What will Awaab’s Law mean for landlords and residents?

“What it means is that we’ll need to inspect many more properties than we do currently to err on the side of caution,” says David Lewis, executive group director of property services at 109,000-home L&Q. “And there are just real challenges around supply chain and capacity, both in-house… and externally.”

The discussions also highlight the work that still needs to be done around hazard reporting and how landlords manage (and act upon) data. The legislation sets timelines, but Steve Lowther, head of property maintenance at 29,000-home Gentoo Group, illustrates how difficult it can be to report urgent hazards within 48 hours, for example. “That’s not working days – that’s hours,” he says. “So for instance, if you carry out a damp survey on a Friday, the expectation is that the report is with the customer on Sunday.”

James Reseigh, director of neighbourhoods at 40,000-home LiveWest, agrees. He and colleagues have estimated the cost of generating reports to be around £600,000. “When you look at those 29 hazards, it’s really hard to produce a report that can be automated,” he says.

Given the breadth of hazards covered in the legislation, Ian Gregg, executive director of asset services at 80,000-home Riverside, thinks that the focus of the new law should firmly be on damp and mould, and that the problem should be addressed across the UK’s housing stock, not just the social sector.

Delegates are keen to stress that the new regulation is one of many that landlords have had to deal with in the past few years. Anita Khan, chief executive of 3,000-home Tower Hamlets Community Housing (THCH), wonders how housing associations would have acted differently if all these changes had been delivered as one package. “Because it’s an ‘and, and, and,’ it feels like we’re incrementally trying to adapt as opposed to inherently rethinking our operating and financial models to respond to the operating environment that we’re now existing in,” she says.

The discussion around damp and mould remediation often centres around repair, but many at the table want to put this into the context of long-term improvements to homes. They acknowledge, however, that the business case for such an approach can be difficult.

Tom Robins, chief executive of Switchee, has some reservations about the implications of the law. “We’ve been passionate for a long time about moving the sector from being reactive to being proactive,” he says. “What we see with this legislation coming in is we’re baking in a level of reactive that’s going to take time and resources away from being proactive.”

Of course, tackling damp and mould – whether reactively or proactively – incurs costs. And when it comes to this investment, Patrick Chauvin, chief officer for safety, assets and sustainability at 39,000-home Stonewater, suggests that capital investment might be a better solution. “It seems to me that everyone is going to be channelling money into revenue spend, when probably the solution is the opposite to that.”

Carol Carter, chief executive of 7,800-home Origin Housing, is concerned that recent regulation tends to address symptoms. “Those symptoms are about the constraints across the sector around investing in homes.”

Alongside the sector’s goals to build more affordable homes, there should be, in parallel, a long-term plan for the quality of housing as well. Ms Carter says: “There’s a real opportunity there, particularly potentially with
a new government, to take that proactive approach… We’re all prepared to invest here, but let’s do it in a planned and measured way. And try to avoid a situation with layer upon layer of new expectations and new regulation. Because that’s just exacerbating the problem and diverting cash away from what it needs to be spent on, which is long-term investment.”

Anita Jones, chief executive at 6,700-home Freebridge Community Housing, believes that associations have a solid track record of handling unexpected change in the form of new regulation or legislation, but there should be a balance. “We all say to our boards that we are long-term businesses, and only a small proportion of our day-to-day activity should be on the crisis – however important that is – for long-term sustainable planning.”

Many participants at the roundtable highlight collaboration as an area for improvement. Not only can it help improve the sharing of information and best practice, but housing associations can also benefit from better procurement, and have easier access to shared services or supply chain partners.

Collaboration is key

Tim Weightman, chief investment officer at 75,000-home Places for People, believes “the sector talks a good game about collaboration but then falls short”. “Everybody has at least one good idea that they’ve never shared with anybody else. If we got that on the table, that’s massively powerful,” he adds.

As one example, Mr Weightman highlights the work done by the Future Homes Consortium. Around 20 landlords have been sharing data on how repair demand has evolved year on year, resulting in a clear picture across a large sample of homes. However, the group has found it more difficult to sign up to joint action. “There has to be a real call to action,” he says. “Sharing knowledge and expertise is quick and easy. Signing up to a procurement deal with other people is hard.”