Remove living rooms from overcrowding standards in Housing Act 1985

Background

We call on the Government to amend Part X of the Housing Act 1985 to state that a household’s living room cannot be legally counted as a bedroom space when calculating overcrowding space standards.

Additional details

We believe the current statutory overcrowding standard is 40 years old and broken. We feel it allows landlords to count a family’s only living room as a bedroom on paper to bypass overcrowding thresholds. This can force vulnerable and non-vulnerable families living in social housing to lose their only communal area. No modern family should be trapped in bedrooms day and night with nowhere to eat, relax, or spend time together. We want the law to be modernised to protect all families facing this.

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