can restore the equal foundations of our society.

Categories
Blog Post Uncategorized

Council housing estates: guilty or not guilty?

The Guardian has made a brave attempt at recording and analysing the riots and their
aftermath.  But looking at their ‘reality check’ feature following Iain Duncan-Smith’s claim that ‘housing estates’ were one of the major factors that contributed to the rioting, I think they are still some way from hitting the nail on the head.
As always, IDS says things that seem to make sense until you look at them properly.  Personally, I find his concern for the poor totally false.  His prescriptions always seem to
involve taking money away from them, as if they can be punished into behaving more as he would like.
The problem with his latest utterance is that he switches between ‘areas blighted by welfare dependency’, ‘underprivileged communities’, ‘housing estates’ and ‘grim council estates’ as if they were one and the same thing.  He warns about social segregation and ghettoisation when most commentators feel his policies will drive us faster in that direction.  And he sees the problem of unemployment as being entirely the failure of ‘benefit dependent’ people to get jobs rather than a statistical deficit of jobs in the market, again made much worse by his policies.
Even so the Guardian took up his theme that housing estates were to blame for the riots, concluding that “It appears there is emerging evidence to support Duncan Smith’s claim that there are links between estates, the people that live on them and this summer’s violence.”
Like IDS, the Guardian’s analysis also switches between deprived areas, estates and council estates without differentiating between them.  Deprivation in some places is increasingly a feature of the private rented sector, and we are often reminded that half the poor are home owners.  They don’t consider the differences between housing association and council estates – does a council estate that has been transferred to a housing association suddenly become less prone to riots?
Nor do they look at the composition of a modern council estate. Especially in London, where most of their analysis is done, ‘council estates’ are not mono-tenure anymore, they are broken up with a large number of flats sold and now occupied by home owners, a burgeoning number of private tenants, temporary accommodation and, in some places, large numbers of students.  Most housing managers will say that a disproportionate number of the problems they have to deal with arise from the more transient residents who are not secure tenants or established lessees.  All of these points should be considered before generalisations are thrown about.
The Guardian’s analysis shows clearly enough that ‘deprivation was certainly the
unifying factor’.  They quote Alex Singleton at Liverpool University (one of those who analysed the data):  “These limited data and analysis seem to suggest that those people who have been appearing on riot-related charges (typically young males) live in some of the most deprived areas of our largest cities, and in neighbourhoods where the conditions are getting worse rather than better. Rioting is deplorable, however, if events such as this are to be mitigated in the future, the prevailing conditions and constraints effecting people living in areas must form part of the discussion. A “broken society” happens somewhere, and geography matters.”
Now I don’t disagree with that.  But the Guardian then moves the point along with some case stories, particularly about Pembury in Hackney.  Now, Pembury is not a council
estate, but from some reports it sounds like world war 3 broke out there.  The Times says the average family income on Pembury is £9,000 compared to £46,000 in neighbouring mortgaged street properties, so it is a prime candidate.  But there has been a lot of dispute about what actually happened there, most notably by the Chief Executive of the Peabody Trust that runs it.  Many people have complained about the mischaracterisation
of their areas in the media.
A mapping exercise done at University College London (my old Geog Dept I assume) discovered that in north London 84% of verified incidents occurred within a five minute walk of both an established town centre and a large post-war housing estate.  Now there’s a shock, I’m not sure there are many parts of Hackney and Tottenham where this doesn’t apply.  In south London it was 96%.  UCL identify a slightly different factor: built form rather than tenure: “it’s not an argument that social housing is connected with crime, but that a certain type of post-war large housing estate is.” 
So does it matter if it isn’t clear if we’re talking about people or places, and which tenure they’re in?  Well I think it does.  Iain Duncan Smith is a highly political man who arrives at highly political conclusions.  His think tank friends want to create the opinion within the public that not only is there a link between living in council housing, sloth, and criminality but there is a causal correlation (ie the tenure causes these defects).  Then they can promote free market solutions and argue that collective provision should be removed.  We are experiencing a skirmish in their propaganda war.

Categories
Blog Post Uncategorized

What goes up won’t come down

The changes to Local Housing Allowance and the rest of the Housing Benefit system have been covered frequently on Red Brick.  We don’t think much of them.
But one argument that the government deployed seemed logical to a lot of people.  That was the common Ministerial assertion that, because LHA claimants make up as much as 40% of the private rented market, the level of LHA  payments must be a big factor in the rise in private rents over recent years.  And the corollary was that cuts to benefit, and hence to tenants’ ability to pay, would inevitably lead to a fall in rents, which would be a good outcome.
In my old economics textbook I find some support for this in theory: if supply is constant and effective demand falls, then the price should fall as well.  Cue much Tory-speak about the good old market mechanism.
However in the real housing market demand is in such excess over supply that the neat little supply and demand chart really doesn’t work.  If you reduce benefits so that tenants in high demand relatively expensive areas have to move out, there are many people willing to replace them at the same price.  The price will not fall.  Yet in the cheaper areas where the tenants are expected to move to, there will be more people chasing the small proportion of homes that become available at or below the 30% percentile (the new cap) at
any one time: the price is likely to rise.
A new report ‘Leading the Market’ from the Chartered Institute of Housing and the British Property Federation pours more cold water on the ‘LHA causes high rents’ argument.
They conclude that

“The increase in average rent levels during this period (2008-2010) is entirely due to a shift in the relative distribution of the caseload from the North and the Midlands towards London and Southern England. After adjusting for this ‘caseload effect’ average housing benefit rent levels fell by 1% (instead of the reported 3% rise).”
“We found no evidence for a relationship between the LHA inflation rates and the proportion of the market that is let to housing benefit tenants.”
“There is no evidence to support the contention that the LHA is inflationary or produces a feedback loop.”
“Our findings call into question the Government’s strategy that it can use its power as a bulk purchaser to force landlords to reduce their rents.  If LHA rates do not contribute towards rent inflation then conversely they cannot be used as a tool to force rents down.”

In short the policy is not just wrong in principle: it is wrong in theory and it is wrong in practice.

Categories
Blog Post Uncategorized

Housing will define the London Mayoral election

Housing was one of Ken Livingstone’s success stories. Despite starting with very few housing powers and responsibilities, Livingstone skilfully used his planning powers and his leadership to promote housebuilding, especially on the major sites in the east of the capital, and to raise the proportion of homes built that are affordable.
Policies such as the target that 50 per cent of all homes built should be affordable; development should wherever possible be mixed tenure; there should be a larger share of family-sized homes – were allied to growing influence over central government’s housing capital expenditure leading to London’s biggest ever affordable housing budget.
Although the recession had a serious impact on private sector output, by 2008, when Boris Johnson took over, the prospects for housing in London were better than they had been for a generation.
Johnson’s policies, like those of the government, are highly ideological and damaging. There will be virtually no new social rented housing and the existing social rented stock will be reduced.
What little money is left after 60% cuts will be channelled into the so-called ‘Affordable Rent’ programme at rents of up to 80% of market rents. Johnson’s revised London Plan removes many of the policies that were most effective.
There has been no mitigation of the “Kosovo-style social cleansing” – to use Johnson’s own words – that will result from their housing benefit policies and the total benefit cap.
The prospect is that, were he to win, a new Livingstone mayoralty will spend three of its four years under the coalition, so the approach will have to be a mix of pragmatic policy and campaigning.
There are things the new Mayor can do to relieve the situation and champion London’s interests. A detailed report from the newly-formed London Labour Housing Group sets out what they might be.
For example:
• Limited funds can be identified to start a programme of social rented housing again, especially using public land;
• The 50% affordable rule – supported by the inspectors who assessed Johnson’s new plan – could be re-introduced;
• More pro-active planning with an emphasis on mixed communities and not
ghettoisation would challenge developers;
• A London-wide empty homes strategy could bring thousands of homes back into use;
• A new charter for private renting could engage tenants and landlords in a serious attempt to professionalise the sector and improve standards;
• The Mayor can push financial institutions into better mortgage policies for first time buyers and mortgage deposit guarantee schemes that could make a big difference for a lot of people;
• A new monitoring unit could track households being forced by the housing benefit changes to move across London, using the information to make sure poor and vulnerable people do not lose contact with essential services, social services support, schooling, and so on;
• A much bigger emphasis on co-operative and mutual solutions to housing needs, including Community Land Trusts.
Another vital role for a new Labour Mayor, were he to win, will be to prepare for a new Labour government in 2015, were Ed Miliband to be elected prime minister.
Livingstone has good relationships with Miliband and Ed Balls and a lot of preparatory work could go in to a new housing programme which should be at the centre of Labour’s economic, health and community re-building agendas as well as housing.
He should champion London’s interests through high-profile campaigning for a better housing deal – more genuinely affordable homes, less draconian benefit policies, mixed communities throughout London, the idea of a London Living Rent to match the London Living Wage.
There are a lot of ideas around at present for Livingstone to build on for the campaign to beat Johnson – from the Green party’s Jenny Jones AM, the Pro-Housing Alliance, the London Assembly Housing and Planning Committee, and now London Labour Housing Group have all produced serious proposals that deserve to be taken up.
Livingstone’s housing record was a good one; Johnson’s is dreadful. The task for progressives is to convince Londoners they can vote for a better way next May.
This post has also been published on Left Foot Forward.
Categories
Uncategorized

The Politics of Land Value Tax

Steve posted a few weeks ago on Land Value Tax – saying it’s ground we shouldn’t let the Lib Dems capture.
It’s now ground that we shouldn’t let the Tories capture.
In addition to Lib Dem support for greater property/land tax, Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home as well as Tory MP, Mark Reckless have come out in favour of such a tax, arguing for a move to tax wealth rather than income.
Admittedly, Secretary of State Eric Pickles has come out very firmly against, as a standard bearer of the Tory right would.
Then again, the Tory right also hate the 50p tax rate and if this is the lever to get the Lib Dems to back its abolition, they may just put up with the introduction of a new tax. Indeed, Tim Montgomerie is not known for being on the left of the Tory party and this is clearly the calculation he is making.
There are some things Tories can do easier than the Labour Party: can you imagine the onslaught Labour would face, in government or in opposition, if we proposed the introduction of a new tax? But since it’s the Tories who’ve let this particular genie out of the bottle, we should seize it.
There is a perfectly good social democratic argument for a Land Value Tax – in taxation and housing terms. Check out Toby Lloyd’s evergreen ‘Don’t Bet the House on It’ for some of the housing reasons.
The taxation case is simpler – It raises money by taxing the unproductive and in many cases unearned wealth of the rich, rather than doing so from the income earned from everyone’s productive activities. That’s hard to argue with.
And we can outflank coalition in a way that will chime better with the mood of the nation and support people far more deserving than those paying the 50p tax rate: the revenues could be used to support first-time buyers, invest in more genuinely affordable social housing or maintain a comprehensive housing benefit safety net.
Or since I’d like to see Labour trusted on taxation and not face an onslaught if we were to propose tax reform: tax cuts for lower and middle earners whose standards of living are being squeezed ever tighter.

Categories
Blog Post Uncategorized

Power in planning goes to the powerful

The letters page in the Daily telegraph is not a place I go often. But in the last week or two, since the paper launched its ‘Hands off our land’ campaign, the correspondents have reflected the mood of insurrection in the shires.
The Government’s draft National Planning Policy Framework is the cause of the deep rift in the Conservative Party.  Two great Tory traditions have collided – conservation of the countryside versus making lots of money from development.
The government has dug this deep hole for itself and Pickles/Shapps/Clark and co deserve no sympathy for their plight.  When they came to power they made constant attacks on Labour’s national targets, its regional planning approach and regional plans, which in my view had quite carefully balanced the need to build homes with the need to protect heritage and beautiful places.
At that time the Tory talk reflected the extreme version of localism, where local people would dictate what would get built and where, with just a few incentives, like the New Homes Bonus, to encourage them to build.  It felt like a nimby charter and that the net result would be very little development.  Indeed, some councils reduced their development targets massively and a few declared what was a virtual moratorium on new homes, especially new affordable homes.
It’s not clear when the penny dropped and the government realised that its approach was incompatible with building more homes.  This realisation was encouraged by some developers who increasingly, according to the Telegraph and others, fill the Tory Party’s coffers with rather more than pennies.  Anyway, they now seem to have swung right round to the opposite extreme.  There are accusations that government inspectors are ‘pressurising’ district councils into changing their core strategies to get more homes built.  The Telegraph says that they have ‘identified a number of rural councils which have been instructed to make changes to their core strategies by planning inspectors that will see them giving up countryside for development. The rulings have created deep tensions at some key Tory run councils with many councillors feeling frustrated at the centralised
interference.’
For the anti-development lobby, the NPPF is wholly unacceptable because it says that planning must not act as an impediment to growth (i.e. development) and that there will be a presumption in favour of ‘sustainable’ development.  Those that genuinely believed in localism, and thought this government would be the conservationists’ friend, feel betrayed and outraged at this new centralised imposition.
Although there is little doubt that the planning system could be streamlined and some of the fussier rules removed, Labour’s structure for planning is beginning to look like a well-oiled machine: national assessments of how many homes are needed, some strict central policy guidance like the target for building on brownfield land and protecting the green belt, a regional assessment of land capacity and the setting of targets for each area,
balanced by local influence over sites and specific developments.
The excellent Highbury Group on housing delivery has submitted comments on the government’s plans which seem to be the height of common sense.  They argue that the planning system needs to be plan-led and not led by desires of developers or even the general needs of the economy.  Plans need to be evidence-based, taking full account of demography, geography and the natural resources available.  They point out that sustainability is a subjective consideration and not a market phenomenon, and should be contextualised by the preparation of a proper hierarchy of national, regional and local plans.
Most studies of the capacity of areas to support housebuilding find more developable brownfield land than was previously believed, although that land is often harder to assemble into good prepared sites than the greenfield option.   Some greenfield (NB not Green Belt) land will be required but not so much that it will concrete over the countryside – far from it.  With imagination and determination, the development planning process can deliver the homes we need without ruining the countryside and the natural heritage.
The truth is that Labour was right all along, or at least a lot less wrong than the Tories, and the Party should be taking this opportunity to say so to the 3.8m members of the National Trust, the 1m members of the RSPB, and the 600,000 members of the Woodland Trust.
As the National Trust says: ‘We believe strongly that any development must meet the needs of people, the environment as well as the economy.  The Government has failed to do this in its reforms. It has put short term financial gain ahead of everything else. It has failed to protect the everyday places that communities love. Power in planning goes to the powerful.’  Spot on.

Categories
Blog Post Uncategorized

Worrying trends in homelessness

All the conditions were there and it was only a matter of time before the homelessness figures start to grow again.
All of the critical indicators of homelessness have now turned upwards after many years of decline.
The number of households accepted by local authorities between April and June 2011 was 11,820, a rise of 17% from 10,100 in the same quarter last year.  This is a very significant change in trend.
The rise in acceptances feeds through slowly into the number of households in temporary accommodation, but even this figure has started to rise again – up in the last quarter after 26 successive quarters of reduction, during which it fell from a peak of over 100,000 to less than 50,000.  In London, 35,620 households were in temporary accommodation at the  end of June 2011, just under three quarters of the total for England.
For those of us who lived through the bed and breakfast crisis of the 1980s, it is extremely worrying to see the numbers increasing significantly again.  From a low of 1,880 at the end of 2009 it is now back up to 3,120.  The number of families with children in B&B, which troughed at 400 at the end of 2009, is now back up to 1,210, a rise of over 60% on the year.  The consistent success in bringing this figure down, from a peak this century of
14,000 in 2002 (of which nearly 7,000 were families with children) has been brought to a halt.  One reason is that the use of private sector leased accommodation is declining.
With regard to the reasons for homelessness, the increase between 2009/10 and 2010/11 of 4,140 in the number of households accepted (40,020 to 44,160) is largely explained by two factors: relatives and friends (other than parents) being no longer able or willing to provide accommodation, which increased by 960 (5,000 – 5,960) and the ending of an assured shorthold tenancy, which increased by 2,050 (4,580 – 6,630).  Given the increasing reliance on private rented accommodation, the latter increase is a sign of things to come.
The apparent success in tackling homelessness since 2004 has not always been what it seems.  There were huge changes in policy and approach which put much more emphasis on managing demand.  This was a mixture of excellent practice – in the development of housing options services and homelessness prevention work – and the less excellent practice of diversion – securing private rented accommodation for households before they even registered as homeless, thereby keeping them out of the statistics.
Of the 164,000 households where action was successful in preventing homelessness in 2010/11, more than 82,000 were assisted in obtaining alternative accommodation, predominantly private lets.  This was the precursor of the current government’s policy to allow councils to discharge their homelessness duty by securing private rented accommodation against the wishes of the applicant.  Despite the best efforts of councils, many suspect that the policy of placing homeless households into private lets will lead a revolving door of insecurity and repeat homelessness.
Detailed homelessness statistics (live tables) are available here.

Categories
Blog Post Uncategorized

Jumping jack flash, it's a (blog about) gas!

The safety of our homes has been highlighted a number of times in recent months and years, with fire safety problems being identified in tower blocks and a wide range of health and safety issues being identified in the private rented sector.  Gas safety has also come
under scrutiny with the reporting of a number of deaths being caused by poor gas installations leading to carbon monoxide poisoning.
However, looking over a longer period of time, gas safety is an example of good regulation and there have been significant reductions in the number of life-threatening incidents.
A new report on carbon monoxide trends from the Gas Safety Trust analyses information obtained from the CO incident database for the lengthy period from 1996 to 2010.  Fatalities have reduced from 21 in 1996/97 to 4 in 2009/10 and non-fatal injuries have reduced from 142 to 115 in the same period.
This is a success story.  But even so 4 deaths is 4 too many.  The report outlines a number of areas where further improvements could be made.  First, the highest risk group is those over 70 years of age, who are 5 times as likely to die as a result of a CO incident as others.  Secondly, although the risk faced by private tenants has reduced substantially over the period, it is still 50% greater than that faced by either owner occupiers or social tenants.  Thirdly, the proportion of incidents involving older central heating boilers (over 20 years old) has been rising steadily and is now around half of all incidents.
The report sets out a clear agenda to be followed.  Elderly gas users and those with older
systems should be considered for concessionary measures to help them (occupiers or landlords) to replace and/or maintain their gas appliances.  Mandatory annual safety checks and certification on appliances has plainly been hugely important in improving the record of the private rented sector, but the report recommends that the next target should be a requirement not just for an annual check but for annual servicing.  The report also recommends that more should be done to prevent unregistered operatives from undertaking gas work as ‘the number that have been cited by incident investigators remains stubbornly high’.
Effective regulation, setting high standards and rigorously enforcing them, has achieved
a huge amount in this field in the last 15 years.  It is an excellent example to use to rebut
those who constantly complain about ‘health and safety’ and ‘red tape’ being too burdensome.  It is also an excellent model to use in tackling other serious hazards in the home.
The report concludes that the ‘industry’s continued efforts and vigilance in promoting best practice and safe gas usage in the domestic sector should therefore be rigorously maintained.’  Indeed, but there may also be a need for further action by government to
finally crack the remaining issues.
(with apologies to the Rolling Stones)