ABSTRACT
For over a century, housing policy in Britain has had a health dimension. This dimension has not always been explicit, and it has rarely been at the top of the policy agenda. Sometimes an emphasis on healthy housing has been deliberate, on other occasions inadvertent. Nevertheless, Britain is probably unique in the extent to which health needs have shaped housing interventions, and in the extent to which housing interventions have impinged on public health. Although moving house has been identified as a stressful life event that can precipitate both mental and physical illness, medical priority rehousing (MPR) is a form of residential mobility that is explicitly designed to be therapeutic. The housing market consists of a number of forms of tenure and the largest housing tenure overall, is owner occupation. This, moreover, is the part of the housing system that has grown most rapidly in recent years, largely at the expense of local authority renting.
