In December 2020, two-year-old Awaab Ishak died in Rochdale. The cause was a respiratory condition directly linked to prolonged exposure to black mould in the one-bedroom housing association flat where he lived. His parents had reported the problem repeatedly. Nothing was fixed. The coroner’s inquest, which concluded in November 2022, found that Awaab’s death was caused by the chronic damp and mould in that home, and the judgment sent shockwaves through every housing body in the country. What followed was the Awaab’s Law provisions, passed under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, requiring social landlords to investigate hazards within 14 days and begin repairs within a further 7 days. It sounded like justice. It sounded like change. Two years into its enforcement window, I’d argue the picture is considerably more complicated than that.
What Awaab’s Law actually requires
The law, which took effect for the most serious hazards in October 2025, places specific legal duties on social landlords in England. If a tenant reports a damp or mould problem that poses a significant risk to their health, the landlord must acknowledge it within 24 hours, complete an investigation within 14 days, and start any repair work within 7 days after that. For emergency hazards, the window is tighter still: 24 hours to begin fixing. The Regulator of Social Housing, which got substantially new teeth under the same 2023 Act, is supposed to oversee compliance. Housing associations and local authority landlords that fall short can now face unlimited fines and, in extreme cases, be placed into special measures.
On paper, this is a genuine shift. The government’s own guidance describes it as the most significant reform to social housing standards in a generation. But legislation and enforcement are two very different things, and the gap between them is where tenants keep falling through.
The enforcement problem nobody wants to talk about
The Regulator of Social Housing published its first sector-wide inspection results under the new consumer standards regime in early 2025. The findings were uncomfortable. A significant proportion of landlords inspected received a C3 or C4 grading, meaning they were found to be causing or at risk of causing serious harm to tenants. Mould and damp were consistently among the top issues flagged. Several large housing associations were publicly named, including some managing tens of thousands of properties.
Here’s the thing, though: being given a poor grade and actually being compelled to fix your stock are not the same thing. Housing associations have appealed gradings, disputed inspection methodologies, and pointed to the sheer scale of their backlogs. Oskar and I have both read through a number of the published regulatory notices, and the language in many of them is revealing. Words like “working with” and “engaging” crop up far more than “enforcement action” or “fine imposed”. The regulator is clearly trying to use a graduated, constructive approach. That might make sense for minor compliance gaps. For a family breathing in spores in a bedroom in 2026, it feels rather thin.
How many homes are still affected?
The English Housing Survey, published by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, estimated in its most recent figures that around 900,000 social rented homes in England have what it classifies as a “non-decent” condition. Damp and mould are among the most frequently cited deficiencies. That number has barely shifted in a decade. The Chartered Institute of Housing put the cost of bringing all social housing up to the Decent Homes Standard at somewhere north of £36 billion. Most housing associations are not sitting on that kind of capital. Many are managing debt portfolios stretched by years of borrowing to build new stock, and maintenance budgets have repeatedly been the first thing squeezed.
Tenants themselves are also not always fully aware of their new rights. Research by Shelter in early 2026 found that a significant portion of social housing tenants did not know Awaab’s Law existed, let alone what timescales it required their landlord to meet. That matters enormously. The law is complaint-triggered. If a tenant does not know they can demand a formal response within 14 days, or does not feel confident enough to escalate when the landlord ignores them, the legal duty effectively sits dormant. We’ve seen precisely this pattern with plenty of tenant protection legislation before: the rights exist in statute, but exercising them requires a level of persistence and literacy that not everyone can muster, particularly when you’re also caring for a sick child or working two jobs.
What housing associations are doing, and saying
To be fair to housing associations, some of them have invested heavily since the Ishak inquest. Several of the larger registered providers, including Places for People and Clarion, published updated damp and mould strategies in 2024, committing to proactive rather than reactive surveying. A handful have started using thermal imaging technology during void inspections to catch hidden moisture problems before they become acute. Clarion, to its credit, also acknowledged in its 2024 annual report that its complaint handling had historically been inadequate.
That said, there’s a pattern in how some providers are responding to the new regulatory regime that feels more like compliance theatre than genuine culture change. Councils and associations are creating dedicated “damp and mould teams” and publishing dashboards showing response times, which is all well and good, but the underlying question is whether the properties themselves are being fixed at scale. A rapid response team that arrives, documents the problem, and then joins a 14-month repair queue is not what Awaab’s Law intended.
The broader picture: who is most at risk
The families most likely to be living in hazardous social housing are disproportionately those with no realistic alternative. As we’ve written before about the broken private rental sector, the options for people on low incomes and housing benefit are narrowing, not widening. Social housing waiting lists in most London boroughs now run to ten years or more. Leaving a mouldy flat means joining that queue all over again, or heading into temporary accommodation, which the UK’s creaking temporary housing system is already struggling to absorb.
The people least able to fight back are the people most exposed to harm. That was true for Awaab Ishak’s family in Rochdale. It remains true for hundreds of thousands of households in 2026.
Is there any reason for optimism?
A little, actually. The Housing Ombudsman, which handles complaints from social housing tenants, has been considerably more assertive since 2023. Richard Blakeway’s office issued a record number of severe maladministration findings in 2024, and the ombudsman’s annual report made explicitly clear that landlords who fail to act on damp and mould complaints will be named publicly. That reputational pressure matters to housing associations in ways that abstract regulatory grades sometimes do not.
There’s also real hope in the shift towards stock condition surveying. If landlords move from waiting for complaints to actively auditing their properties, the structural problem gets addressed rather than just managed when it becomes critical. The question is whether cash-strapped councils and housing associations can afford to fund that kind of programme at the pace needed. Given that the welfare system is already squeezing the finances of the very tenants living in these properties, the stakes of getting this wrong remain as high as they were when a coroner stood in a courtroom in Rochdale and explained how a little boy died from breathing in his own bedroom.
Awaab’s Law is a meaningful step. My honest read of 2026 is that it is not yet a meaningful change. The law exists. The enforcement is patchy. The stock is still crumbling. And until we see the Regulator of Social Housing using its full suite of powers consistently, rather than as a last resort, too many families are still living with conditions that no one should have to tolerate.