Awaab's Law Phase 2 (30 November 2026): What Surveyors and Housing Teams Need to Know

On 13 July 2026 the Government confirmed that the next stage of Awaab's Law is going ahead. Phase 2 for social housing in England comes into force on 30 November 2026, published with an updated explainer and revised guidance for social landlords. For damp and timber surveyors and the housing teams they work with, it is the biggest change to the compliance picture since Phase 1 landed last October. Our Awaab's Law overview covers the framework; this post is what Phase 2 changes.

What Phase 2 adds

Phase 1, in force since 27 October 2025, put statutory response timescales around damp, mould and emergency hazards. Phase 2 keeps those and extends the same duty to a wider set of hazard categories from 30 November 2026:

• excess cold and excess heat
• falls on the level, on stairs and between levels
• structural collapse and falling elements
• fire
• electrical hazards
• domestic hygiene hazards, including pests

In short, a social landlord's legal obligation to investigate and act on a reported hazard, on the clock, stops being a damp-and-mould matter and becomes a whole-home one. The remaining HHSRS hazards are due to follow in a subsequent phase, so the direction of travel is clear: every serious hazard a tenant reports will eventually carry a statutory deadline.

The clock still runs, now on more things

The mechanism that made Phase 1 bite is unchanged. Once a landlord becomes aware of a potential hazard, the statutory timescales start, and awareness means a tenant's report to a housing officer, not the day a surveyor is instructed. For damp and mould that means investigating within 10 working days, a written summary within 3 working days of the investigation concluding, and making safe within 5 working days, with emergencies handled in 24 hours. You can work those dates out with our free Awaab's Law deadline calculator. Phase 2 applies the same response-timescale principle to the new hazards; the exact figures per hazard are set out in the updated guidance, so read them against the hazard in front of you rather than assuming the damp and mould numbers carry across unchanged.

What it means if you are a damp specialist

The obvious reading is that Phase 2 is someone else's problem, since excess cold and electrical hazards are not a damp surveyor's remit. In practice it rarely divides that cleanly. Excess cold and inadequate heating are two of the biggest drivers of the condensation that produces mould; a cold, poorly heated, poorly ventilated home is a damp problem and an excess-cold problem at once. When you attend for damp, you are increasingly the person best placed to flag the adjacent hazards a housing team now has a deadline to address.

That is an opportunity as much as a risk. Surveyors who can capture a hazard cleanly, classify it, and hand back a defensible, dated record, whatever the hazard, become more useful to housing providers who have just had their compliance surface area widened. The discipline is the same one a good defensible damp report already uses: evidence, classification, and a clear account of what was found and recommended.

What housing teams should do before 30 November

Extend, do not rebuild. The teams that handled Phase 1 well built one thing: a clean path from tenant report to investigation to written summary to works, with the statutory clock visible on every case and a timestamped record behind it. Phase 2 does not need a new process, it needs that process pointed at more hazards. If your damp and mould workflow is a spreadsheet and an inbox, widening it to seven more hazard types is where it breaks.

The evidence trail is still what decides cases. Housing Ombudsman determinations are lost not because a hazard existed but because the landlord cannot show what was found, when, and what the tenant was told. That is true across every hazard Phase 2 adds. SurveyMate's Awaab's Law module tracks the statutory clock per case with a full audit trail, so proving compliance is a matter of record rather than reconstruction, and it extends to the new hazards without a change of tool.

The backdrop: damp is still widespread

Phase 2 is not arriving into a solved problem. The latest government figures put damp in around one in ten private-rented homes, roughly one in fourteen social-rented homes, and one in twenty-five owner-occupied homes, and research on Phase 1 found that while emergencies were generally handled quickly, landlords struggled most with damp and mould itself: diagnosis, coordinating contractors, and completing permanent repairs. Widening the duty to more hazards without fixing that diagnostic and record-keeping gap simply widens the exposure. See our UK damp and mould statistics for the full picture.

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