The last year has been a blur of medication, hospital visits and paramedic callouts for Rachael (who doesn’t want her surname used) and her two children. “One night my son was unresponsive. He just went limp in my arms,” she says. “I was crying on the phone to the ambulance, saying you better hurry up and get here.”
Neither Rachael nor her son had serious respiratory problems before they moved into a flat in Salford last year. During her five visits to hospital, she says, doctors warned that chronic damp and mould in her home were probably to blame.
The mould has become so bad that she has to clean using bleach every day, going through multiple bottles a week, as well as leaving some windows in her high-rise flat open almost all day. She and her 18-month-old son now need an intermittent cocktail of steroids and antibiotics in order to continue living in the flat.
The response from the housing association that runs the block has been almost nonexistent, according to Rachael – even as the damp causes structural damage to the windows. “We’re being treated like dogs,” she says. “But they’re still taking the rent every month like nothing’s happened.”
Her story bears painful similarities to that of Awaab Ishak – the toddler whose death in 2020 was caused by exposure to mould in his Rochdale home, a coroner concluded last week.
Now two of the UK’s largest organisations representing frontline doctors have warned that mould and damp are becoming serious threats to people’s health, with the BMA telling the Observer it is concerned about a spike in respiratory problems and even deaths this winter caused by social conditions such as poor housing.
“My colleagues are dealing with the chronic impacts on people’s health from poor housing day in, day out,” said Dr Penelope Toff, chair of the BMA’s public health medicine committee. “This needs to be a real wake-up call. I don’t think it is yet.
“One of my colleagues based in Rochdale said it [the death of Awaab Ishak] could have happened in many other homes in that region.”
The Royal College of General Practitioners, the body representing more than 50,000 UK GPs, agreed, telling the Observer that GPs are already seeing the rising impact of poor housing and the wider the cost of living crisis on the health of vulnerable patients.
Poor housing, including property riddled with mould and damp, is estimated to cost the NHS as much as £1.4bn a year.
In 2021, a poll by the housing charity Shelter found thatone in five renters in England were being made physically ill by housing problems associated with their accommodation.
After Leonie and Dario Brito, 29 and 28, moved into their studio flat in Walthamstow, east London, last year, the first thing they noticed was a “fish smell”. But they couldn’t work out what caused it.
“A few months in, I lifted up my bed and then all our belongings underneath had mould on,” Leonie says. “Soon it was everywhere – the mattress, the wall, our clothes, the toilet, the kitchen, our laptops, the TV … If you walked into the flat, you would always smell the mould, even if you opened the window.” The mould even spread into the spices in their kitchen cupboards. Then the breathing problems started.
“I had never had any problems before, but I was left gasping for air at night,” she says. One night the breathlessness forced her to go to A&E at Whipps Cross hospital, where doctors told her she would need an asthma inhaler if she continued living in the property. “The landlord said it was too expensive to deal with the mould. And that was literally all we got. We sent pictures, but they didn’t come round once,” she says. “We didn’t want to stay indoors.”
A report by the Housing Ombudsman in October 2021 found that, in 56% of cases it investigated over two years, landlords failed to do something or did something they shouldn’t have, resulting in damp and mould developing in the property.
Thomas Rogers and his wife left their last flat because they were worried about how the damp would affect their health – his wife is pregnant and Rogers has respiratory issues caused by a childhood spent in housing infected with black mould.
Within five days of moving into their new home in Bradford, however, the walls started to seep water, thanks to a plumbing leak that their lettings agent had promised it had dealt with.
“It was like something out of a horror film. Water kept coming out of all the walls, paint started coming down the walls,” he recalls. The mould began spreading across multiple rooms and floors. “You could wake up in the morning at 9am and, by 9pm, you could see it had got worse,” Rogers says. The couple were forced to leave the flat last week – fearing yet again for their health and that of their unborn son – and are now homeless, staying with family and on blow-up beds with friends.
“It’s just before Christmas and we’ve got nowhere to live,” Rogers says. “All we want is a nest to bring our son into the world.”
