Awaab’s Law is named after Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old boy who died in 2020 after prolonged exposure to mould in his family’s housing association home. It came into force for the social rented sector on 27 October 2025, and it does something most housing legislation doesn’t: it puts a legal clock on how fast a landlord has to respond, covering not just the repair itself but how you communicate about it along the way.

Most coverage of Awaab’s Law is written for repairs and maintenance teams. This isn’t that. If you work in housing communications or resident engagement, three of the law’s requirements are about what you tell tenants and when, not what a contractor does on site, and those are the parts most likely to fall through the gap between a repairs system and a comms team.

Phase one, in force since October 2025, covers emergency hazards and significant damp and mould hazards. For an emergency hazard, defined as an imminent and significant risk to health or safety, landlords must make the property safe within 24 hours. For a significant damp or mould hazard, the requirements are more detailed:

• Investigate within 10 working days of becoming aware of the hazard
• Provide a written summary of the findings within 3 working days of the investigation concluding, including what will be done and when
• Carry out safety work, such as a mould wash, within 5 working days of the investigation
• Begin any supplementary work needed to stop the hazard recurring within 5 working days of the investigation concluding, with that work generally expected to be completed within 12 weeks
• Offer suitable alternative accommodation, at the landlord’s expense, if the property can’t be made safe within these timescales

Landlords also can’t assume damp and mould is caused by a tenant’s “lifestyle” as a reason to delay investigating, a point the Housing Ombudsman has been explicit about.

Look again at that list. The 10-day investigation and the 5-day safety work are physical actions. But the 3-day written summary, and the requirement to agree how often you’ll stay in contact on longer cases, are communication obligations with their own legal deadline, entirely separate from whether the repair itself is done. A landlord can complete excellent remedial work and still fail Awaab’s Law if the tenant was never told what was happening.

The timescales run from when the landlord becomes aware of a hazard, which means the way a tenant can actually report one matters more than it might seem. A report that’s hard to find, buried in a generic inbox, or missed because it arrived through a channel nobody’s monitoring, delays the clock just as much as slow admin does, even though nothing about the repair itself has changed.

Awaab’s Law is being introduced in phases. From 2026, it extends to a wider set of hazards, including excess cold and heat, falls, structural collapse, fire and electrical hazards, and hygiene and food safety issues. From 2027, it extends again to cover all remaining hazards under the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, except overcrowding. The communication obligations, the written summary, the update schedule, the record-keeping, apply in the same way to every hazard the law eventually covers, so the processes you build now for damp and mould are worth building to scale.

Awaab’s Law is a repairs law with a communications deadline built into it. The 3-day written summary and the record-keeping requirement exist independently of whether the physical repair is done well, which means a housing association’s compliance depends on comms and engagement processes as much as its repairs contractors.

Orlo doesn’t manage repair jobs or dispatch contractors, that’s the job of your repairs and maintenance system. Where it genuinely helps is the part of Awaab’s Law that’s about communication and evidence: giving tenants an easy way to report a hazard in the first place, keeping the written updates the law requires consistent and easy to send, and giving you a timestamped record if you ever need to show what was said and when.

Over 400 public sector organisations use Orlo, including housing associations working through exactly this kind of compliance requirement alongside local government and central government bodies.

If you want to see how Orlo supports the communication side of hazard reporting and Awaab’s Law compliance, a demo is the fastest way to see it in your context.