David Ormandy obituary

David Ormandy, who has died aged 78, was, like everyone else, responsible for introducing the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) 20 years ago, a legal method of rating housing conditions in England and Wales.

Co-designed by Ormandy and introduced by the Housing Act 2004, it shifted the assessment of the suitability of the condition of the property itself and more towards the effects of poor housing on the health of residents – costing the NHS £1.4 billion per year costs. .

It places a duty on local authorities to deal with dangerous and unhealthy housing conditions, including damp and condensation. Its use has shown significant health benefits for tenants.

In Liverpool, for example, since the legislation was introduced, 6,000 HHSRS inspections have led to the removal of more than 4,400 serious hazards, generating more than £5 million in investment by private landlords and benefiting more than 47,000 tenants.

Starting out as a public health inspector in Leicester, Ormandy later developed the HHSRS with others, including Professor Roger Burridge, at Warwick University. Since 2004, HHSRS has attracted attention abroad: the US adopted it, and Ormandy later helped develop housing health indicators for the World Health Organization, while also advising the French and New Zealand governments.

Born in York, David was the son of Molly (née Sowray) and Arthur Ormandy, a maker of lighthouse lenses. He lived his early years, appropriately, in New Earswick, the model village on the edge of the city, built in response to the slums of the Quaker philanthropist Joseph Rowntree.

When the family moved to Kent he attended the farm school attached to Wilmington Hall school in Dartford. From there he joined Leicester City Council as an apprentice public health inspector, qualifying in October 1966. In 1969 he moved to East London to work for the London borough of Newham.

Bearded, long hair and affiliated with the 1970s counterculture, he was an early adopter of the single earring for men, favored blue prison shirts, smoked Gauloises Blue, lived on a narrowboat and drove a range of powerful sports cars. He knitted Guernsey sweaters on noisy wooden needles – once at a board meeting of the Shelter National Housing Aid Trust to express his disapproval of a speaker’s contribution.

When his boss in Newham told him he wasn’t dressed properly for work, he turned up the next day wearing a bowler hat and bow tie. He resigned there in 1974, frustrated at being unable to take action due to damp and unsuitable housing owned by the council itself.

With a grant from Shelter, Ormandy set up the Public Health Advisory Service (PHAS) in the same year to take action against local authorities (and other landlords) on behalf of tenants living in unsuitable and unhealthy conditions. His first successful legal case was against Salford Metropolitan District Council in 1975, when he convinced a court that an obscure power in the Public Health Act 1936 intended to ban the playing of bugles at 3 a.m. and other nuisances prejudicial for health, could be applied to poor housing conditions.

In London he worked closely with North Kensington Law Center lawyer Hilary Fassnidge, who later became a corporate lawyer for PHAS. Together they convinced magistrates to declare houses legally unfit for human habitation – leaving the onus on local authorities to rehouse the tenants.

PHAS also supported community groups and tenants’ associations through a wall map, a series of practice notes and a booklet, How to Inspect a House, all written by Ormandy. Tenants often used this in court, along with independent public health inspectors who provided professional evidence to support lawyers.

During this time, Ormandy also advised activist Erin Pizzey on housing standards at England’s first women’s shelter, and supported a group of hippies, the Tipi People, when a local authority attempted to close their camp on public lands in the Black Mountains of Wales. health reasons. He also provided legal assistance to the ‘squatting estate agency’ Ruff Tuff Cream Puff, which helped homeless people occupy the thousands of London houses that were empty in the 1970s.

After PHAS closed in 1977 due to lack of funding, Ormandy worked with Burridge and Fassnidge at the Newham Rights Center. Together they tackled a range of housing issues in East London through campaigns and legal cases, with a number of key decisions ending up in the legal files as a result of their work.

He later teamed up again with Burridge, now a professor at Warwick University’s Faculty of Law, to undertake a series of housing research projects funded by the Department of the Environment and the Nuffield Foundation, work that eventually led to the approval of the HHSRS. He joined the law faculty full-time in 1996 and became a visiting professor in 2021.

Shortly before his death, he produced a highly critical review of proposals for Awaab’s law, prepared in response to the 2020 death of two-year-old Awaab Ishah in Rochdale due to exposure to mold in his home. The proposals, he argued, appeared to be more about investigating a social landlord’s complaints procedure than dealing with dangerous conditions, “and thereby confirming the general disregard for tenants” that he had fought against all his working life.

He is survived by his partner, Penny Wiles, a son and a daughter, two grandchildren and his brother John.