When Awaab's Law came into force in October last year, it gave social landlords a legal backstop they'd never had before. Emergency hazards and significant damp and mould problems had to be investigated and fixed to fixed timeframes, full stop. No more open-ended repair queues, no more assuming a mould complaint could sit behind a kitchen refit.
If a home was making a tenant unsafe, the clock started the moment the landlord knew about it, and the numbers were unforgiving: 24 hours for anything genuinely emergency, 10 working days to investigate a significant hazard, 5 working days to fix it once that investigation concluded.
Phase 1 was, in effect, a trial run focused on the hazard most associated with the law's origins. From 30 November this year, that trial run becomes the default for a much longer list of problems. Excess cold, excess heat, falls, structural collapse, fire and explosion, electrical hazards, domestic hygiene - all of it now sits under the same statutory clock as damp and mould.
The government has just published its Phase 2 guidance to explain how that's meant to work, and there's a lot in it worth landlords' attention before the deadline arrives.
The mechanics stay consistent with Phase 1, which is genuinely useful: the same 24-hour, 10-day and 5-day structure applies across every new hazard type, so nobody has to learn a second system. What's changed is the breadth of what falls inside it. A broken bannister, a boiler that failed in December, a smoke alarm that's not working in an individual flat - these are now Awaab's Law matters in exactly the way a mould-covered bedroom wall has been since last year.
What I'd flag to anyone reading the guidance in detail is how much weight it puts on the first few minutes of a report, not the works that follow. The definitions of "significant" and "emergency" hazard both hinge on what a reasonable landlord, with the knowledge they have or ought to have about that particular household, would do.
That means the housing officer taking the call needs to know about a tenant's asthma, or their mobility needs, or their children's ages, at the point the report comes in - not weeks later when a survey turns up. Get that triage judgement wrong, and every deadline downstream is already compromised.
For damp and mould specifically, Phase 2 doesn't relax anything - if anything, it tightens the expectation that a dehumidifier and a mould wash are a temporary measure, not a resolution. Landlords still have to begin, or demonstrably take steps to begin, the supplementary work that stops the problem coming back, within 5 working days of the investigation concluding, with 12 weeks as the absolute backstop if specialists or materials aren't immediately available.
That's the bit I'd urge landlords not to treat as a formality. Knowing whether you're dealing with poor ventilation, thermal bridging or rising damp - and being able to explain that clearly in a written summary a tenant can actually follow - takes proper diagnostic input, and it needs to happen early rather than after a second complaint.
The guidance also includes worked timeline examples and a template for the written summary landlords must now issue after most investigations. Neither is compulsory, but I'd expect both to become reference points if a case is ever tested by the Housing Ombudsman or the courts, where the question will be whether a landlord used "all reasonable endeavours" to comply.
There's just under four months until Phase 2 takes effect. If your organisation built solid triage and record-keeping habits around damp and mould last year, you're most of the way there - the same discipline just needs applying more widely. If those habits were still bedding in, this is the moment to fix that, because from 30 November the margin for getting the first call wrong gets a lot narrower.
