Decent Homes Standard

Housing Health and Safety Rating System

The government will also be introducing changes to the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS), a tool used to assess hazards in residential premises. The government commissioned an external review of the HHSRS, which concluded in 2022. Following this, changes will be introduced to simplify the HHSRS. This will include:

• Amalgamating some hazards assessed and producing a simpler means of banding the results of HHSRS assessments.
• Publishing baselines to indicate whether a property contains serious hazards, to make assessments easier to understand.
• Publishing new statutory operating and enforcement guidance and a comprehensive set of new case studies

New regulations will be necessary to bring the revisions to the HHSRS into force. These will be introduced after the conclusion of the Decent Homes Standard review. You can see further details of the HHSRS review on GOV.UK.

For more information about the NHF’s work in this area, please feel free to get in touch.