Guides
Practical, plain-English answers for landlords — each guide links to the pillar page it supports, where every UK area is covered.
For ordinary rentals, the honest water-hygiene story is reassuring: low risk, simple controls, no annual certificate. HMOs are where that reassurance needs qualifying — not because the law changes, but because shared houses systematically collect the risk factors the ordinary advice assumes away: stored water, uneven occupation, shared spray-forming outlets and higher system complexity. Here's what genuinely changes.
Somewhere along the way, a genuine but modest legal duty — assess and control legionella risk — grew a commercial exoskeleton: the 'annual landlord legionella certificate', renewed yearly, priced accordingly, and required by precisely no legislation. The HSE has publicly pushed back on the mis-selling. Here's the duty as it actually stands, and how to meet it without funding the myth.
Holiday accommodation combines the two conditions water hygiene guidance worries about most: periods of stagnation between bookings, and a stream of guests — including older and less robust ones — showering in a system nobody lives with. The control measures are cheap and procedural, which makes this a topic where the changeover routine does nearly all the work.
The cold water storage tank is the component that most changes a property's water hygiene profile — and the one landlords are least likely to have looked at, since it lives in the loft doing its work invisibly. Where risk assessments find problems in ordinary rentals, the tank is disproportionately involved. Here is what it needs, and when the right answer is removing it.
A landlord letting a flat in a converted house or purpose-built block controls only part of the water system serving the tenant: the pipework inside the flat, downstream of communal tanks, risers and sometimes shared hot water plant that belong to someone else. Water hygiene here is a boundary question — and unmanaged boundaries are where the gaps live.