Homes That Make Us Ill

Awaab's Law has changed how landlords respond to damp and mould, but the deeper lesson is about listening.

Awaab Ishak was two years old when he died. A coroner concluded that prolonged exposure to mould in his family's housing association home was the cause. His family had reported the problem repeatedly. The reports were made, the conditions stayed, and a child paid for the gap between the two. That is a difficult thing to write, and it should be. It is also the reason a piece of legislation now carries his name.

A Clock on Hazards: What Awaab's Law Requires

Awaab's Law came into force for social housing in England on 27 October 2025. Its first phase is deliberately narrow and deliberately firm. When a social landlord becomes aware of a potential damp and mould hazard, it must investigate within ten working days. It must give the resident a written summary of the findings within three working days of finishing. Where a significant hazard is confirmed, fixed timescales for action follow. Where the hazard is an emergency, the home must be made safe within twenty-four hours. If that is not possible, the landlord must arrange suitable alternative accommodation at its own expense and keep records of everything it does.

The principle underneath is simple. A reported hazard starts a clock. It is not a matter to be scheduled when convenient. Later this year the same framework widens to cover excess cold, excess heat, falls, structural collapse, fire, electrical faults and hygiene hazards, and by 2027 it is due to reach the remaining hazards in the national housing rating system, with overcrowding excluded. For now it applies only to social housing. Government has said it intends to extend similar protection to the private rented sector, but no date has been confirmed.

Beyond Timelines: What Surveyors Look For

Legislation of this kind is necessary, and it is also only half the picture. A deadline tells a landlord how fast to respond. It does not tell anyone what they should be looking for when they arrive. That second question is where surveyors like Jason Ratcliffe, who calls himself the Wellbeing Surveyor, have been quietly working for years.

Ratcliffe's starting point sounds almost too simple. Inspect a property, list the technical defects, then listen to the person living there. What he kept hearing was a child sleeping beside mould, a family unable to heat every room, someone avoiding a space because it affected their breathing. "The building report and the human story were describing the same problem in different languages," he says. Once that clicked, his question changed. It stopped being only what is wrong with the building and became what the building is doing to the person inside it.

Complex Moisture and Climate Pressures

That shift matters because damp is rarely a single fault. A patch of mould might trace back to a cold surface, poor extraction, heating that comes on only in bursts, water entering from outside, or several of these at once. A room can show a perfectly comfortable air temperature while the surrounding walls are cold enough to drive condensation. Ratcliffe works in Cornwall, where historic homes, exposed weather and constant moisture pressure make generic assumptions unreliable. He is candid that measurement alone is never enough. Numbers have to be read alongside the fabric of the building, its heating and ventilation, the weather, and what the people inside actually experience.

The Problem With 'Lifestyle' Blame

This is also where the language professionals use becomes a moral choice. Official guidance is now explicit that landlords should not assume damp and mould are caused by tenants, because most of the time they stem from the building. Ratcliffe puts the risk sharply. "Lifestyle" can become a careless way of transferring responsibility to the occupant. Tell a family to open the windows and wipe the walls and you have handed them a problem that a failed extractor or a cold bridge created.

The cost is not only physical. Persistent damp, odour and cold bring shame, anxiety, broken sleep and conflict at home. Tenants fear being blamed. Parents worry about their children. Vulnerable people retreat into the one room they can afford to heat. These effects rarely appear on an inspection checklist, yet they shape how a household lives every single day, and they are precisely what a purely technical report tends to miss.

Diagnosis Before Decoration

His prescription for a genuine pattern is refreshingly unglamorous. Clean the contamination safely, find the moisture source, assess ventilation and heating, and correct the underlying failure rather than painting over the surface. Nothing in that sequence is exotic. Its strength lies in the order, which puts diagnosis before decoration and cause before cosmetics.

He is equally careful about the limits of his role. A building inspection does not diagnose illness, and he does not claim it can. That belongs to healthcare professionals. What a surveyor can do is identify environmental evidence, be honest about uncertainty, and help reduce plausible building related risks. That restraint is what makes the work credible, and it is the same discipline the wider sector will need as new duties arrive.

Awaab's Law will change how quickly landlords act. Whether it changes how well they understand what they are looking at will depend on something harder to legislate. It means treating the home as an exposure pathway rather than a backdrop, and treating the person who lives there as the best witness the building has.