Awaab’s Law has changed what “prompt” means for social housing repairs in England. Since 27 October 2025, social landlords have had to investigate and fix emergency hazards, and damp and mould that poses a significant risk, within fixed legal timeframes. From 30 November 2026, the law is due to cover a much wider range of hazards, from excess cold to electrical faults.
The law is named after Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old who died in 2020 from a severe respiratory condition caused by prolonged exposure to mould in his home. Its purpose is simple: when a tenant reports a dangerous problem, it must be dealt with quickly, and the tenant must be kept informed. Meeting those deadlines across thousands of homes, with contractors and housing officers involved, is as much a systems challenge as a repairs one. This guide explains what the law requires and how the right software, from housing systems to custom tenant and contractor portals, helps social landlords and their contractors keep to it.
This article is about systems rather than legal advice. Social landlords should rely on the government’s guidance and their own legal advisers for how Awaab’s Law applies to them.
What Awaab’s Law requires
Awaab’s Law applies to social housing landlords in England, including local authorities and housing associations. It is being introduced in phases:
- Phase 1, in force since 27 October 2025: all emergency hazards, plus damp and mould hazards that present a significant risk of harm to tenants.
- Phase 2, due from 30 November 2026: extends the requirements to further hazards where they present a significant risk of harm, including excess cold, excess heat, falls, structural collapse, fire and explosions, electrical hazards and domestic hygiene.
- Phase 3, at a later date: extends the requirements to the remaining hazards in the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, apart from overcrowding.
The Phase 2 changes are made by amending regulations that were laid before Parliament for approval, and legislation.gov.uk still listed them as a draft due to come into force on 30 November 2026 when we checked. The government has already published updated guidance on how Phase 2 will work, so landlords are expected to prepare now.
The deadlines in plain English
The government’s Awaab’s Law guidance for social landlords sets out the timeframes. In summary, a social landlord must:
- Emergency hazards: investigate and carry out the work needed to make the home safe within 24 hours of becoming aware of the hazard.
- Significant hazards: investigate within 10 working days of becoming aware of a potential hazard.
- Written summary: give the tenant a written summary of the investigation findings within 3 working days of the investigation concluding.
- Safety work: where a significant hazard is found, carry out the work needed to make the home safe within 5 working days of the investigation concluding.
- Preventative work: begin, or take steps to begin, any further work needed to stop the hazard returning within 5 working days, and in any case begin it within 12 weeks.
- Alternative accommodation: if the home cannot be made safe in time, arrange suitable alternative accommodation for the household at the landlord’s expense.
The guidance defines a significant risk of harm as one that “a reasonable lessor with the relevant knowledge would make safe within 15 working days”. In practice, that judgement decides which clock applies.
When does the clock start?
Every deadline runs from the point the landlord becomes aware of a potential hazard. That is not only when a tenant phones the repairs line. The guidance lists many routes to awareness, including routine inspections and visits by housing officers or support staff, findings made while investigating a different problem, notifications from regulators and other bodies, and reports from contractors and other third parties.
That has big implications for systems. If a gas engineer notices black mould in a bedroom while servicing a boiler, or a housing officer spots a damaged stair rail during a visit, the landlord may already be on the clock. Information that sits in a notebook, an email inbox or a contractor’s own system until someone gets round to passing it on is exactly where deadlines are missed.
Why Awaab’s Law is a systems problem
The legal duty is about repairs, but meeting it depends on information moving quickly and being recorded properly. The guidance stresses that landlords should keep accurate, up-to-date information about residents and homes, and clear records of all engagement, investigations and communications with tenants.
Records matter for another reason too. The law includes a defence where a landlord can show it used all reasonable endeavours to comply but could not, for example because a tenant repeatedly refused access. A landlord can only rely on that if it can prove what it did and when: every call, visit, access attempt, letter and photo.
There is also a regulatory angle. The Regulator of Social Housing’s Safety and Quality Standard requires landlords to have accurate stock condition information, to enable repairs and maintenance issues to be reported easily, and to keep tenants informed about repairs. Awaab’s Law does not include fines of its own, but tenants can take action through the courts, and complaints can reach the Housing Ombudsman.
What good Awaab’s Law software does
Many social landlords already have a housing management system, and some have added specialist damp and mould tools. Whatever the set-up, these are the capabilities that make the deadlines achievable.
Easy reporting for tenants
Tenants should be able to report a problem in the way that suits them, by phone, online or through an app, and add photos at the time. A tenant portal that records the date and time of every report, sends an automatic acknowledgement and lets the tenant see progress reduces chasing calls and gives the landlord a reliable starting point for each deadline. Our guide to what client portals are and when you need one explains the wider benefits of giving people a secure place to log requests and follow their progress.
Triage and hazard classification
Call handlers and housing officers need a consistent way to decide whether a report is a potential emergency, a potential significant hazard or a routine repair. Structured questions, guidance notes and clear escalation routes help staff make the right call quickly, and record why they made it. Reports of damp and mould, in particular, should never be logged as a cosmetic job without a proper assessment.
Deadline tracking in working days
Working-day deadlines are easy to get wrong by hand, especially around weekends and bank holidays. Software should calculate every deadline automatically from the moment of awareness, show each case’s status at a glance, and alert supervisors well before a deadline is missed, not after.
Getting the right information to contractors
Many investigations and repairs are carried out by contractors. Jobs need to reach them with the right priority, address, access notes and hazard details, and results need to come back the same day. Mobile job sheets with photos and signatures, as described in our guide to job scheduling and dispatch software, remove the delay of paperwork being posted, scanned or retyped.
Written summaries and tenant updates
Producing a clear written summary within 3 working days is much easier when the investigation findings, photos and planned work are already in one place. Templates can turn those details into a plain-English summary for the tenant, sent by their preferred method and logged automatically.
A complete audit trail
Every action should be time-stamped and attributed: reports, triage decisions, appointments, missed access, contractor updates, photos before and after work, letters and calls. That record supports compliance reporting, complaint handling and, if it comes to it, the reasonable endeavours defence.
What Awaab’s Law means for contractors
Contractors are not directly bound by Awaab’s Law, but the landlords they work for are, and the guidance explains that a contractor becoming aware of a hazard can count as the landlord becoming aware, depending on whether the contractor is legally acting as the landlord’s agent. In practice, contractors working in social housing should expect landlords to ask them to:
- report any potential hazard they notice in a tenant’s home promptly, even if it is unrelated to the job they were sent to do;
- attend investigations and carry out safety work within the landlord’s deadlines;
- provide findings, photos and details of work promptly, so the landlord can issue written summaries on time;
- keep records of access attempts and anything that prevented work going ahead.
For contractors, that makes good job management systems a competitive advantage. Being able to receive jobs electronically, update them from site and hand back complete evidence the same day makes a contractor much easier for social landlords to work with.
Off-the-shelf systems or something custom?
For most social landlords, the core housing management system will stay. The question is whether it does everything Awaab’s Law now demands, and whether the pieces around it connect. Common gaps include tenant reporting that does not feed directly into cases, contractors working in separate systems, working-day deadlines calculated on spreadsheets, and evidence scattered across inboxes and shared drives.
Sometimes the right answer is configuring or upgrading an existing product. Sometimes it is a focused custom layer, such as a tenant portal, a contractor app or a compliance dashboard that pulls information together from the systems already in place. Our guide to how much a client portal costs in the UK covers the factors that drive the budget for that kind of project.
We know the social housing sector from our own work. For Eastern Procurement, a not-for-profit framework provider owned by social housing providers in the East of England, we built a modern React website and the back-end admin dashboard behind it, giving members a clear route to its frameworks and the EP team an easy way to keep everything up to date.
Handling tenant data responsibly
Hazard reports often contain sensitive information. A damp and mould case may include details of a child’s asthma, a tenant’s disability or a household’s vulnerability, which matters for prioritising the work. Health information is special category data under UK GDPR and needs extra protection.
Any system used for Awaab’s Law should limit access by role, so contractors see what they need for the job and no more, encrypt data in transit and at rest, and keep a log of who viewed or changed each record. Photos taken inside people’s homes deserve the same care as written notes.
Getting ready for 30 November 2026
With Phase 2 due to widen the range of hazards, social landlords and their contractors can use the remaining weeks to check their processes:
- Map every route by which the organisation could become aware of a hazard, and make sure each one creates a time-stamped record.
- Update triage questions and staff guidance to cover the Phase 2 hazards, such as excess cold, falls and electrical hazards.
- Check that deadlines are calculated automatically in working days, with alerts before they fall due.
- Agree with contractors how hazards they spot will be reported, and how quickly findings and photos will come back.
- Review written summary templates so they are clear, accurate and quick to produce.
- Test the audit trail: could you show, for any case, exactly what was done and when?
Awaab’s Law: common questions
Does Awaab’s Law apply to private landlords?
Not yet. It currently applies to social housing in England. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 gives the government the power to extend similar requirements to the private rented sector, but the timing is still to be confirmed following consultation.
Does Awaab’s Law apply in Scotland or Wales?
No. Awaab’s Law applies to social housing landlords in England. Scotland and Wales have their own housing standards and regulators.
Are there fines for breaching Awaab’s Law?
The law itself does not create fines. The requirements are implied into tenancy agreements, so tenants can take legal action for breach, and the courts can order repairs and compensation. Complaints can also go to the Housing Ombudsman, and the Regulator of Social Housing oversees landlords against its consumer standards.
Do social landlords need new software to comply?
Not necessarily. Some existing systems can be configured to track Awaab’s Law deadlines. What matters is that every report is captured, every deadline is visible, contractors are connected and the evidence trail is complete. Where existing tools fall short, targeted additions can close the gaps.
What counts as becoming aware of a hazard?
Awareness can come from a tenant’s report, a staff visit, a contractor, another investigation or a third party such as a regulator or representative. The government’s guidance gives detailed examples, and it is worth training everyone who visits tenants’ homes to recognise and report potential hazards.
The bottom line
Awaab’s Law turns long-standing expectations about safe homes into hard deadlines, and Phase 2 is due to apply them to many more hazards from 30 November 2026. Social landlords that capture every report, track every deadline in working days, connect their contractors and keep a complete record will find the law far easier to meet, and their tenants will notice the difference.
If you are reviewing how your systems handle repairs and hazards, talk to us about what you need or call us on 01482 212499. We will give you a straight view of where a portal, an app or better integration would make the biggest difference.
