Awaab's Law Explained: What Housing Providers Need to Know

Awaab's Law is named after Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old who died in 2020 following prolonged exposure to mould in his family's social housing flat. The coroner found that mould in the property had been reported repeatedly and not properly addressed. The law was introduced to stop that pattern of delay from happening to anyone else, by placing firm legal expectations on social landlords to investigate and fix serious hazards within a defined timeframe.

Social landlords must investigate reported hazards, particularly damp and mould, within a set period, and must act on the findings without unreasonable delay. The emphasis is on speed and evidence: a report cannot sit unactioned, and once an inspection has happened, there needs to be a clear, followed-through plan to fix what was found.

This applies whether the report comes from a resident, a repairs contractor, a health visitor, or any other route into the organisation. The clock does not wait for the report to reach the right department through the usual channels.

Meeting the law in practice depends on a few operational basics working reliably every time, not just when things go well.

In our experience, the risk rarely comes from landlords deciding not to act. It comes from handoffs: a report logged in one system that never reaches the team who schedules repairs, or a repair completed on site with no photo evidence that it was completed to the standard the inspection required.

Making it easy for operatives to capture condition evidence, photos, and notes at the point of the visit, rather than relying on memory or paperwork completed later, is one of the most effective ways to close that gap.