The Government confirmed on 13 July 2026 that the second phase of Awaab's Law will come into force on 30 November 2026, subject to Parliament approving the draft amendment regulations. MHCLG published the landlord guidance and a hazards annex the same day. For repairs teams that leaves a little over three months of real working time, much of it running through the summer holiday period and into the point where winter demand starts climbing again.

Phase 1 covered damp and mould. Phase 2 extends the fixed timescales to significant hazards involving excess cold and excess heat, falls, structural collapse, fire and explosion, electrical safety, and domestic and personal hygiene including food safety. The 24 hour requirement for emergency hazards stays as it is. What changes is the range of reports that now carry a legal clock, and the Social Housing (Regulation) Act gives the regulator room to issue uncapped fines and performance improvement plan notices where landlords fall short.

The harder part of this isn't writing the policy. It's recognition. A resident who rings up about a wobbly bannister, a cooker that has stopped working, or a bedroom that never gets warm is not going to use the language of the hazards annex. Someone has to hear that description and understand which clock has just started. In most organisations that someone is a contact centre adviser working through a queue, and the guidance is explicit that advisers, housing officers, surveyors and contractors all need to be able to spot in-scope hazards.

A useful readiness test is to take a sample of last winter's calls and ask, honestly, which of them would have been recognised as Phase 2 hazards, and what evidence would exist today to prove the response happened on time. Where teams find gaps, they're usually in the same two places: what gets captured at the point of report, and whether the record can be reconstructed months later.

Alix is built around that first point. Structured intake prompts for the details that determine urgency, resident vulnerabilities are flagged so they travel with the job, and residents can send photos or short video before anyone is dispatched, which often settles the severity question quickly. Alix's damp, mould and compliance tool already supports triage and reporting against Awaab's Law, and the same triage view shows repairs leaders where the clocks are running across the whole workload rather than job by job. Every photo, note and decision stays in one place, timestamped.

Three months is not long, but it's enough to test how the front door actually behaves rather than how the process document says it should. The organisations that come through November comfortably will mostly be the ones that started with the phone call, not the policy.