The Renters' Rights Act 2025: What It Means for Damp & Mould Surveys

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 is the most significant restructure of the private rented sector in three decades. The headlines have focused on the abolition of section 21 evictions and the move to periodic tenancies, but the Act also contains a less-discussed provision that has profound consequences for damp and mould surveyors: it extends Awaab's Law-style obligations to private landlords.

Roughly four and a half million homes in England are privately rented. The statutory damp and mould response framework currently applies only to social housing — but the Renters' Rights Act 2025 extends it to the PRS, with commencement phased through the government's implementation roadmap. This post explains what is changing, when, and what surveyors practising in the PRS should do to get ahead of it.

The legal mechanism

Part 4 of the Renters' Rights Act inserts a duty into private residential tenancies equivalent to the Awaab's Law duty for social tenancies. The mechanism is the same — implied terms in the tenancy contract, statutory clocks, ombudsman jurisdiction — but delivered through the new Private Rented Sector Ombudsman rather than the Housing Ombudsman Service.

Commencement is phased and — for the damp and mould duties — the exact timescales are subject to consultation. The government's implementation roadmap places the Awaab's Law extension in the final phase of the Act, alongside the modernised Decent Homes Standard for the PRS. The working assumption across the sector is that the PRS clocks will mirror the social-housing ones in force since 27 October 2025: investigate a significant hazard within 10 working days, give the tenant a written summary within 3 working days of the investigation concluding, make the property safe within 5 working days, and respond to emergency hazards within 24 hours.

Who counts as "the landlord"

This is where the PRS gets fiddly. The Act's drafting puts the primary duty on whoever is named as the landlord on the tenancy agreement. But in practice, day-to-day handling falls on letting and managing agents, who are also caught by the duty as agents acting on the landlord's behalf.

The practical effect is that a tenant's mould complaint to a letting agent will trigger the clock, even if the agent doesn't immediately tell the landlord. Housing Ombudsman determinations in the social sector have consistently held that delay between agent-aware and landlord-aware does not pause the statutory clock — and there is no reason to expect the PRS regime to be more forgiving.

The surveying market consequences

Today, a private landlord receiving a damp complaint has wide discretion over how and when to investigate. Many take the path of least friction: ignore until the tenant escalates, or commission a quick visual inspection from a builder.

That option is going. Once the duty commences, the landlord (or agent) will have a fixed statutory window to investigate and put the findings in writing. In practice, this means a damp survey by a competent person — and in the social sector, ombudsman determinations have already set the bar for "competent" at qualified surveyor level.

The social-housing experience since October 2025 is the preview: statutory clocks turn discretionary maintenance into urgent survey instructions. When the duty reaches the PRS, the market will be short of surveyors who:

• Can turn around an inspection inside a 10-working-day window
• Produce reports in a format the PRS Ombudsman recognises
• Capture HHSRS scoring (the PRS Ombudsman cross-references HHSRS even though the Act doesn't explicitly require it)
• Maintain the audit trail required if the case is escalated

What changes for surveyors already serving the PRS

Three operational changes are worth making before the duty lands, because they are already the norm in social housing:

1. Faster turnaround. A 10-working-day clock includes the surveyor's inspection and report. Most landlords won't instruct on day 1 — they'll instruct on day 5 or 6 — which leaves a few days for site visit, write-up, and dispatch. On-site reporting becomes a competitive necessity, not a nice-to-have.
2. HHSRS scoring in every report, not just the social-housing ones. HHSRS is the common framework for hazard severity across both regimes, and reports without scoring are treated as incomplete by the Housing Ombudsman today.
3. Health vulnerability questions. The emergency tier (24-hour response) hinges on whether the household contains a vulnerable occupant. The surveyor is often the first person to ask. Skipping the question can drop a case from a 10-working-day response into a 24-hour breach without anyone realising.

What changes for landlords and agents

The landlord-side change is largely process. Forward-thinking agents are moving to a single damp-and-mould protocol that mirrors the social-housing regime: log the complaint, instruct a surveyor within days, investigate inside 10 working days, summarise in writing inside 3 more, make safe inside 5, and document everything.

The hidden cost is the audit trail. A spreadsheet of complaints will not survive an ombudsman determination. Agents need a timestamped record of when each complaint was received, when each surveyor was instructed, when each report was issued, and when each remedial work was completed. This is exactly the workflow SurveyMate produces by default.

Where the case law is heading

The social-sector experience under Awaab's Law is the best guide to how the PRS regime will be policed. Housing Ombudsman determinations are setting a clear pattern:

• Surveyor competence is being scrutinised. Reports from non-qualified inspectors (general builders, EPC assessors moonlighting) are being cited as evidence of inadequate response, even where the inspection was timely.
• Photographic evidence is essential. Reports without time-stamped photos linking findings to specific locations are being treated as unverified narrative.
• Diagnostic reasoning is required. "The tenant has condensation due to lifestyle" is no longer a sufficient finding without supporting readings and analysis.

The opportunity

For working damp surveyors, the Renters' Rights Act will substantially expand addressable demand — four and a half million PRS homes brought under statutory damp-and-mould clocks. The constraint on capturing that demand won't be finding leads — it will be operating on statutory-grade timelines. Surveyors still relying on Word templates and email-the-PDF-tomorrow workflows will lose instructions to faster competitors.

See our companion post on Awaab's Law for the social-housing context — the underlying duty is the same, and operationally most surveyors are now serving both sectors with a single workflow.