What Your Landlord Must Put in Writing From 30 November

From 30 November 2026, if you report a fire, electrical, cold or other significant hazard to your social landlord in England, it must investigate within 10 working days and give you a written summary of what it found within 3 working days of that investigation finishing. That summary is not a courtesy letter. The regulations prescribe what it has to contain, and it is the document you will need if the repair does not happen.

What has changed

Awaab's Law came into force on 27 October 2025, named after Awaab Ishak, the two year old who died after prolonged exposure to mould in his family's Rochdale home. Phase 1 was narrow on purpose: significant damp and mould hazards, plus emergency hazards of any kind.

On 13 July 2026 the government laid the regulations for Phase 2 and published guidance for social landlords. Phase 2 takes effect on 30 November 2026 and adds seven more hazard groups drawn from the Housing Health and Safety Rating System: excess cold, excess heat, falls, structural collapse and explosions, fire, electrical hazards, and domestic and personal hygiene and food safety. A third phase is planned for 2027 to sweep up the remaining HHSRS hazards apart from overcrowding.

The practical effect is that a hanging smoke detector, a flat entrance door that no longer closes itself, scorch marks around a consumer unit or a flat you cannot keep warm all become things with a legal deadline attached, rather than things on a list.

The clock starts when the landlord becomes aware

This is the single most important sentence in the regulations for anyone keeping records, and it is easy to skim past.

The timescales do not run from when the landlord opens a job, accepts the report, or decides it counts. They run from the point it becomes aware of a potential hazard. That awareness can arrive through your phone call, a contractor's visit, or a routine inspection.

Which means the date of your report is the fact that everything else is measured against, and you are the only person guaranteed to have it. Report in a way that dates itself. An email, a message through the landlord's portal, or a webform that sends you a confirmation all do this by default. A phone call does not, so follow it up the same day with a short message saying you called, what about, and when. That is thirty seconds of work that turns a disputed conversation into a fixed point.

The written summary is a document with a required content list

After an investigation, the landlord must give you a written summary within 3 working days of it concluding. The guidance sets out what that summary has to tell you:

• whether the investigation found a significant or emergency hazard, and what the hazard is
• if action is required, what that action is, with a target timeframe for starting and finishing it
• if no action is required under the regulations, that this is the conclusion and the reasons why
• how to contact the landlord

Read that list again against anything you have previously been sent. A great deal of repairs correspondence is a job number and a date. That is not a written summary. A summary that does not name the hazard, or that says no action is needed without saying why, has not met the requirement, and the gap is worth pointing out in writing at the time rather than a year later.

Keep the summary with the rest of the property's fire and electrical paperwork rather than in your email archive. Our guides to fire risk assessment record keeping and electrical records cover what should already be on file alongside it.

If the work cannot be done in time

There is a provision that gets very little attention. If the relevant safety work cannot be completed within the timescales, the landlord must secure suitable alternative accommodation for the household, at its own expense.

That is not discretionary goodwill. It is what the guidance says the landlord must do, and it becomes arguable the moment there is a dated report, a dated investigation and a written summary with a target date that has passed. Without those three documents it is a conversation. With them it is a position.

Who this does not cover

Being clear about the edges matters, because the current wave of commentary is blurring them.

Awaab's Law applies to social housing in England. It does not apply to private rented tenancies, and it does not apply to you as a leaseholder in respect of your own flat. It is also nothing to do with the Building Safety Act's golden thread, which reaches only higher risk buildings of 18 metres or seven storeys and above. Different law, different buildings, different duty holder.

If you rent privately, the hazards themselves are still regulated through the HHSRS and your local council's environmental health team, just without these deadlines. If you are a landlord rather than a tenant, the same records logic applies from the other side, and our guide to the property logbook for landlords is the place to start.

How these duties are actually enforced

Awaab's Law works by implying a term into the tenancy agreement. The guidance is blunt about what follows: if a landlord does not meet the requirements, tenants can hold them to account by taking legal action through the courts for breach of contract.

Breach of contract is proved with documents. Not with recollection, and not with a sense that things took too long. The regulations hand tenants a set of dated obligations, and the value of that is entirely dependent on whether the dates were recorded.

Paper is fine for this. A dated letter in a folder is evidence, and has been for a century. What fails is not paper, it is records nobody can find: a report made from a phone that has since been replaced, a summary in an inbox belonging to a partner who has moved out. Whatever you use, the test is whether you could put the whole sequence in front of someone in ten minutes, in order.

Frequently asked questions

Does this apply to me if I rent privately?

No. Awaab's Law applies to social housing tenancies in England. Private renters report hazards to their local council's environmental health team under the HHSRS, which has no equivalent statutory clock.

What counts as an emergency hazard?

One posing an imminent and significant risk. For those, the landlord must investigate and make the property safe as soon as reasonably practicable and within 24 hours of becoming aware, whatever the hazard type. That has been true since October 2025.

My landlord says no action is required. Is that the end of it?

Only if it told you why. The regulations require the written summary to give reasons where the conclusion is that no action is needed. A bare "no action" does not meet that, and it is worth saying so in writing while the investigation is fresh.

Does the guidance itself have legal force?

The regulations do. The Phase 2 guidance published on 13 July 2026 is non-statutory and exists to support implementation, but it is the government's own account of what the regulations require, which makes it useful when you are asking a landlord to explain a decision.

Is a digital record better than paper?

Not inherently. What matters is that the record is dated, complete and retrievable by whoever needs it. Digital tends to date itself automatically, which is its real advantage. Paper does the job as long as it is kept in one place and not scattered across a house move.