Awaab's Law and the case for continuous damp monitoring
The new duties on social landlords to fix damp and mould within set timescales, and why temperature and humidity sensors turn a complaint-driven process into a measured one.
Awaab's Law, introduced through the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 and brought into force by regulations in 2025, requires social landlords in England to investigate and fix reported damp and mould hazards within fixed timescales, and to deal with emergency hazards within 24 hours. Guidance from the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman has pushed in the same direction for several years: treat damp and mould as a hazard to health, not a lifestyle issue, and act on evidence.
The problem with a complaint-driven process
Mould grows where relative humidity stays high for long periods on cold surfaces. By the time a tenant reports it, the conditions have usually existed for weeks. A visit records a single moment: the surveyor's meter reading on a dry Tuesday afternoon says little about what the bedroom is like at 4 am in January.
What continuous monitoring adds
A small battery sensor in a room records temperature and relative humidity every twenty minutes for years. Across a block or an estate that gives a housing team:
- Early warning. Sustained relative humidity above about 70 % is the condition mould needs; an alert that fires only after it has persisted for several hours avoids false alarms from showers and cooking while catching the rooms that never dry out.
- A measured baseline per room. The pattern by hour of day and day of week shows whether a problem is ventilation, heating or a building fault.
- Evidence for the timescales. When a hazard is reported and fixed, the record shows the conditions before, during and after the works.
- Prioritisation across the stock. Rooms ranked by hours above threshold, not by who complained loudest.
Practical notes
- Sensors are installed in minutes without wiring and have multi-year batteries. One LoRaWAN gateway covers a block; radios reach through walls that Wi-Fi does not.
- The data concerns someone's home. Only the landlord's estate team should see it, access should be role-based and logged, and residents should be told what is collected and why.
- Readings should be kept in an append-only record, so that what the data showed is never in dispute.
Tempa's Estate Health kit was designed for this: room sensors, leak sensors and CO₂ sensors on one platform, with the same append-only record, alerting and reporting used for cold-chain compliance.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Check the current regulations and guidance for your organisation.
The demo dashboard runs on simulated sensors through the same path as real hardware.