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After ten years of development, the English government adopted the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) as the prescribed method for assessing housing conditions. Prior to 2006, the assessment was based on the condition of the building and the presence of necessary facilities. Being ‘building focussed’, the basis of the severity of the condition was the extent and cost of any remedial works considered necessary to make the dwelling ‘fit for human habitation’. The HHSRS shifts the focus to the potential threat to health and safety from any defects and deficiencies. The assessment takes account of the likelihood of a hazardous occurrence, and the probable severity of harm that could result from such an occurrence. This approach acknowledges that defects that would be relatively inexpensive to deal with can pose a serious threat to health and/or safety.

Work on the development of the HHSRS included matching data on housing conditions with data on health outcomes. The analyses of the matched database provided information on, among other factors, the range and severity of harm outcomes associated with particular hazards. As the health data used was that available from hospitals and general practitioners, it meant that the health outcomes were those serious enough for the victim to seek medical attention. It has now been realised that it is possible to compare the one-off cost of works to remove or reduce housing hazards with the estimated annual saving to the health service. Using this approach, it has been estimated that poor housing in England is costing the health service around £600 million a year. This cost to the health service is estimated to be around 40% of the total cost of poor housing to society.

ROUSED out of pre‐breakfast tea‐gulping torpor recently by hearing on Radio London the confident assertion, ‘Oh yes, there's a great shortage of librarians throughout the country…’ No Rip Van Winkle beard, wasn't April 1 and no echo of the Last Trump. It was all about a book called Work after work by Judy Kirby and REACH—Retired Executives Action Clearing House, which seeks to relieve the withdrawal symptoms of the retired by finding outlets for their skills in work for voluntary organisations. These withdrawal symptoms in librarians are easily recognised and include immediate and compulsive reading of everything in the Record, a tendency to beam for the first time at young people at conferences, and a not always suppressed urge to write rude letters to the professional press or to the LA. Editing the professional press is not recommended as nostrum for those old retirement blues.

OF THE desultory correspondence in the Times provoked by the announcement in March of the go‐ahead for the new British Library building next to St. Pancras railway station—a gentle lap‐dog to lie down along‐side a portly crinolined Victorian lady—the most interesting to my mind was a letter pointing out that because of the impending electrification of an ancillary line, that particular railway station would in due course be surplus to British Rail's requirements. Why not, asked the correspondent, build a bridge from the new library across Midland Road to the old station, and convert the train shed into a magnificent reading‐room?

This chapter addresses housing policy in England since 2007 and changes in housing opportunities and inequalities. The credit crunch and its aftermath were experienced across the United Kingdom, and speeded the established trend to greater inequality. Many problems identified in England are relevant elsewhere, but the distinctive housing policies adopted in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not discussed here. The chapter argues that the policy direction adopted since 2010 failed in its ambition to increase housing supply and home ownership and further increased social and spatial inequalities.

FOR ME PERSONALLY, The library world has completed a circle in the last decade. From 1958 to 1962 I was concerned in its publication, first with Grafton & Co, and then with André Deutsch Ltd. When Sydney Hyde of WHS Advertising Ltd told me in December that the journal would not fit into their proposed re‐organisation, sentiment alone would probably have been sufficient to arouse my interest in acquiring it.

In 2001 each primary care trust in England was required to undertake a needs assessment in preparation for the development of a mental health promotion strategy. In Greenwich, it was decided to include the physical environment as one of the themes. This paper describes the findings of a literature review undertaken of health, social sciences and architectural research and the preliminary conceptual model subsequently developed to pull together all aspects of the interface between the urban and physical environment and mental well‐being. The literature review identified five key domains that impacted on this relationship: control over the internal housing environment, quality of housing design and maintenance, presence of valued ‘escape facilities’, crime and fear of crime, and social participation. That these domains can be confounded by socio‐economic and demographic factors and also interact with cultural factors and housing type suggests the importance of a public health approach, which focuses on causal systems rather than simply on individual causal factors.