Awaab's Law: The Repair Timescales Contractors Actually Have to Hit

Short answer: Awaab's Law converts social housing repair response times from a service-level target into a statutory duty. Once a landlord is aware of a relevant hazard, fixed clocks start running — 24 hours for emergencies, a short fixed window to investigate and report back, and a further window to begin remedial work. The landlord carries the duty; the contractor carries the evidence that proves it was discharged.

Where Awaab's Law came from

Awaab Ishak died in December 2020 after prolonged exposure to mould in a Rochdale flat. The coroner's finding — that the death was caused by a respiratory condition arising from that exposure — made two things impossible to ignore: that damp and mould are a health hazard rather than a cosmetic complaint, and that a landlord's repair process had no enforceable deadline attached to it.

Awaab's Law is the legislative response, introduced through the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023. It works by amending the tenancy agreement itself: the required timescales are treated as an implied term of the tenancy, which means a tenant can enforce them directly through the courts rather than waiting on a regulator.

That is the structural change worth understanding. Before Awaab's Law, a slow repair was a complaints matter. After it, a slow repair is a breach of contract with a statutory basis.

The clocks

The regime is being introduced in phases, beginning with damp and mould alongside emergency hazards, and widening over time to the broader set of health and safety hazards found in housing. The shape of the obligation stays the same across phases:

Check the current phase and the exact day counts against the published regulations before you write them into a contract — the figures are set by regulation and have moved between consultation and commencement. The operational point below does not change with the numbers.

Two details catch contractors out.

The first is what starts the clock. It is not the raising of a job. It is the moment the landlord becomes aware — which includes a phone call to a call centre, a note in a complaints inbox, or an operative on another job spotting mould and mentioning it. If your contract makes you the first point of contact for repairs, your inbox is the landlord's awareness, and the clock starts when the report lands with you.

The second is that the deadlines are cumulative and independent. Completing a repair quickly does not cure a missed investigation deadline. Each stage has to be evidenced on its own.

What "becoming aware" means for your process

Most maintenance contractors log jobs. Far fewer log awareness, and that is the gap that turns a compliant repair into an unprovable one.

A defensible record needs a timestamp against each of these:

• The report. Who reported it, through what channel, what they said, and when it reached someone who could act. Verbal reports count. A note in a WhatsApp thread is awareness; it is also unusable as evidence six months later.
• The triage decision. Whether this was classified as an emergency or a standard hazard, and on what basis. If you downgrade something that later turns out to be serious, the reasoning recorded at the time is what protects you.
• The attendance. Who went, when they arrived, what they found, and photographs of the affected area. Damp and mould cases are almost always argued on photographs.
• The written summary. What was sent to the tenant and when. This is a statutory output, not a courtesy.
• The works. Start date, completion date, and any period where access was refused or unavailable, with the attempt recorded.

Access refusal is the most common genuine reason a deadline slips, and the most commonly under-evidenced. "No access" as a job status is not enough. The record needs to show a specific attempt at a specific time, and ideally the card left or the message sent.

Damp and mould is a diagnosis problem, not just a repair problem

The first phase exposed something uncomfortable: a large share of mould jobs were historically closed with a mould wash and a coat of anti-fungal paint, with no investigation of the cause. Under Awaab's Law that closure is a compliance risk, because the hazard returns and the next report restarts the clock with a worse history behind it.

The investigation stage exists to distinguish between:

• Penetrating damp — a defect letting water in from outside. Roof, flashing, pointing, blocked gutter, failed seal. Usually localised, and worst after rain.
• Rising damp — moisture drawn up through the structure. Confined to the lower part of the wall, often with a tide mark.
• Condensation — moisture generated inside meeting a cold surface. Worst in corners, behind furniture, on external walls and around thermal bridges.

Condensation cases are where contractors get blamed for a building fault and landlords get blamed for tenant behaviour, and both are usually wrong. The honest finding is often that ventilation is inadequate for the way the property is now occupied, and that the fix is extract capacity and insulation rather than a wash-down. Recording that finding matters, because it moves the job from a repeat repair into a planned works case with a documented reason.

Getting the evidence out of the field

The hard part of Awaab's Law is not knowing the timescales. It is that the proof is generated by someone standing in a damp bedroom with a phone, often with no signal, and it has to survive as a timestamped record that a lawyer can read two years later.

Three practical things make that work:

Capture at the point of observation. A photograph taken on site and attached to the job at that moment carries its own timestamp. The same photograph emailed that evening does not evidence when the operative attended.

Make the deadline visible to the person who can hit it. A countdown against the job — days remaining, not a due date buried in a spreadsheet — changes behaviour far more than a weekly exception report.

Record refusals and obstacles as events. They are the only defensible reason a clock is interrupted, and they have to be contemporaneous.

ScopeKit tracks statutory hazard timescales as live countdowns against the job, with breach alerts raised before the deadline rather than after it, and photographs, findings and access attempts attached to the record they belong to. The point is not the countdown itself — it is that the evidence assembles as a by-product of doing the work, instead of being reconstructed under pressure when someone asks for it.

What to do this month

If you hold or are bidding for social housing maintenance work:

• Map your contract's response times against the statutory ones. Where the contract is looser, the statutory clock still applies to your client, and they will pass the risk down at the next renewal.
• Check where awareness enters your business. Every channel that can receive a tenant report needs a timestamped path into your job system.
• Audit ten closed mould jobs. If you cannot show the investigation, the summary and the start of works with separate dates, your evidence pack has a hole in it.
• Stop closing mould jobs on a wash-down alone. Record the cause, even when the cause is not yours to fix.

Related reading

• RIDDOR reporting in construction — the other statutory clock that runs from a report rather than a job.
• The daily site diary — the same evidencing discipline, applied to live sites.
• Compliance and H&S in ScopeKit — hazard registers, statutory timescales and the audit trail behind them.