Awaab Ishak was two years old when he died in December 2020, in a one-bedroom flat in Rochdale, from a respiratory condition caused by prolonged exposure to mould. His family had been reporting that mould to their landlord, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, since 2017. They were not ignored, exactly. They were heard. They were logged. They were left waiting.

Someone did go out. A member of staff visited the flat, saw the mould, and recorded it. Then nothing happened, because a disrepair claim had been opened and the process at the time held that repairs waited until the claim was resolved. The evidence existed. It sat in a file while a small boy kept breathing it in.

I think about that person quite often. They walked into a home, saw what the family had been describing for three years, wrote it down accurately, and went back to the van knowing it was bad. They didn’t have the authority to escalate it. They weren’t the failure. They were inside the failure, doing exactly what they had been told to do, which is a particular kind of helplessness that a lot of people reading this will recognise.

The coroner called Awaab’s death a defining moment for the sector, and it was. But I don’t think the lesson is only that a landlord failed a family, true though that is. What failed underneath it was an operating model that trusted process more than it trusted people, residents and staff alike.

Here is what I mean by that. Almost every system in use across social housing today was built around the asset. Stock condition surveys, work orders, SLAs, planned maintenance cycles. The property is the thing the record is about. The person living inside it appears as a name attached to a property reference, and their account of what’s happening in their home appears, if it appears at all, as free text in a box that nobody reports on.

So there is nowhere obvious to put “I keep telling you and it keeps coming back”. There’s nowhere to put what an operative judged while standing in a bedroom, smelling it, seeing a child’s things on the floor. Whatever doesn’t make it into the data doesn’t make it into the decision, and both of those pieces of knowledge, the resident’s and the operative’s, tend not to make it in. That isn’t a software bug. It’s a design choice the sector inherited and mostly stopped noticing.

The cost of that choice falls hardest on residents, but it lands on staff too. When I talk to repairs teams, the frustration I hear most often isn’t about workload, though the workload is real. It’s about knowing something is wrong and not being able to move it. The surveyor who flags a property and watches it drop back down the list. The call handler taking a report at ten to five on a Friday who can hear the worry in someone’s voice and has no field to record it in. Process culture doesn’t just slow those people down. Over time it teaches them that their judgment isn’t part of the job, and good people leave over that.

Which raises a question worth asking honestly inside your own organisation: who is the customer here? I’d say there are two. The external one is the resident, whose safety and trust are the outcome we’re all judged on. The internal one is the surveyor, the operative, the planner, the person on the phones. Their experience of the systems we hand them decides whether the resident’s experience is any good at all. When I ask housing teams whether their frontline colleagues were consulted on how those systems were set up, the room usually goes quiet.

Phase 2 of Awaab’s Law arrives on 30 November 2026 and widens the law well beyond damp and mould, into excess cold and heat, structural defects, electrical hazards and fire risk. Those are deadlines that only an empowered front line can meet. No procurement round fixes that on its own.

Co-design isn’t a soft add-on here. Peabody rebuilt communal repairs communication around WhatsApp with residents involved in the design, and saw calls into the contact centre fall because people finally knew what was happening. Enham Trust used the same channel to match disabled residents with local carers. Both worked because somebody asked first.

At Alix, everything we’re building comes back to one idea: residents believed, professionals empowered, in the data, in the design and in the decision. That’s less a feature list than a starting position.

So here’s one small thing you could do before November. Pick a single HHSRS process, just one, and put a resident and a frontline voice in the room while you redesign it. Then listen to what they tell you, and notice whether your systems have anywhere to put it.