On 9 October, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government opened its consultation on extending Awaab's Law to private rented tenancies.
It runs until 18 December and starts from the rules social landlords have followed for damp and mould since 27 October 2025: investigate a potential hazard within 10 working days, make a significant hazard safe within five working days of the investigation ending, and deal with emergencies within 24 hours. For private lets, it follows the same 10-day investigation window, carried out by a competent investigator.
For a private landlord, the hard part will be that first step. Ten working days is plenty to find the cause of a damp patch if someone looks in the right place. Condensation gets the blame for a lot of mould in rented homes, and it is often the right call. A slow leak behind a bath panel or under a floor can produce the same black spots and the same musty bedroom, though, and no amount of opening windows will cure it.
Leaks that pass for condensation
The bathroom is the first place I'd look. Shower trays and baths flex a little every time someone stands in them, and the silicone along the wall cracks long before anyone notices. Water then runs behind the tiles or onto the joists, and the first sign is a stain on the ceiling below or a skirting board gone soft next door. A patch that grows after the morning showers and dries out a bit by evening points to a seal or a waste fitting.
Waste traps and joints under baths and basins can weep for months without leaving a puddle. Take the bath panel off and shine a torch on the trap and the overflow: a tide mark or a white crust of limescale on a joint tells you water has been getting out.
Heating pipework gives the hardest cases to read. Plenty of homes have copper heating pipes laid in a concrete floor, and a pinhole in one of those shows up as a damp patch at skirting level, a carpet that feels cold and wet in one spot, or a warm patch on a tiled floor where no pipe should be running hot.
The boiler will often tell you about that kind of leak before the floor does. On a sealed system, which covers every combi, the pressure gauge should hold steady at the figure in the manufacturer's manual, in the region of 1 to 1.5 bar with the heating cold.
A tenant who has to top it up every week or two is replacing water that is getting out somewhere, through a leak or a weeping pressure relief valve, and an engineer can tell which. Ask them to note the reading on the same morning each week for a month. It costs nothing, and it gives the engineer a trail to follow.
Older toilet cisterns and cold water tanks overflow through a pipe in the outside wall, and a float valve that lets by sends a trickle down the brickwork all winter until the damp shows on the inside. A cracked downpipe does the same, which is a roofer's job rather than mine, but worth a glance from the garden.
Checks you can run before anyone visits
A water meter test catches a leak on the incoming supply. Make sure nobody runs a tap or flushes, read the meter, wait an hour and read it again. If the numbers have moved, water is escaping somewhere between the meter and the taps, and the pipe runs from the stopcock are where an engineer will start.
Mapping the damp helps as much as any meter. Condensation mould gathers in cold corners, behind wardrobes on outside walls and around window reveals, and it gets worse in cold, still weather. Damp from a leak tends to sit in one patch, usually below or beside a bathroom, kitchen or pipe route, and it carries on whatever the weather does. Dated photos a week apart show an engineer more than a description over the phone.
Calls that can't wait, and keeping it from coming back
A ceiling that is dripping, a gauge that falls to zero overnight or water coming through a light fitting can't wait for a routine booking, and the tenant should know where the stopcock is before the day it matters. If water is near a light or socket, they should keep clear of the switches.
Those are the calls we treat as emergencies at First Point Plumbing, and the first thing we do on the phone is talk the tenant through turning the water off.
Prevention is less dramatic. On a yearly service, the engineer has the boiler casing off, which is the one time a weeping seal or a corroded condensate trap inside it gets seen before it drips. Some landlords with several lets put each boiler on a boiler care plan so the service is booked without anyone chasing it and a fault call goes to a priority line.
A dated pressure log, a meter reading and two photos give the engineer a head start on the first visit. The consultation also asks whether that investigation window should be five, 10 or 15 working days, and responses close on 18 December.
