Most social landlords have spent the past year getting damp and mould right. New timescales, new reporting, new escalation routes. It has been hard work, and plenty of teams have made real progress. Then comes 30 November 2026, and the scope widens sharply. The statutory clock that currently applies to damp and mould starts applying to excess cold and heat, falls, structural collapse, fire, electrical hazards and hygiene hazards too.

Phase 2, subject to parliamentary approval of the draft regulations, extends investigation and repair deadlines well beyond damp and mould. On paper that is an expansion of scope. In practice it is an expansion of volume, and volume is where compliance processes tend to break.

A team that reliably clocks and tracks a few hundred damp cases a year could be looking at several thousand hazard-flagged jobs once cold, fire and electrical sit inside the boundary. Excess cold alone will pull in a large slice of every winter's call volume. And that pressure arrives into a system already stretched. The Housing Ombudsman's latest annual complaints review found a 43% rise in repairs complaints investigated, with 73% of them upheld.

The risk is not that landlords ignore the law. It is that a hazard hiding inside a routine-sounding report never gets recognised as one.

Which makes the intake conversation the most important part of the whole process. If a hazard is identified correctly on day one, the clock starts on time and everything downstream works. If it is logged as "heating not great" and sits in a routine queue for three weeks, no amount of good work later recovers that time.

Good looks like consistent questioning at first contact, whoever picks up the phone. It looks like hazard type and severity recorded in a structured way rather than as free text. It looks like a repairs lead who can see at a glance which cases are approaching a deadline. And it looks like a record that stands up months later when someone asks what you knew and when.

Alix works at that first point of contact. It structures the repair report so hazard type, priority and resident vulnerability are captured properly rather than left to the judgement of whoever happens to be on the phone. Residents can send photos and short videos, so a suspected hazard can be assessed remotely instead of waiting for a survey slot. Everything sits in one place, with images and decisions attached to the job.

That gives repairs teams the two things Phase 2 really demands. Early recognition, and a clean audit trail.

November is not far away. The providers who cope best will not be the ones with the longest policy document. They will be the ones whose front door catches hazards accurately, first time, every time. That work is worth starting now, while the winter volume is still ahead of you rather than on top of you.