David Ormandy
The School of Law is saddened by the passing of Professor David Ormandy on 11th April 2024. Our thoughts and condolences go out to all of David's family, friends, and colleagues.
David’s Biography
David had a background in public health, having trained and qualified in 1966 as a public health inspector (PHI now renamed environmental health practitioner/officer EHP/O), and worked as a PHI for Leicester City Council and Newham LBC. He specialised in housing conditions and, from 1973 practised as an expert witness in cases dealing with housing conditions. He was the founder and director of the Public Health Advisory Service (a project funded by Shelter) from 1974 to 1977 and later moved to Newham Rights Centre where he worked to improve housing conditions in east London.
From 1992 to 1998, David was involved in research with Warwick Law School for the UK government, investigating controls on minimum standards in housing and the health impact of housing conditions. He was responsible to the UK government for the projects to develop the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS), which was adopted as the statutory method for assessing housing conditions in England and Wales in 2006. He developed training courses for local authority officers on the use of the HHSRS. David was also responsible to the UK government for projects to produce an Approved Code of Practice for Management Standards in Multi-Occupied Buildings, and for the production of Housing Disrepair Legal Obligations: Good Practice Guide.
David joined Warwick Law School full time in 1996 after working with Roger Burridge on studies into housing standards. David then moved to the Institute of Health, School of Health and Social Studies in February 2010 and transferred to Warwick Medical School, Division of Health Sciences.
Between 2000 and 2010, David worked for the World Health Organization, which included membership of the Task Force on Health and Housing (which monitored and advised on the LARES project - a study of housing conditions and health in eight European countries, see Housing and Health in Europe (2009) Routledge). During this time, he was responsible for start-up work to develop Housing-Health Indicators; participated in work on the development of Environmental Health Indicators; and was seconded to WHO ECEH (Bonn) for three months in 2006 to review and develop their strategy on health and housing. He contributed to projects on policy briefs to reduce children's unintentional injuries (part of the work on Children's Environment and Health Action Plan for Europe), developing health-relevant climate change indicators, and indoor air quality.
In 2010, the US Department for Housing and Urban Development adopted the HHSRS (unchanged, other than being renamed the Healthy Homes Rating System) and required its use by all housing-related projects awarded grants by HUD. David was commissioned by HUD to train potential users of the US HHRS. David then moved to the Institute of Health, School of Health and Social Studies in February 2010 and transferred to Warwick Medical School, Division of Health Sciences.
In 2012, David was advisor and consultant to Wayne State University, Detroit, USA for the Three Cities Healthy Homes Rating System Study. David had been a member of the Scientific Committee of the US National Center for Health Housing since 2012, and he contributed to work on the development of the Healthy Housing Index carried out by the Housing and Health Research Programme at the University of Otago, New Zealand. This led to the development of the Rental Housing Warrant of Fitness. Between 2012 and 2018, David collaborated with Dr Véronique Ezratty MD (Medical Studies Department, EDF, France) investigating Health, Energy, and Energy Precariousness in France and England, in particular, the cost to French society attributable to energy inefficient dwellings and energy vulnerability.
David acted as Advisor to UK Building Research Establishment (BRE) on the production of a Guide and an Assessment Protocol on Overheating in Dwellings published in 2015 and was a member of Eurofound’s Economic and Social Cost of Inadequate Housing in Europe panel that produced the 2016 report "Inadequate Housing in Europe: Costs and consequences." He was an advisor to the BRE on a project to develop a methodology to compare the one-off cost of mitigating housing hazards with the estimated annual cost saving to the health sector in England, leading to a series of reports on the Real Cost of Poor Housing.
David was a member of the World Health Organization Working Group, developing Healthy Housing Guidelines (published in 2018) and a member of the Working Group for the National Healthy Housing Standard, published in 2015 by the American Public Health Association and the National Center for Healthy Housing. David was also a member of the New Zealand Government’s 2015 National Science Challenges: Assessment Panel on Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities.
With Professor Roger Burridge, David organised the Warwick series of (un)Healthy Housing conferences: Unhealthy Housing: A diagnosis (1986), Unhealthy Housing: Prevention and Remedies (1987), Unhealthy Housing: The Public Health Response (1991), and Healthy Housing: Promoting Good Health (2003). He also organised the 5th Warwick Healthy Housing Conference (2008). David returned to the School of Law in 2021.
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