Awaab's Law Phase 2: What landlords and their contractors must do before 30 November 2026
Awaab Ishak was two years old. He died because of mould in his family's home, and the law that carries his name exists so that no landlord can treat a hazard where someone lives as a problem for another day. Since 27 October 2025, that principle has applied to emergencies and to damp and mould in the social rented sector. On 30 November 2026, Awaab's Law Phase 2 widens it to most other serious hazards. The organisations that cope best will be the ones who prepared over the summer, landlord and contractor together, rather than the ones who scrambled in the winter.
Here is the useful version of what is coming, and how the two sides of the repairs relationship can get ready.
What changes on 30 November 2026
Phase 1 has been in force since October 2025 for emergency hazards and for damp and mould. Phase 2 keeps those duties and extends the same statutory timescales to a much wider set of Housing Health and Safety Rating System hazards, including excess cold, excess heat, falls, structural collapse and explosions, fire, electrical hazards, and domestic and personal hygiene such as pest infestations. Further hazards, including asbestos and carbon monoxide, are due to follow in 2027.
The timescales are the part to internalise. Where a hazard poses an immediate risk, the landlord must investigate and make the property safe within 24 hours. For serious but non-emergency hazards, the landlord must investigate within 10 working days, give the resident a written summary of the findings within 3 working days of that investigation, complete any urgent safety works within 5 working days of the investigation, and begin longer-term repairs within 12 weeks.
What it means for social housing landlords
For landlords, Phase 2 turns a broad duty of care into a set of clocks that start the moment a resident reports something. The hard part is rarely the repair itself. It is recognising a report as a potential hazard quickly, getting the right person to inspect it in time, and being able to prove, on paper, what happened and when.
That puts weight on three things: the quality of your stock and hazard data, so you can see risk before it is reported; a single front door for resident reports, so nothing sits unnoticed in an inbox; and a triage process that is written down, so there is no ambiguity about who decides a report is a hazard and how fast an inspection follows. Miss those, and the deadlines become impossible no matter how good your trades are.
What it means for maintenance and compliance contractors
For the contractors who deliver repairs and compliance on a landlord's behalf, Phase 2 changes the operating tempo. A wider range of jobs now carries a statutory deadline, which means capacity, scheduling and record-keeping all have to flex.
In practice, contractors will need surveyor and trade availability that can absorb short-notice, deadline-bound work across the whole hazard set, not just damp and mould. They will need to capture evidence to the standard the landlord must be able to show a regulator: timestamps, findings, photographs, and completion records. And they will need shared visibility of the clock, so a job logged on day one is not treated as routine on day nine. A contractor who can demonstrate this becomes a genuine compliance partner, not just a supplier.
How landlords and contractors should prepare together
The failure mode is a handoff. A resident reports a hazard, the landlord logs it, and time is lost before the contractor is even instructed. Phase 2 rewards partners who close that gap now, before the duty bites.
Practical steps for the summer and autumn: agree, jointly, what counts as an emergency versus a serious hazard, so both sides triage the same way; connect systems (or at least reporting routines) so the contractor sees a hazard the moment the landlord does; set service levels that map directly onto the 24-hour, 10-day, 3-day, 5-day and 12-week milestones; run a dry run on the newly in-scope hazards to find where capacity or data breaks; and agree one shared record of what was done and when, so the audit trail exists in one place rather than two. Prepared together, the deadline becomes a shared operating rhythm rather than a monthly source of risk.
What good looks like
The landlords and contractors who handle this well will not describe it as a compliance burden. They will describe it as the moment their repairs service finally became genuinely responsive, because a hazard reported on Monday can no longer quietly become next month's job. Residents feel that difference first. The regulator and the ombudsman feel it later.
There is a harder truth beneath the checklist. Awaab's Law exists because a family was not listened to. The organisations that meet Phase 2 in spirit, and not only to the letter, will be the ones that treat every report as a person telling them something is wrong in the place they live.
How Axis CLC can help
Meeting the Phase 2 timescales across a wider hazard set is, in the end, a question of shared capacity and evidence. This is the kind of partnership Axis CLC delivers for social landlords day to day, through its damp and mould, responsive repairs and wider compliance services: investigating quickly, acting inside the deadlines, and keeping the records that prove it, as an extension of the landlord's own team.
Next steps for landlords:
- If you're interested and would like to speak to our team about how we could help, request a meeting and we'll connect you with the right person.
- See how this works in practice: read our social housing case studies below
Sources:
Awaab's Law: Regulations (GOV.UK, published 13 July 2026)
