Awaab's Law arrives: what social landlords must do now

For years a damp report could sit in a queue. A tenant would mention black mould behind a wardrobe, someone would log it, and the matter would move at the pace of the next available surveyor. Awaab's Law ends that pattern by putting a clock on each step. Once a landlord knows about a potential hazard, the law no longer asks whether the response was reasonable in the abstract; it asks whether it happened inside a stated number of days.

That shift is the point. Damp and mould rarely fail because nobody cared. They fail because the response was slow, the ownership was vague, and the record of who did what and when was thin enough that a delay could be explained away after the fact. The new regime removes most of that wriggle room.

What is now in force

Phase 1 of Awaab's Law came into force on 27 October 2025, covering damp and mould together with all emergency hazards, according to guidance summarised by the CIH, Kennedys and Brabners. It applies to social landlords and works by inserting implied terms into the tenancy, so the timescales are contractual obligations rather than aspirations.

The duty is triggered by the landlord becoming aware of a potential hazard, however that awareness arrives. A tenant report is the obvious route, but a contractor noticing mould during an unrelated repair, or a surveyor flagging it during a stock survey, counts too. The implication for process is simple: every channel that can surface a hazard needs to feed the same record, because the clock starts the moment the organisation knows, not the moment the right team is told.

The timescales, in days

The Housing Ombudsman and RPC set out the core deadlines. They are worth holding in one place, because each one starts from a different event.

The written summary is the step that most catches landlords out, because it is short and easy to forget under the weight of the repair itself. The tenant is entitled to know in plain terms what was found, what it means, and what happens next. Three working days is not long to draft, approve and send a summary if the investigation notes live in a surveyor's notebook rather than a shared system.

Why the record matters more than the repair

A landlord can do the right physical work and still fall short of Awaab's Law if it cannot show the dates. Each duty is defined by timing, and timing can only be proved with a record that captures when awareness began, when the investigation happened, when the summary went out, and when works started. If those events live across an inbox, a job-management tool and a contractor's phone, reconstructing the sequence after a complaint becomes its own project.

The discipline that holds up is the dull one: a single dated trail per property, per hazard. When the first report lands, log it with a timestamp. When the investigation concludes, attach the findings. When the summary is sent, keep the copy. None of this is glamorous, and that is exactly why it tends to slip.

Getting ready for the next phase

Phase 1 is a starting point, not the whole of it. The CIH notes that the regime expands in 2026 to cover excess cold and heat, falls, structural collapse, fire, electrical hazards, and hygiene and food-safety hazards. That is a far wider set of conditions, and it pulls in parts of the building and the wider estate that a damp-and-mould process might not currently touch.

Landlords who treat Phase 1 as a self-contained damp project will find themselves rebuilding the same machinery a year later for a longer list. The more durable approach is to design the response around any hazard with a clock attached, then point the existing damp-and-mould workflow at it first. A few things make that transition easier:

• A single intake point so every hazard report, from any source, lands in one place with a timestamp.
• Clear ownership for each property, so the clock has a named person, not a team inbox.
• Standing categories for what counts as emergency, significant, and routine, agreed before the report arrives rather than during the panic.
• A repeatable way to issue the written summary, so the three-working-day step is a template, not a fresh act of drafting each time.

Where this connects to the rest of compliance

Damp and mould rarely travel alone. A cold, poorly ventilated flat with a failing extractor is a damp problem, a ventilation problem and sometimes an electrical one, and the underlying cause may sit in the fabric of the building rather than the unit. Treating each hazard as an isolated ticket misses the pattern. Holding the history of a property in one place lets the recurring causes surface, which is the difference between making safe the same flat every winter and fixing the thing that keeps failing.

This is where a structured approach to risk assessments and a clear compliance calendar earn their place, because they turn a reactive scramble into a set of dated, owned actions. For the practical side of managing recurring moisture problems, our note on managing damp and mould before it manages you goes further into prevention.

A short, practical close

Awaab's Law does not ask landlords to do anything they would not already call good practice. It asks them to do it inside a fixed number of days, and to be able to prove it. The organisations that cope best will be the ones that already log awareness the moment it arrives and keep one dated trail per property. SAMRISK is built around exactly that kind of single, time-stamped record, which makes the difference between meeting a deadline and explaining why you missed it. This is general information rather than legal advice; check the current position before you act on any specific case.