Private and social landlords in Glasgow have been hit with more than 1,500 warnings for damp or mould in recent years, figures show.
The city council has issued 1,505 statutory notices over the past five years for water ingress “likely to have caused dampness within the property” according to data obtained by The Herald.
The enforcement notice is an indication that a Statutory Nuisance exists as defined by the Environmental Protection Act 1990 which could be detrimental to health.
The council may order repairs to be carried out if the owners have failed to act.
READ MORE: Fury at housing group over damp and mould failures
Figures show the number of enforcement notices peaked from April 2018-March 2019 when 320 were issued. A total of 156 have seen served so far for the current financial year.
The council said a significant number would have been served for common structural defects, such as a defective roof allowing water penetration into
a property.
It refused to provide the names of the landlords who were warned about living conditions, saying the cost of extracting the information would exceed the £600 limit.
Councils have the option of complying with such requests but Glasgow said: “On this occasion we have decided not to due to the resources (both financial and human) which voluntary compliance would divert away
from our core business.”
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Last year paediatric doctors in England called for better reporting of air quality problems following the death of a child from prolonged exposure to mould in his family’s flat.
Awaab Ishak died in 2020, eight days after his second birthday, as
a direct result of black mould in the flat he lived in.
Coroner Joanne Kearsley said Rochdale Boroughwide Housing was not “proactive” and asked: “How in the UK in 2020 does a two-year-old child die as a result of exposure to mould?”
Days after the youngster’s death Scotland’s biggest publicly funded housing association was condemned for a failure to track the full extent of damp and mould problems in its rented properties.
Wheatley Group, which owns or manages homes in 19 of Scotland’s 32 local authority areas,admitted that it does not “place any particular marker” on its properties to identify if they have damp and mould problems.
READ MORE: How to stop damp and condensation in your home
It was responding to a freedom of information request from concerned tenants asking
Glasgow-based Wheatley, the UK’s fourth largest housing group, how many of the total social housing stock had damp and mould problems in each of the last two years.
The housing group was also unable to say how many complaints it had received over damp and mould problems.
But it was able to say there were 56 complaints over dissatisfaction over the group’s repairs and maintenance service in 2021-22-23, more than the previous year.
The response shocked the Scottish Tenants Organisation, which said: “It beggars belief that Scotland’s biggest social landlord does not know the extent of dampness and mould throughout the thousands of its social rented homes in Scotland.”
New analysis by the Fraser of Allander Institute highlighted damp and overcrowded accommodation as a factor in the dramatic stalling of improvements in living standards in Scotland.
Previous housing condition surveys north of the Border had shown a decrease in the number of properties reporting issues with damp conditions over the past decade, but suggested that lower income households were still the worst affected.
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