The Housing Ombudsman has published its latest "Learning from Severe Maladministration" report, and its timing is deliberate. With Phase 2 of Awaab's Law expected later this year, the report turns its attention to hazards more broadly: what they look like in practice, how they cluster together in a single home, and what happens when providers fail to act.

The cases are difficult reading. Residents drinking unsafe water for eight months. Exposure to lead paint. Heating and hot water lost not for days, but for months or years. Bedrooms so cold a mother and her son moved into the living room for two winters running. Temperatures reaching 34°C in summer. And throughout all of it, residents absorbing the financial consequences in higher bills and unplanned costs.

These are not edge cases. They are, the Ombudsman argues, the product of systemic failures that providers need to confront honestly.

The same problems, in the same places

What the report makes clear is that many of the service failings identified are not new. Early warning signs go unnoticed or ignored. Processes exist but are not followed, either because they are unclear, unenforced, or not yet properly embedded. Individual circumstances are overlooked. Multiple surveys are commissioned without the work actually progressing. Communication is inconsistent. Decisions that should escalate do not reach the right person in time.

The Ombudsman is direct about the cultural dimension: excessive time passing without the right action being taken is not always an accident. Stretched teams, siloed working, and gaps in competency all play a role. So does a lack of governance that would catch these failures before they compound.

A false sense of readiness

One of the sharpest observations in the report concerns Phase 1 of Awaab's Law itself. The Ombudsman raises the concern that early compliance with the damp and mould requirements may have created a false sense of readiness for what comes next. Phase 2 will be more complex. Where multiple hazards are present in a single home, assessments become harder and decisions need to be faster and more nuanced. The cases in this report suggest that the clarity and agility required for that are not yet consistently present.

What this means for housing providers

The report is not dismissive of the progress being made. More investment and innovation is going into hazard management across the sector, and that is acknowledged. But the Ombudsman flags a real risk: that resource and attention remains concentrated on damp and mould, while other hazards receive less consistent focus. The cases in this report are a reminder of what that gap costs residents.

For housing providers, the practical implications are clear. Governance and oversight need to be robust enough to catch failures before they become entrenched. Data needs to be meaningful and acted on. And where multiple hazards exist in a single property, the response cannot be linear or siloed.

Phase 2 of Awaab's Law will raise the stakes. The question this report poses is whether the underlying conditions that produced these cases have genuinely changed, or whether compliance with Phase 1 has masked problems that are still there.