Luke Brooks was a young man described as happy-go-lucky, funny and clever, who would do anything for anyone, enjoyed cooking, taught himself to play keyboard and absolutely adored video games.
He was healthy, both physically and mentally, and he had his whole life before him. But he died aged 27 in October last year in a cold, damp and mouldy privately rented house that, his family believed, killed him.
An inquest held this week into his death had been expected to raise wider questions about mould in residential properties.
It didn’t do that. But it did shine a light on what are daily realities for countless numbers of people who have to rent property privately and cheaply, repeatedly trying and failing to get into a hugely overstretched social housing system.
The evidence from Luke’s mother, Patricia, provided a shocking spotlight on living conditions in modern Britain.
She said her family lived in a privately rented house in Oldham from 2014. For the first three years they had no heating or hot water.
When Patricia Brooks did finally get a working boiler in – she said it was her doing, using a government scheme – things were not much better because there was a problem with the radiators.
It meant only the top few inches of the radiators became hot, she said. In the summer it was OK, in the colder months it was freezing and warmer outside than in.
There were leaks, which caused damp and mould. The kitchen sink was held up by planks of wood. There were no carpets. There was a rotting door frame around the back door. The whole house wanted knocking down, one witness said.
Patricia Brooks gave evidence that she went to Oldham council and begged for the family to be moved into social housing. She said: “For God’s sake will you please get us out of that house before somebody dies?”
Brooks said she was told she could not get on a waiting list and advised to keep on trying for social housing.
She blames the conditions of the house for causing her pneumonia in 2019 and this week blamed the house for killing her son.
Giving evidence to the inquest, Jayne Ratcliffe, director of adult social care at Oldham council said she had reviewed the family’s case for the council to assess “opportunities missed”.
She said the issues related to communication and customer care. Ratcliffe said the way in which the council worked from “a prevention and early intervention perspective” is something that they could learn from the case.
A police officer, PC Adam Rogers, who attended Luke’s death, recalled it being so cold in the house that he could see his breath. You “could feel the damp on your lungs”, he said.
Rogers also took photographs of black mould that he said covered half the ceiling of the upstairs bathroom, which would have been used by Luke. Another photograph showed how plaster had come away from the wall in Luke’s bedroom.
Two other photographs taken by Rogers also highlight another disturbing aspect of Luke’s life and death: the squalor he was living in.
Two sides of Luke emerged at the inquest. He was funny and caring and looked after his elderly mum and dad, Patricia Brooks said. A mate, Jenny Harrington, described Luke as a kind and lovely friend who would often have her in tears laughing.
He was also a recluse, spending most of his time in a grotty bedroom he shared with his best friend, Chris, as well as a cat, which came and went, and three dogs.
He smoked 20 roll-up cigarettes a day and cannabis at weekends. Neither he nor Chris were good at clearing empty food plates or beer cans or crisp packets. There was no carpet on the floor.
Luke’s mother did not go into Luke and Chris’s room because she respected their privacy. He didn’t let people in his room because he was “embarrassed” by it.
The central issues for any inquest is to identify the medical cause of death and then answer four questions: who, when, where and how?
In this case the who, the when and the where were straightforward and the cause was given as acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by aspergillus pneumonia. Aspergillus is a type of mould and a pathologist said it was found in Brooks’ lungs during a postmortem investigation.
It was no coincidence that the Brooks legal team were the same people who represented the family of Awaab Ishak, the two-year-old who died in a mouldy social housing flat on an estate in Rochdale, about 20 minutes’ drive away from the Brooks house in Oldham.
The inquest into Awaab’s death was carried out by senior coroner Joanne Kearsley, who concluded that that mould was the cause of death and hoped it would be “a defining moment” for the housing sector. The inquest created shock waves, leading to resignations at the social housing provider and the government bringing in tougher legislation on mould.
Kearsley was also the coroner for Brooks’ inquest and all eyes were on whether the death would be another wake-up call.
The crucial evidence in the Brooks inquest has been from Prof Malcolm Richardson, a consultant medical mycologist in Manchester and someone with 50 years experience of fungal diseases and the moulds and yeasts that cause them.
Richardson said it was regrettable that no mould samples were taken at the time of Brooks’ death. He was also frustrated at the house being cleaned and decorated before he took his own samples.
Nevertheless, his conclusions were clear. The mould he found in the Brooks house was penicillium, which is not a pathogen. He found “very, very little” evidence of aspergillus.
With one or two rare exceptions, aspergillus is not the black mould we might see in a bathroom in any event. Rather, it is a grass eater which might be found in a compost heap. When a garden waste bin collector opens the bin they get “a massive amount of exposure”.
It might sometimes grow on damp clothes or textiles or furniture; it might also grow on dust; or cannabis leaves, but there is little for it to grow on in buildings, he said.
It was impossible to say how long the aspergillus in Luke’s lungs had been there, he said.
Richardson also said there were more than 100,000 species of mould fungi but very few of those were allergenic or pathogenic.
He was asked if it was common to find mould at a property. “It varies tremendously,” he said, “Even in the cleanest dust-free house, I will always find mould.” Just open your windows and you could have mould spores come in, he said.
He added: “All of us sitting in this room are colonised with a variety of moulds.”
Richardson’s evidence did not provide easy answers but it changed the inquest. The next day the coroner said the Brooks’s landlord, Mark Sharples, did not have to give evidence.
The Brooks inquest may not have been a wake-up call on the scale of the Awaab Ishak inquest, but it reveal details of modern life in the UK that will ring true for everyone.
For example, when Brooks became ill his family rang for an ambulance and were told the wait times were more than eight hours, 45 minutes and he would be better off making his own way to an accident and emergency department.
At the end of the inquest Kearsley offered her condolences to the family. Brooks had aspergillus in his body. How it got there will never be known.
