My friend Jeff Hollingworth, who has died aged 74, was a senior civil servant in the Department of the Environment. He was well known in environmental health and housing circles for his work on regulatory reform of housing renewal assistance in 2002 and his drafting, in the early 1990s, of a consultation paper on the licensing of bedsits and other houses in multiple occupation.
The proposals in his paper were blocked by the government at the time, but licensing eventually came into being with the Housing Act of 2004. Jeff was also involved, behind the scenes, in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, which introduced the concept of commonhold as an alternative to leasehold for flats and other properties.
