Awaab's Law Phase 2, and the hazards it adds from October

Awaab's Law is the government's answer to a preventable death. Awaab Ishak was two years old when he died in Rochdale in December 2020 after prolonged exposure to mould in his family's social housing flat. The coroner found the mould was the cause, and that repeated reports had gone unresolved. The law that carries his name puts fixed timescales on how quickly a social landlord has to act once a hazard is reported.

The first phase came into force for the social rented sector on 27 October 2025 (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2025). From that date, social landlords in England have to investigate reported damp and mould that presents a significant risk of harm, and deal with any emergency hazard, against statutory deadlines rather than at their own pace.

The timescales, in plain terms

The clock starts when a tenant reports a hazard, or the landlord otherwise becomes aware of one. An emergency hazard, one that poses an imminent risk to health or safety, has to be investigated and made safe within 24 hours. For a significant hazard, the landlord has 10 working days to investigate, then has to give the tenant a written summary of what was found and confirm whether further work is needed. Where work is required, it has to be completed within set timescales, and a hazard that cannot be made safe in time means the landlord has to offer suitable alternative accommodation at its own expense until the home is safe.

None of that is possible without a record. You cannot show you investigated within ten working days if you cannot say when the report came in, who looked at it, and what they found.

What October 2026 adds

Phase 1 was deliberately narrow: damp, mould and emergencies. Phase 2, from October 2026, widens the duty to a further set of hazards drawn from the Housing Health and Safety Rating System. The additions are excess cold and excess heat, falls, structural collapse and explosions, fire and electrical safety, and domestic hygiene, pests and food safety (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2025). A third phase in 2027 is expected to bring in the remaining HHSRS hazards, apart from overcrowding.

So the same reporting and repair clock that applies to mould today will, from October, apply to a cold flat, a loose balustrade, a faulty consumer unit or a fire risk. The list of things a landlord has to be able to evidence, quickly, gets longer.

The scale of the problem

This is not a niche duty. Around 2 million people in England live in homes with a significant damp or mould problem, according to the English Housing Survey 2024 to 2025 (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2025). Damp is most common in the private rented sector at 10 per cent of homes, against 7 per cent in the social rented sector and 4 per cent of owner-occupied homes. The Renters' Rights Act 2025 carries the framework to extend Awaab's Law to private landlords as well, though the government has said the date will follow a consultation and is not yet fixed.

Where SAMRISK fits

Awaab's Law rewards landlords who already keep a tidy, dated record, and exposes those who do not. The duty is procedural as much as physical: investigate on time, write down what you found, tell the tenant, book the work, prove it was done.

That is the discipline SAMRISK is built around. A reported hazard becomes a dated incident with an owner and a clock. The investigation and any remedial work sit on the building's maintenance schedule and its compliance calendar, so a ten-working-day deadline is a date on a screen, not a note lost in an inbox. The written summaries, photographs and sign-offs live with the building's other documents, so when a regulator or a tenant's solicitor asks what happened and when, the answer is already assembled.

The premises do not change on the day the law does. What changes is how well you can prove you acted. Get the record straight now, before the list of hazards grows in October.