An AssocRICS surveyor and PhD researcher argues that a building can be “structurally sound, compliant and reasonably energy efficient” and still be quietly failing the people who live in it.
Someone usually contacts Jason Ratcliffe about a damp problem: a patch on the wall, a persistent smell or mould forming around a window. His first step is to investigate the cause. He examines the building fabric, ventilation, heating and how the space is used before recommending a response. Cleaning the mould or running a dehumidifier may deal with the immediate symptom, but lasting improvement depends on understanding where the moisture is coming from.
On one property he surveyed, the visible problem was never the real one. The issue was not a single defect. It was the interaction between cold surfaces, moisture production, ventilation and the way the building had been altered over time. Once he started measuring instead of guessing, the question in the room changed. Not how to remove the mould, but why the environment was allowing it to exist at all.
It is not a rare shape of problem. Poor housing, chiefly cold, damp and disrepair, is estimated to cost the NHS £1.04 billion a year in treatment bills, according to the Building Research Establishment’s most recent analysis.
Jason is an AssocRICS surveyor and PhD researcher who works under the name The Wellbeing Surveyor, and the question he asks on every job, a housing association’s whole portfolio or a single home, is the same one: what is this building actually doing to the person inside it?
Leader in Spotlight: Read Adam Dowd Feature in Executives Diary
The Job Nobody Finished
Jason’s argument starts with an assumption he thinks the property sector has stopped questioning: that if a building is structurally sound, compliant and reasonably energy efficient, the job is done. He does not think that is enough anymore. Buildings, in his view, are there for people, and understanding how they perform technically is only half the assessment. The other half is what that performance is doing to the person living, working, learning or recovering inside.
The sector, he says, has become good at measuring buildings and much less good at connecting those measurements to the people who occupy them. A home can hit its EPC target and still be uncomfortable or unhealthy. Improve its thermal performance without also considering ventilation and occupant behaviour, and overheating, humidity or indoor pollutants can quietly rise in its place.
That is not a solitary complaint. A December 2024 report from the National Engineering Policy Centre, the policy arm of the Royal Academy of Engineering, reached a similar conclusion about the UK’s retrofit programme: improving a building’s fabric without also embedding health outcomes risks trading one problem for another, and roughly two million people in England already live in homes with significant damp or mould. For the housing providers and developers Jason wants reading this, that is not a footnote. It is the gap his work sits in.
He wants homeowners and occupants to recognise themselves in it too. The everyday experience of a room that never quite feels right is exactly the evidence his argument rests on.
What Most Surveyors Never Do
Ask Jason what he tells someone who comes to him with an uncomfortable or unhealthy home, and he starts in the same place every time. He does not want to diagnose a building from one symptom. Mould, headaches, condensation, a room that never quite feels right: all of it gets looked at as one interconnected environment, building fabric, moisture, ventilation, temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, thermal behaviour and occupancy, and how those factors interact over time.
The difference, as he describes it, is measurement. Rather than walking into a property, taking a snapshot and leaving, he wants to understand how a building behaves when nobody is standing there with a clipboard. Long-term environmental monitoring, building physics and occupant experience, he says, can tell you things a single inspection cannot.
“We need to stop asking only whether a building is compliant and start asking whether it is healthy for the person living inside it.”
Jason Ratcliffe, Founder and Director, The Wellbeing Surveyor
It is the idea behind his research at the University of Plymouth and behind The Wellbeing Surveyor itself: surveying that moves from identifying defects toward understanding building performance and human wellbeing together.
From Atlantic to The Wellbeing Surveyor
Jason trained first as a mainstream surveyor. He studied real estate at the University College of Estate Management from 2018 to 2020, and during his MSc entered, and won, a competition among more than 250 applicants to design a climate-control system using phase-change-material technology.
He became Director of his own surveying firm in Cornwall in 2021, which later became Atlantic Edge Property Group, a role he continues to hold, and in 2020 began a PhD at the University of Plymouth in sustainability in the built environment, research that is still running. In 2023, RICS shortlisted him as a finalist for Residential Property Surveyor of the Year. He also spent a year as the Forbes Business Council’s UK Leader, which he says helped push his career forward, and has won the Green Hero award at Grand Design Live.
Alongside all of it sits The Wellbeing Surveyor, the practice he now leads as Founder and Director. In his own words, it brings building surveying, building physics, environmental measurement and human wellbeing together to understand how buildings actually affect the people inside them. Atlantic Edge Property Group has since become a wider surveying practice, and Jason advises international clients on building performance and wellbeing as an Expert Consultant with Guidepoint. The Wellbeing Surveyor, though, is where he wants this argument to sit.
The Page He Would Tear Out
Colleagues who work with Jason get used to a certain kind of interruption: a new idea, in the middle of something else, usually preceded by a version of the same question. “That is how we have always done it” rarely satisfies him. “Why” generally follows. It is, he says, “probably both one of my greatest strengths and one of my more irritating characteristics.”
It has not always been a comfortable habit to carry. Jason describes himself as someone who instinctively pushes through difficulty: if something goes wrong, work harder, stay up later, solve it. Learning that determination is not always a strength, he says, has been one of the hardest lessons of his life, and there have been periods where his own health forced him to stop and reassess rather than push on. The mornings after those periods, he says, have looked far less dramatic than people might imagine. He gets up, spends time with his family, works out what actually matters, and starts again.
His wife, Sophie, has been present for all of it, the version of events people do not see as well as the one they do. What he values most, he says, is that she has never asked him to prove an idea would work before agreeing it was worth exploring.
“That is quite a powerful thing to have beside you when you are trying to build something that does not quite fit into an existing box.”
Jason, Founder and Director, The Wellbeing Surveyor
Where Jason Is Now
His PhD at Plymouth is ongoing, and since September 2025 he has advised international clients on building performance and wellbeing as an Expert Consultant with Guidepoint. He has also organised TEDxTruro since 2024.
The next stage of the work, as he describes it, is turning building health from something investigated after people experience a problem into something that can be continuously measured, understood and, eventually, predicted.
Outside work, his compass is a simpler question than any building physics can answer. He has a wife and two young children, and says they are the biggest reason the subject of healthy buildings feels important to him rather than merely interesting. He can spend all day talking about building physics, sensors and research, he says, but underneath it the question is a human one.
“Would I be comfortable with my own children living, sleeping or learning in this environment?”
Jason, Founder and Director, The Wellbeing Surveyor
He also trains in kickboxing, boxing and MMA, which he says gives him something entirely removed from buildings and research, and satisfies the part of his mind that struggles to sit still.
The people Jason most wants this argument to reach are not one audience. Housing providers and housing association leadership sit across entire portfolios where indoor environmental performance could be managed differently. Developers and major property organisations are, in his view, increasingly thinking seriously about the health and future performance of what they build. Policymakers, he argues, are the ones who could give indoor environmental health the same regulatory standing energy efficiency already has. Researchers, technologists and innovators working across buildings, health and environmental sensing are, he believes, where the next real advances will come from, because they will not come from any one profession working alone.
“That is quite a useful compass,” Jason says.
The Jason Ratcliffe Playbook: Reading a Building as a System
• Treat the building, not the symptom. Look at damp, mould, cold and poor air quality as evidence of one system working badly, not as separate problems to patch one at a time.
• Measure how it behaves when nobody is watching. A single inspection tells you what a building looked like for an hour. Long-term monitoring tells you how it actually behaves.
• Ask why the environment allows the problem, not just how to remove it. Treating the symptom repeatedly achieves very little. Understanding the cause changes the conversation.
• Question the practice everyone else takes for granted. “That is how we have always done it” is a starting point for asking why, not a reason to stop asking.
• Judge it by the simplest test you have. Would you be comfortable with your own family living, sleeping or learning in this environment? If not, the building has failed a test no compliance check will catch.
From the Diary of Jason Ratcliffe
Jason Ratcliffe is a Hayle, Cornwall-based building surveyor and PhD researcher, and the Founder and Director of The Wellbeing Surveyor.
| Role | Founder and Director, The Wellbeing Surveyor · Director, Atlantic Edge Property Group · PhD Researcher, University of Plymouth |
| Based in | Hayle, Cornwall |
| Also with | Expert Consultant, Guidepoint |
The line he wants to own:
“We need to stop asking only whether a building is compliant and start asking whether it is healthy for the person living inside it.”
Editor’s Note
Jason Ratcliffe surveys buildings for a living, and argues that the industry has settled on the wrong test for whether one is doing its job. His research at the University of Plymouth and his practice, The Wellbeing Surveyor, both start from the same question: not whether a building meets a standard, but what it is doing to the person living inside it. The magazine features him for the case he makes against treating damp, mould and poor air quality as separate problems rather than symptoms of one system working badly. It is an argument that concerns anyone who commissions, designs, manages or simply lives in a building, which is to say nearly everyone.
Executives Diary, Editorial
