The aim of this toolkit is to assist environmental health practitioners and local housing managers in achieving a better understanding of the links between housing and health. Produced for the CIEH by the Building Research Establishment, it shows how links between homes and health can be made, including where possible, the cost benefit of some specifically linked housing and health issues.
Environmental health practitioners play a key role in promoting the Government’s Decent Homes programme in the private sector. This toolkit provides a method of measuring and showing the value of private sector housing intervention to health, society and quality of life.
One of the tools available is a cost calculator based on the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS.) The calculator is intended to help demonstrate the value of an intervention by producing a baseline of likely numbers of incidences within local authority areas, together with the health costs and costs of mitigating the hazard. This figure can be used as evidence of the cost and subsequently compared to the costs of improvement works.