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Quarter of landlords fail to fit homes with working smoke alarms

Fire Safety News

A survey of landlords has found that hundreds of thousands of tenants are living in unsafe housing with missing smoke or carbon monoxide alarms as landlords aren’t meeting obligations on repairs that they are responsible for.

The data, collected by ComRes on behalf of Citizens Advice, found that a quarter of landlords failed to make sure there's a smoke alarm on every floor of their properties and a further 26% failed to carry out annual gas safety work.

According to the report, 90,000 homes do not have a working carbon monoxide alarm, despite this being regulation, and one in six tenants say the disrepair in their home was causing a 'major threat to their health and safety.'

ComRes is calling for a national housing body for private renting to set standards, which could include creating a home “MOT”, setting a “fit-and-proper-person” test for landlords and standardising rental contracts.

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