The regulations for phase 2 of Awaab's Law were laid in Parliament on 13 July, with new guidance for social landlords published alongside them. From 30 November 2026, seven further hazard categories come under the same clock that has applied to damp and mould since October last year: electrical hazards, falls, fire and explosions, excess cold, excess heat, structural collapse and falling elements, and domestic hygiene. Phase 3 follows in 2027, covering everything else in the HHSRS except overcrowding.

At a legal briefing this month, the housing providers in the room were asked to score their own readiness for phase 2. The average came out at about 2.5 out of 10, which is roughly where the sector sat twelve months before phase 1 landed. What's striking is that almost everyone in that room could recite the timescales accurately: investigate within 10 working days, written summary within 3, urgent safety work within 5, longer-term repairs started within 12 weeks. The legal knowledge is there. The operational readiness isn't, and the two get confused often.

The clock starts the moment a report is received. Not when it's picked up on Monday, not when it reaches the repairs team, but when a resident tells you, including by email at nine on a Saturday night. In most organisations, the out-of-hours service logs those reports properly and doesn't triage them, which means the hazard is recorded and the clock is running while nobody has decided whether it's a 24-hour job. That's before phase 2 widens the range of things that might turn out to be one.

Then there's evidence, which is where most of these cases are likely to be won or lost. A contractor photo taken from the doorway shows that somebody attended. It doesn't show what they found, what they did, or why they judged the hazard non-urgent. A CRM note reading "called, no answer" sits in the same file as a full timestamped record of three attempted visits, and to a reviewer they carry very different weight. The bar for reasonable endeavours will probably be set higher than the sector expects. Siloed systems make it worse, because the repeat problem at the same address, the vulnerability flagged two years ago, and the current job rarely appear on the same screen.

This is the gap Alix was built around. Operatives capture surveyor-grade evidence on site, photographs that actually show the condition and the work done, structured notes in the same format every time, timestamps that hold up under scrutiny. Vulnerability flags and previous jobs at that address sit alongside the current one, so patterns surface before a reviewer finds them for you. It gives repairs leaders a defensible record without asking anyone to write a longer report at the end of a long day.

One point from that session has stayed with us: a tenant who feels looked after rarely claims. Compliance follows from that, not the other way round. Two things worth doing before November: pull three recent jobs and ask whether the evidence would stand up on its own, and run a drill at four o'clock on a Friday.