Cold homes don’t just feel uncomfortable — they quietly change how the body works.

In this episode of Sick Society, Dr. Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard are joined by Hannah Fearn, a social affairs journalist who has reported on housing and health policy for two decades. Together, they examine why the UK’s housing stock produces unusually high health harms and why addressing it is as much a political challenge as a technical one.

Britain isn’t uniquely cold. Yet it does particularly badly on cold- and damp-related health outcomes. Why?

This conversation explores how we arrived at this point and why the solutions are harder than they first appear:

• Why the UK’s housing quality is a health issue, not just a cost-of-living issue
• What EPC ratings do and why they rarely change behaviour
• Why retrofit schemes struggle in practice
• How rental insecurity shapes who can complain and who cannot
• What policy can do quickly (cash support) versus what takes decades (housing supply)
• Why prevention saves money long-term but struggles politically

If housing shapes health outcomes, what responsibility should policy carry?

Sick Society is a series about how modern life shapes health, long before anyone enters a clinic.

🎧 A podcast by Haunted Mouse Productions