Damp, mould and where Awaab's Law stands

Awaab's Law applies in social housing. Its extension to the private rented sector has been announced in principle, but government has not confirmed a timescale, and nobody can currently tell you the month or the year it will bite for a private landlord in Doncaster. Anyone giving you a firm date is guessing. That is the position as at September 2026, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing it up, because the practical question for a landlord is not when the duty starts. It is what you do the next time a tenant sends you a photograph of black mould behind a wardrobe.

Awaab's Law is named after a child who died following exposure to mould in a social rented home. It places fixed statutory timescales on social landlords for investigating and putting right damp and mould hazards. That is as much as needs saying about the background here.

What applies to you right now

The absence of a confirmed date does not leave a private landlord with no obligations. Damp and mould are already dealt with under existing repairing obligations and under the housing health and safety rating system, which local authorities use to assess hazards in a property and which allows them to serve improvement notices. Councils were enforcing on damp long before Awaab's Law existed, and they still are. A tenant can also bring a disrepair claim through the courts. If a tenant is threatening legal action or the council has served a notice, speak to a solicitor.

So the useful framing is this. The specific duties and timescales are not yet in force for the private rented sector. The underlying liability already is.

Telling the three types of damp apart

Most arguments about damp go wrong at the diagnosis stage, because the landlord and the tenant are describing different problems using the same word. There are three distinct things and they have different causes, different evidence and different fixes.

Penetrating damp comes in from outside through a defect in the building. Failed pointing, a cracked render, a blocked or broken gutter, a slipped tile, a leaking overflow, a window seal that has gone. It usually appears as a patch rather than a spread, it tends to be worse after rain, and it can occur at any height on the wall, including upstairs. If a damp patch on a bedroom ceiling gets worse every time it rains hard, that is not a tenant drying washing indoors.

Rising damp comes up from the ground through masonry where there is no damp proof course or where it has been bridged or breached. It is confined to ground floor walls, it stops at a fairly consistent height, often around a metre, and there is frequently a tide mark and salt deposits on the plaster. It is genuinely less common than the damp proofing industry suggests, and a lot of properties diagnosed with rising damp turn out to have a raised external ground level, a blocked airbrick or a leaking pipe under the floor.

Condensation is moisture from the air inside the property settling on cold surfaces. It shows up on the coldest parts of the room, so window reveals, external corners, behind furniture pushed against an external wall, and in unheated rooms. Black spot mould is the usual sign. It is the most common cause of mould in rented homes by a distance, and it is also the one landlords most often treat as being entirely the tenant's fault.

Why blaming tenant behaviour is usually the wrong answer

The standard landlord response to condensation is that the tenant is not ventilating, is drying clothes on radiators, and is not heating the property. Sometimes that is a real contributing factor. It is very rarely the whole explanation, and as a defence it tends to hold up badly.

The reason is that condensation is a function of moisture production, ventilation and heat, and the building controls two of those three. If a property has no working extractor fan in the bathroom, no extractor in the kitchen, single glazed or failed double glazed units, an uninsulated solid wall, a boiler the tenant cannot afford to run, and painted over airbricks, then normal household activity will produce mould. Every household produces moisture. The question a council officer or a court asks is whether the property can cope with a normal amount of it.

There is a second problem with the behaviour argument. It is almost never written down. A landlord who says the tenant caused it, but has no record of a working extractor fan, no inspection notes and no ventilation survey, is making an assertion. The tenant with dated photographs is producing evidence.

The energy efficiency point matters here too. A cold, poorly insulated property produces more condensation, and the minimum standard is moving. All private rented tenancies will need EPC band C by 1 October 2030, with a spending cap of £10,000 per property. The work that lifts a property from an F or a G, insulation, heating improvements, better glazing, is largely the same work that stops the mould. The government guidance on the minimum energy efficiency standard is worth reading alongside any damp works you are planning, because doing the two jobs separately costs more.

What to do when a tenant reports mould

The sequence below is good practice, not a current statutory timetable for private landlords. Treat it as the way to keep a small problem small.

• Acknowledge the report in writing on the day you receive it, and say what will happen next.
• Inspect in person within a few days rather than diagnosing from a photograph. Photographs hide the cause.
• Establish which of the three types you are dealing with before ordering any work. If it is not obvious, get an independent damp survey from someone who is not selling the treatment.
• Deal with the immediate hazard while the underlying cause is being investigated. Cleaning the affected surfaces and getting ventilation working is not a fix, but it reduces exposure.
• Fix the cause, not the symptom. Repainting over mould with anti mould paint is a delaying tactic and both the tenant and the council will recognise it as one.
• Go back and check. A second visit a few weeks later tells you whether the work succeeded, and it produces the record that shows you followed through.

Where the work is significant, keep the tenant informed about timescales rather than leaving silence. Most escalations to the council come from tenants who believe they are being ignored, not from tenants who believe the repair is difficult.

Record keeping is the whole defence

Whatever the eventual timescales for the private rented sector turn out to be, they will be enforced against records. A landlord who cannot show when a report came in, when the inspection happened and what was found will struggle regardless of how reasonably they behaved at the time.

Keep the tenant's original report and the date it arrived. Keep your written acknowledgement. Keep dated inspection notes and photographs, including photographs of things that were working correctly, such as an operating extractor fan, because proving the absence of a defect later is difficult. Keep any survey, any contractor quote and any invoice. Keep a note of appointments the tenant did not keep, factually and without commentary. Keep the follow up visit.

This is also why periodic inspections earn their place. An inspection record showing no mould in March makes a January the following year report much easier to understand and to date. Our approach to routine inspections and repair records across a managed portfolio is built around that, because the record is what you produce when someone asks.

The Decent Homes Standard, and what it means for older stock

The Decent Homes Standard applies to the private rented sector from 2035. That is a long way off, and it is easy to file under later. It should not be, for one reason. The properties that will fail it are identifiable today.

A standard of that kind will test whether a home is free from the most serious hazards, whether the key building components are in reasonable repair, and whether there is adequate heating and insulation. Damp and mould sit squarely in the first of those. If you own a solid walled Victorian terrace in Doncaster with a band E EPC, an unheated back bedroom and a bathroom with no extractor, you already know how that property performs. It will not improve on its own between now and 2035.

Set against the 2030 EPC C deadline, the sensible reading is that the worst properties in a portfolio face two separate standards within five years of each other, and the £10,000 cap is per property, not per landlord. Spreading that work over several years is a lot easier than facing it all at once. The wider picture of what is arriving and when is set out in our guide to the Renters' Rights Act for landlords, and the government overview for landlords covers the reforms already in force.

Where to start

Take the two or three properties in your portfolio that you would least like a council officer to inspect and get a proper look at them. Check the extractor fans work, check the airbricks are clear, check the gutters, check the external ground level. Then look at the EPC. Most of what fixes damp also improves the rating, and the timing works in your favour if you start now rather than in 2029.

If you are buying or letting a property for the first time, the damp assessment belongs at the start rather than after the first winter, and our notes on preparing a property before it goes on the market cover what to check. GMS handles damp and mould reports as part of managed lettings, including the inspection record and the follow up, and our compliance work for landlords covers the standards already in force as well as the ones arriving. We are a member of Propertymark, and you can reach the office on 01302 244104.