Managing Damp and Mould Complaints Under Awaab's Law: A Practical Guide for Housing Teams

Most damp and mould complaints that end badly do not fail on the repair. They fail on process. The tenant reports mould to a call centre, the note sits in a shared inbox, and by the time anyone books an inspection the statutory clock has been running for a week. Under Awaab's Law that gap is no longer an admin problem; it is a legal one. This guide sets out how a housing team should run a damp and mould complaint from first report to sign-off, and what the record needs to show if the case is ever examined.

Step 1: The clock starts at the report, not the referral

The statutory timescales begin when the landlord becomes aware of a potential hazard. Awareness means the tenant's report, whoever receives it: a housing officer, the contact centre, a repairs contractor, even a comment made during an unrelated visit. It does not mean the day the case reaches your damp surveyor.

That single fact should shape your whole intake process. Every report of damp, mould or condensation needs a timestamp, a case reference and a route to triage on the day it arrives. If reports can sit unlogged in an inbox, your team is spending statutory time before anyone knows the case exists.

Step 2: Investigate within 10 working days

For damp and mould, a significant hazard must be investigated within 10 working days of the landlord becoming aware of it, and an emergency hazard dealt with within 24 hours. The investigation is not a phone triage; it is a proper inspection of the property by someone competent to judge the severity of the hazard, usually with HHSRS hazard assessment providing the framework for how serious it is.

The practical failure mode here is scheduling. Ten working days disappears quickly across triage, tenant contact, access arrangements and surveyor availability. Teams that hit the deadline reliably have one queue where every open case shows its days remaining, so the case at 2 days is visibly different from the case at 9. You can check the exact dates for any case with our Awaab's Law deadline calculator.

Step 3: The written summary, within 3 working days

Once the investigation concludes, the tenant must receive a written summary of the findings within 3 working days. This is the step most often missed, because it belongs to nobody: the surveyor has moved to the next job and the housing officer is waiting for the report.

The summary should say what was found, how serious it is, and what happens next with dates. If the inspection findings are captured in a structured way on site, the summary can be generated from them rather than written from scratch, which is the difference between a three-day deadline being easy and being missed.

Step 4: Make safe within 5 working days, then fix properly

Where the investigation finds a significant hazard, safety work must begin promptly and the property made safe within 5 working days. Making safe is not the same as the permanent remedy: a mould wash and a dehumidifier may make a home safe while a failed damp-proof course or a ventilation defect is fixed properly afterwards. Both belong on the case record, with the completion of each confirmed rather than assumed.

What the Ombudsman actually examines

When a damp and mould case reaches the Housing Ombudsman or a tribunal, the questions are about the timeline and the communication. When did you become aware? How quickly did you investigate? What did you tell the tenant, and when? Did the works resolve the problem, and how do you know?

Cases are lost on gaps in the record far more often than on the quality of the repair. A complete file shows the report, the acknowledgement, the inspection findings with photographs, the written summary, the works orders and the sign-off, each with a date and a name against it. If your process cannot produce that file for any case on demand, that is the gap to close first.

What a proper complaint management process looks like

Pulling the steps together, a damp and mould complaint management process that stands up to Awaab's Law has five properties:

• One case per complaint, opened on the day of the report, with the statutory clock visible from the start.
• One queue, ordered by days remaining, so the team works the nearest deadline first and at-risk cases surface before they slip.
• Evidence inside the case: the inspection findings, moisture readings and photographs belong to the complaint record, not to a surveyor's camera roll or a separate reporting tool.
• Tenant communication generated from the findings, so the 3-working-day written summary is produced from what the surveyor captured rather than reconstructed later.
• An audit trail nobody can quietly edit, exportable as a single file when a case is challenged.

Some teams build this across a housing management system, a spreadsheet and a survey app. It can work, but every hand-off between systems is a place where the record breaks. This is why purpose-built tools exist: SurveyMate's Awaab's Law compliance module runs the report, the clock, the inspection, the tenant summary and the audit trail as one case, and it sits alongside your housing management system rather than replacing it.

Getting ready for Phase 2

From 30 November 2026, Phase 2 of Awaab's Law extends the statutory duties beyond damp and mould to further hazard categories, including excess cold and heat, falls, structural, fire, electrical and hygiene hazards. The process you build for damp and mould complaints now is the process you will run for every reported hazard, so it is worth building it properly once. Our Phase 2 guide covers what changes and when.