Awaab’s Law: React to hazards earlier through VoC

Awaab’s Law is the common name for the Hazards in Social Housing (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2025.

It sets prescribed requirements for how social landlords in England must respond to:

• emergency hazards, and
• significant hazards (starting with damp and mould in the first phase)

If you work for a registered provider, these documents may be familiar already, but for reference, the Government provides this guidance for social landlords.

The timeframes you need to meet

Awaab’s Law is built around clock-starting moments (“when the landlord is made aware”) and clear expectations for investigation, action, and communication.

Emergency hazards: 24 hours to make safe

For emergency hazards, the expectation is:

• investigate and make safe within 24 hours of being made aware, and
• if the home cannot be made safe within that time, the landlord must offer suitable alternative accommodation until it is safe.

(See the government guidance linked above.)

Significant hazards: Investigate and act

For significant hazards (including dangerous damp and mould), the guidance sets out:

• investigation within 10 working days of being made aware, and
• written communication after the investigation (including providing a written summary within a defined window).

(Again, see the government guidance linked above for the step-by-step flow and wording.)

This means you need a process that can evidence:

• what you knew,
• when you knew it,
• what you did next, and
• what you told the tenant.

Your Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme can’t replace repairs and inspections, but it can help support, both as an early-warning system that spots risk and gets it to the right team fast, and as an evidence base, demonstrating that you’re quickly investigating and acting.

The process you need to follow

1. Detection

The first difficulty in putting together a robust, defensible operational response is spotting the signals in the first instance. Any insight leader will be familiar with diverse signals from across the business:

• a survey comment about mould,
• a call about a “musty smell”,
• a repair logged as “condensation”,
• a complaint saying “we’ve told you three times”

The first step in reliably detecting issues is to build a single source of truth. One system that can pay attention to all these signals.

This system should be able to use AI to identify signals at scale.

CustomerSure’s AI is aware of the Regulator’s definitions of vulnerability, and can spot both first-order (i.e. “black mould”) and second-order (i.e. “smell”, “asthma”, “condensation”) signals which may indicate customer feedback about a potential hazard.

2. Assignment & Escalation

Using AI for automated decision making is fraught with problems, but it is an excellent way of prioritising things for manual review: finding the signal in the noise.

Once AI spots feedback about a potential hazard, you should escalate to the right people. An individual should be given responsibility for sense-checking feedback about potential hazards, and if appropriate, alerting your repair teams.

3. Investigation and Implementation

CustomerSure is a VoC platform. Our friendly team will talk to you all day about metrics, surveys, and closing the loop, but we won’t lecture your hard-working repair teams and contractors about how to manage their work, and we don’t make claims we can’t deliver on.

You should use us to route the feedback to repair and maintenance colleagues, and provide them with the verbatim tenant feedback, indicators of vulnerability, and any other information they need to prioritise the work.

Once maintenance and repair teams are aware of the issue, they have great systems in place to do their job well.

4. Close the loop

You should have defined customer journeys for this process, allowing you to consult tenants for feedback at appropriate touchpoints.

It may be a simple repair, or it may be a more involved investigation and follow-up actions, but your VoC platform should be notified by your repairs system when a touchpoint occurs, giving you the opportunity to hear the tenant’s voice:

• Is the issue addressed?
• Are they satisfied with the speed of progress?
• Did you understand their needs?

5. Evidence

Evidence under Awaab’s Law isn’t about screenshots or one-off reports. It’s about showing, consistently, that feedback leads to action.

Your VoC data should let you demonstrate:

• how many hazard-related items entered the system,
• how quickly they moved from awaiting action to investigated and closed,
• whether certain tenant groups or property types experience longer delays, and
• where issues stall or re-appear.

Just as importantly, you can link follow-up feedback to the original report:

• What did the tenant say at the start?
• What did they say after works were completed?
• Did they confirm the issue was resolved — or raise concerns again?

That tenant-confirmed closure shows you didn’t just schedule a job: You addressed the risk as experienced by the person living there.

6. Improve

This is where VoC moves from ‘box-ticking’ to ROI.

Once you can reliably detect and track hazard-related feedback, you can spot:

• the same blocks appearing again and again,
• repeat wording that suggests residents feel ignored,
• contractors associated with follow-up complaints rather than resolution.

Because this insight comes from tenants, rather than subjective internal perceptions, you can have more evidence-based conversations about getting the correct outcomes.

Over time, that means fewer escalations, fewer repeat reports, and fewer situations where a hazard reaches the point of regulatory concern.

Getting ahead of 2026 and 2027

The government approach is phased. Awaab’s Law started with damp and mould (significant hazards) and all emergency hazards, with plans to expand coverage to more hazards in later stages.

This is why focusing on damp and mould doesn’t tackle the root cause.

You need to build a customer-centric feedback process that combines clear AI-based topic detection with customer-centric people to spot any signals that you need to be aware of, route them to the correct area of the business for follow up, and prove results.

Next step

If you’re tightening your Awaab’s Law approach, start here:

• Do we have a reliable way to detect hazard signals across feedback and complaints?
• Can we tag and escalate quickly with clear ownership?
• Can we track follow-up and show the outcome?
• Are we learning from patterns, not just closing tickets?

We work with some of the country’s most forward-thinking registered providers, and our team would love to chat to you about the issues you’re facing, and help if we can. Why not learn more from our sector-specific webinars or get in touch?