If you do repair work for a housing association or a council, something changed last October, and you may only have felt it second-hand. A re-tendered contract with a new clause about response times. A client asking for attendance times in writing. A query about a mould job from three weeks back, arriving with a strange urgency. The change has a name — Awaab’s Law — and although it puts no legal duty on you at all, it will be your firm that delivers it. Or fails to.
What Awaab’s Law requires
Awaab Ishak was two years old when he died in Rochdale in December 2020. The coroner found that prolonged exposure to mould in his family’s housing association flat caused his death. His parents had complained about the mould repeatedly and got nowhere. The inquest, and the public anger that followed it, pushed Parliament into acting, and the result — formally the Hazards in Social Housing (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2025, known to everyone as Awaab’s Law — came into force in England on 27 October 2025.
It puts a legal clock on repairs in social housing. An emergency hazard — anything posing an imminent and significant risk of harm — must be investigated and made safe within 24 hours, and if the home can’t be made safe in that time, the landlord has to offer the tenant somewhere else to stay. Damp and mould serious enough to pose a significant risk to health runs on a slower but equally fixed clock: investigate within ten working days, give the tenant a written summary of the findings within three working days of finishing, make the property safe within five working days, and physically start any follow-on work to stop the problem coming back within twelve weeks.
These aren’t targets, and they aren’t guidance. The requirements sit inside every social tenancy agreement as a term of the contract, which means a tenant whose landlord misses them can take the landlord to court.
Why Awaab’s Law reaches contractors
The duty sits with the landlord. The tools sit in your van. Councils and housing associations deliver most of this work through maintenance contractors, and a legal deadline the landlord can’t discharge with its own hands gets passed down the only way it can be — through your contract. Response times that used to be service-level aspirations, missed with an apology, are turning into terms with a statute standing behind them.
There’s a detail in the government’s guidance worth reading twice. The clock starts when the landlord “becomes aware” of a potential hazard — and the guidance is explicit that this can include being told by a contractor. Depending on the legal arrangement, the landlord may even count as aware from the moment your operative is. Your plumber notices black mould above a bath while fixing a tap, and mentions it to nobody. On some contracts, day zero has already happened.
Why the repair record is part of the job
Try this. A client rings tomorrow and says: a tenant is taking us to court over the mould job at number 14 — show us when you attended, what you found, what you did and when you finished. What could your firm actually produce? In most firms I audit, the honest answer is a WhatsApp thread, a job sheet in a lever-arch file, and photos on the site lead’s personal phone — some of which left the company when he did.
The landlord defending that claim will stand or fall on records — theirs and yours. The official guidance urges landlords to keep records of every report, investigation and action, right down to attempts to get access when the tenant isn’t home. Landlords have noticed, and it shows in procurement: the timescales — and the evidence to prove them — are finding their way into contractor terms. A firm that can hand over a clean, timestamped account of every job is worth more at tender than one that’s a pound an hour cheaper and runs on paper.
What a proper fix looks like
Less than you’d think. This isn’t a case for a field-service platform with forty features, most of which exist for national facilities-management companies. The job is a record keyed to the client’s clock: when the job came in, when someone attended, what they found, what they did, timestamped photos, and a note of every knock on a door that went unanswered — captured on the phone the operative already carries, at the moment it happens, and turned into a report your client can drop straight into their compliance file.
The hard part isn’t the technology. It’s fitting the recording to the way your teams actually work, so it gets done on a wet Tuesday in February and not just in the demo. That’s a design problem, not a software-licence problem, and it’s why the off-the-shelf answer so often dies within a month of rollout.
Where this doesn’t apply
If you do no work for social landlords and don’t intend to, close the tab; this isn’t your problem yet. If you hold one big contract with a single landlord and they mandate their own reporting system, use theirs — building your own would be money spent duplicating what your client already pays for. The case for purpose-built sits with the firm in the middle: several landlord clients, each with different portals and demands, and an office quietly re-keying the same job three times because none of the systems talk to each other.
The clock gets louder from here
Phase one covers emergency hazards plus damp and mould. The government’s stated plan is to widen the regulations to further hazards — excess cold and heat, falls, fire, electrical faults — in 2026, with the remaining categories following in 2027. And the Renters’ Rights Act contains the framework to extend Awaab’s Law to private landlords too, expected around 2027 and subject to consultation. Whichever way the details land, the direction is fixed: more hazards, more clocks, more demand for proof.
If social landlords are on your client list and the evidence still lives on WhatsApp, it’s worth sorting before the next tender asks the question. Get in touch.
