Awaab’s Law Compliance for Housing Associations: 5 Key Gaps

Awaabs Law changed what “compliant” means for a housing association’s repairs service. Since 27 October 2025, English social landlords have had to investigate emergency hazards and make homes safe within 24 hours, investigate significant hazards such as damp and mould within 10 working days, and complete the necessary safety works within 5 working days of that investigation concluding.

From 30 November 2026, Phase 2 of Awaabs Law extends the same fixed timescales to excess cold and heat, falls, structural collapse, fire and explosions, electrical hazards, and hygiene hazards, which between them cover most of the serious repairs a housing association ever deals with. That is a statutory clock now running inside every repairs and maintenance contract a landlord holds, and it is exactly why Contract intELIEgence exists: to keep track of that clock before it turns into a missed deadline.

A statutory deadline sitting inside a commercial contract

Almost no housing association carries out its own repairs. Damp treatments, emergency call-outs, electrical works and structural repairs are delivered by contractors working under term contracts, framework agreements or specialist call-off arrangements, each with its own response-time clauses, escalation routes and reporting requirements. The legal duty sits with the landlord, not the contractor, so a housing association is only as compliant as the contract sitting underneath it. If a contractor’s SLA for a routine repair is slower than the statutory window for a significant hazard, or the contract has no clause requiring the contractor to report back the moment an investigation is complete, the landlord is exposed even though nothing about the repair itself was mishandled.

That gap rarely shows up when a contract is first signed. It shows up months later, when a tenant complaint reaches the Housing Ombudsman or the Regulator of Social Housing asks for evidence of when a hazard was reported, investigated and fixed, and nobody can produce a clean paper trail because the contract never required one.

Three places the risk hides inside a repairs contract

The risk under Awaabs Law is rarely in the headline SLA everyone remembers negotiating. It is in the detail nobody rereads once the contract is signed. This is exactly the gap Contract intELIEgence is built to close, and three places the risk typically hides are as follows.

1. Response-time clauses that no longer match the law. A contractor’s SLA for a “routine” repair, often five or ten working days, may have been perfectly acceptable before this legislation existed. Once a repair is reclassified as a significant hazard, the statutory clock of 10 working days to investigate and 5 working days to make safe applies regardless of what the contract says, and a slower contractual SLA becomes a direct source of exposure.
2. Missing reporting and evidence obligations. Many older repairs contracts require a contractor to complete the work but say nothing about when or how they must confirm timings back to the landlord. Without that clause, a housing association has no reliable way to show a regulator exactly when an investigation started and concluded, even if the repair itself was completed in time.
3. Handoffs between multiple contractors on one job. Damp and mould cases often involve a surveyor or diagnostic visit followed by a separate works contractor. Where the contract does not clearly allocate who owns the clock at each stage, the time between diagnosis and repair is exactly where notice periods, responsibility and evidence quietly go missing.

How Contract intELIEgence supports Awaabs Law compliance

Rather than someone on the repairs or compliance team rereading a contract every time a hazard is reported, askelie’s Contract intELIEgence reads the agreement once and extracts the clauses that actually matter: response-time SLAs, notice periods, reporting obligations and renewal dates, then keeps them visible instead of buried in a schedule at the back of the document.

As part of the wider askelie platform, it is the same approach behind reading unstructured agreements and turning them into information you can search, track and report on, applied specifically to the repairs and maintenance contracts a housing association depends on every single day.

In practice, that means a compliance lead can see, at a glance, whether a contractor’s SLA for damp and mould work is faster or slower than the statutory 10-day investigation window, without opening the contract itself. It means a repairs manager can check whether the reporting clause actually obliges a contractor to confirm investigation and completion dates in writing, the exact evidence the Housing Ombudsman and the Regulator of Social Housing now expect to see. And it means renewal dates and notice periods on ageing repairs contracts stop being a surprise, because they surface weeks before a window closes rather than the week after it has.

Building an evidence trail regulators can actually check

Consumer standards and tenant satisfaction measures were already pushing housing associations toward more visible, evidenced repairs performance before Awaabs Law arrived. It adds a hard legal deadline on top of that expectation, which means a housing association now needs to demonstrate not just that a repair was completed, but that it was investigated and fixed inside a specific, provable number of working days. That is difficult to do by hand across dozens of repairs contracts covering hundreds of properties, and it is precisely the kind of structured, ongoing record that Contract intELIEgence is designed to support.

None of this requires ripping up existing contractor relationships. It starts with the repairs and maintenance contracts a housing association already holds: reading them once, surfacing where the contractual SLA is slower than the statutory clock, and flagging the handful of clauses that determine whether an evidence trail exists when a regulator asks for one. Awaabs Law is less about replacing contractors and more about knowing, with confidence, what every one of those contracts actually commits both sides to, and being able to prove it whenever the law asks for evidence.

Related reading

• Managing Contract Obligations: Stop the Hidden Risk
• askVERA for Housing Associations: 5 Powerful Tenant Wins