Awaab's Law starts the clock when you find out

Awaab's Law has a quiet feature that decides everything else about it: the clock starts the moment a landlord becomes aware of a damp and mould hazard.

Not when the repair is booked. Not when the complaint is escalated. The moment you become aware. Every statutory deadline that follows hangs off that one point — and for most landlords, that point is a complaint landing weeks after the mould began to grow.

You can't change the deadlines. But you can change when the clock starts.

What the law actually requires

Awaab's Law came into force for the social rented sector on 27 October 2025. For damp and mould hazards that present a significant risk of harm, the timeframes are fixed:

• Investigate within 10 working days of becoming aware of a potential hazard.
• Give the resident a written summary of the findings within 3 working days of the investigation concluding.
• Begin to act within 5 working days of identifying a significant hazard — repair works, or alternative accommodation if it can't be made safe in place.
• Make emergency hazards safe within 24 hours.

And it widens. From 2026, Phase 2 brings excess cold and excess heat into scope, alongside other hazards. The temperature problems not being formally tracked yet are about to carry the same clock.

The problem isn't the deadlines. It's the trigger.

Most landlords find out about damp and mould the way they always have: a tenant reports it, or an inspector sees it on a six-weekly walk-round. Both are late. By the time mould is visible on a wall, the conditions that grew it — sustained high humidity, cold surfaces, dew point creeping up overnight — have been present for weeks. The hazard didn't start when someone noticed. It started when the physics did.

That late trigger does two things, both bad. It starts the statutory clock from a position of disadvantage, already behind the conditions. And it leaves compliance resting on the thinnest possible evidence: a clipboard entry, a photo, a date someone wrote down. A record of a moment, not a record of the building.

Become aware on day one

Continuous sensors change what becoming aware means. Measure humidity, temperature, dew point and mould risk per dwelling, every few minutes, and awareness stops being an event that depends on a complaint. It becomes a line on a chart the day conditions cross it — logged, dated and impossible to lose.

That flips the law from a liability into something a landlord can actually run:

• The clock starts on your terms — when the conditions appear, not when the complaint arrives, so you act inside the window instead of chasing it.
• The evidence writes itself — the written summary the law asks for is the timeline already being recorded: when the risk appeared, what was done, when it cleared.
• You can triage — continuous data tells the genuine significant-risk hazard from the open window, and puts the clock-critical cases first.

One social landlord, three blocks, replaced six-weekly visual inspections with continuous mould-risk monitoring across every dwelling. The shift wasn't really about catching more mould. It was about holding a defensible, time-stamped record of exactly when each risk appeared and when it was dealt with — the thing an inspection has never been able to give.

Phase 2 is already on the calendar

The same sensors that watch damp and mould watch excess cold and excess heat — the hazards Phase 2 pulls into Awaab's Law in 2026. Instrument for the damp and mould deadline now, and it is not a one-off compliance job; it is the evidence base for the next phase, built before it starts its own clock.

The point

Awaab's Law isn't asking anyone to fix buildings faster than physics allows. It's asking you to know, and to prove you knew in time. The hardest part of any deadline is the day it starts — and that's the one part you can move. Find out sooner, and everything after it gets easier.

You can't pause the clock. You can start it on day one, with the evidence already written.