Heroic efforts won’t survive phase two of Awaab’s Law but your system architecture might
Most housing providers got through phase one of Awaab’s Law, although few would like to admit how they did so. In many organisations, it was less by design and more by determination – contact-centre scripts were rewritten, damp and mould teams were stood up and deadlines were often tracked manually.
That model might work when the ‘statutory clock’ covers only one hazard category but from the end of this November, it will govern many categories. Before I get into what that means for your systems, a quick recap of where the regime is and where it’s going.
Phase one (since October 2025) gave housing providers fixed statutory timescales for the first time, covering:
- All emergency hazards investigated and made safe within 24 hours;
- Significant damp and mould hazards investigated within 10 working days;
- Made safe within five working days of that investigation;
- With longer-term work physically starting within 12 weeks;
- Residents also became entitled to a written summary of the findings within three working days.
Phase two will cover:
- All phase-one deadlines remain as before;
- A wider hazard set, covering excess heat and/or cold, falls, structural collapse and falling elements, fire and explosions, electrical safety and domestic hygiene;
- And phase three is expected to reach the remaining hazards from 2027.
The deadlines haven’t changed but the cases subject to a statutory clock have grown sharply. And the standard is not “did we fix it?” but “can we prove, case by case, exactly when we knew, when we investigated, when we told the resident and when we acted?”
That is a data question and it’s the one your systems can either answer automatically or force your staff to reconstruct under pressure. From my discussions with housing providers and with my colleagues, here are some of the key areas to focus on if you are sitting in your organisation’s IT or transformation seat.
Gone in 60 seconds…
Perhaps the single most important judgement in the whole repairs process happens in the first sixty seconds at the point of report.
Under phase one, first-contact staff essentially determined: is this damp, mould or an emergency? Under phase two, they must categorise across hazards as different as a failing consumer unit, a loose stair tread and a home that won’t hold heat. And they must get it right, because the wrong category starts the wrong clock and every downstream deadline then inherits that error; the government has published a dedicated triage annex precisely because it knows this is where cases are won or lost.
This isn’t a training problem to be solved with a longer script. This is where intelligent triaging earns its keep. Whether as an online self-service guide for your tenants or for your staff in your contact centre, AI-assisted diagnosis can help determine whether a report is in scope, categorise the hazard, start the correct statutory clock and route the job to the right team before a human has finished the call. In short, it’s doing for repairs triaging what dynamic scheduling did for job allocations.
The value is that your organisation’s categorisation becomes consistent and auditable, regardless of who picks up the phone or how an online request is raised, and the clock starts from a system event you can evidence rather than a note someone meant (but forgot) to make.
Where audit trails are won or lost
Damp and mould largely lived inside one operational function. Phase two hazards are spread across electrical compliance, fire safety, heating and structural surveying (as well as the various external contractors most housing providers depend on) and all now working to the same statutory clocks.
This is where mobile working becomes more than a productivity tool and turns into your compliance infrastructure. Operatives need the hazard history in their hands and the organisation needs time-stamped evidence (e.g. photos, structured notes and completion records) flowing back into the case record in real time, not re-keyed a week later. A mobile solution with hazard-aware workflows and embedded assistance to help staff record information consistently and accurately is a key area for investment and attention because the alternative is an audit trail with holes that won’t satisfy the regulator.
All of this only works if the hazard record, the mobile job and the contractor’s update reconcile to one timeline. In most software estates, they don’t. You can hit every individual deadline yet still be unable to produce a single defensible case history because no one system holds the whole thread, so the fewer seams a case must cross, the fewer places for that thread to break. It’s also worth bearing in mind that data foundations, not features, are usually the real dependency.
Take the readiness test
Strip away the regulation and phase-two readiness comes down to a small number of questions a transformation team can answer honestly:
- Intake: can we automatically start the correct statutory clock from any channel a report arrives through (e.g. phone, portal or an operative’s own eyes)?
- Triage: is hazard categorisation consistent and evidenced, regardless of who handles the report or does it depend on individual judgement?
- Field: do updates from operatives and contractors land in the case record in real time with time-stamped evidence or are they re-keyed later, if at all?
- The timeline: can we produce a complete, defensible history for any single case on demand within minutes (not days)?
- The board view: can senior leadership see every open statutory case and its position against the clock, right now, without someone building a report?
If your answer to any of the questions above is “not really”, that’s your phase-two project, whether its configuration and integration of what you already run or a re-platforming project because the housing providers that will be most comfortable under phases two and three are those treating it as a systems question now, while there’s still time to design rather than react.
Greg Jackson is the customer success director at Aareon UK.
For further details, please see: www.aareon.co.uk.
