Welcome!

Welcome.

This site has been created by a group of Environmental Health Practitioners, for the benefit of others in understanding and applying the Housing Health And Safety Rating System in part 1 of the Housing Act 2004.

Please feel free to explore the site, which represents the culmination of about 18 months work. We include worked examples, a “whole house” case study, draft procedures, survey sheets, Notices, Orders, and “Statements of Reasons”, and a Microsoft Excel based Calculator that can be used to score the hazards and record both the justifications for changing harm likelihood’s and harm outcomes. There are useful links to other sites, documents etc.

There is some material that is intended to help with training - a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, and a staff training programme. Links to useful software are on our software page

Can we ask that you avoid making hard copies of our documents as far as possible - whilst this may be handy for reference, firstly this is out of concern for the environment - it is wasteful of paper, and secondly you may miss an important update. Feel free though save copies of documents to your hard disc, or to revisit the site.

The material is copyright, but it may be freely used and reproduced without acknowledgement, so long as not for profit. We offer it to inform, educate, inspire and enable - if you chose to use it, you do so at your own risk, and we do not accept liability for loss as a consequence of using our material. Some of the work was done when we were at the beginning of the learning curve, and we may do things differently now. Please be aware. Please see our authors note and, licence and disclaimer.

Deliberately, we do not have a discussion page, forums etc., to give you the chance to discuss the hazards etc. We would point you to the LACORS website for discussion pages etc.

Our calculations were done prior to the issue of Statutory Instrument 2005 No 3208 Housing Health and Safety Rating System (England) Regulations 2005 which changes the method of calculation. Under the old system you selected class 1, 2, and 3 harm outcomes and then used class 4 to make 100%; under the new system you select the second, third and fourth most likely, total their RSP’s and deduct the sum from 100 to give the value for the most likely harm outcome. It is not thought that will make much difference to the scoring in most cases. We have amended ours where a significant difference arises and have asked the ODPM for clarification as the calculation in the Regulations is not the method taught in the Accredited Training, nor in the Operating Guidance. Our calculator has not been amended in the light of this.