I've worked on the frontline making social housing repairs – Awaab's Law must bring real change

When I first stepped into social housing maintenance over a decade ago, I thought the job would be a simple case of repairing and refurbishing properties.

But it didn’t take long to realise the bigger picture: it wasn’t just the homes that needed fixing, but rather the housing providers and the broader systems within them, the way housing is run, managed, and delivered. Over the years, working on the frontline within various social housing providers, I’ve witnessed these challenges firsthand. That’s why I wrote Middle Ground, to shed light on the often untold stories of those living and working in social housing.

Many housing providers have lost their way, especially many of those who have merged, detaching themselves from the people and communities they were meant to serve. Bureaucracy gets in the way of common sense, and mismanagement has been normalised. Centralised call centres are overloaded, jobs are logged incorrectly, passed between departments that barely communicate, and frontline staff end up grounded due to failing IT systems, which results in further delays. At times, critical repairs fall through the cracks, leaving tenants to live in unsafe conditions.

There are a lot of good people working in housing; they’re the ones keeping things running day to day. But too often, they’re trapped in what seems like a machine that values numbers over people. Instead of focusing on quality, the emphasis seems to be on quantity, hitting targets and reducing budgets, rather than delivering meaningful results. The same issues come back, wasting time, money, and eroding trust.

I’ve seen first-hand how those failings play out in people’s homes. Damp and mould are the clearest signs of a system that isn’t working. For years, it’s been treated as an inconvenience. The instructions I’ve had from management have been: clean it, paint it, move on. No survey, no root cause, no urgency.

Tenants would report the same issues over and over, and instead of being listened to, they were blamed. “Open your windows,” they were told, as if that was the sole cause of the issue, rather than a symptom of underinvestment, ageing stock and failing repair services. At one point, tradespeople like me became couriers. Management sent us out delivering “mould cleaning packs”. Inside were cleaning chemicals, PPE, application tools, and instructions. Tenants were left to deal with it themselves. That was the level of seriousness it was given.

It’s a culture that has grown out of stigma, the idea that social housing tenants are problems to manage rather than people to help. That attitude seems to be ingrained into the system, from the way calls are handled to how repairs are prioritised. It’s a reason why some issues that should take days end up dragging on for months or even years.

That’s why Awaab Ishak’s story hit so hard for so many of us. Because we’ve seen it before. Not just the mould on the walls, but the pattern of being ignored, dismissed, and blamed. Awaab was two years old when he died from prolonged exposure to mould in his home in Rochdale. His parents had raised the issue repeatedly. The warnings were clear, but the provider in question didn’t act.

Read more:

• Awaab Ishak: Toddler’s death from mould leads to record social housing complaints
• Awaab’s Law is finally coming into force in October – but some hazards won’t be covered until 2027
• Family of toddler who died from damp and mould issue grave warning to Labour over new housing law

Out of that tragedy came Awaab’s Law, a new requirement for social landlords to fix health and safety issues like damp and mould within strict time limits. On paper, it’s progress. It says to tenants: your complaints matter, and your health matters.

But new laws can only work if the existing systems within housing providers are ready to support them. Without strong internal foundations, well-run departments, joined-up processes, accountability, and a skilled workforce, those rules risk becoming just another set of deadlines rather than meaningful change.

Many housing providers are already stretched thin. Some can’t meet their own internal targets, let alone new legal ones. Unless we address the core issues, we’ll continue seeing temporary fixes instead of lasting solutions that actually make homes safe. The risk is that Awaab’s Law becomes another box-ticking exercise in a system obsessed with ticking boxes.

Real change will only happen when housing providers rebuild from the ground up. That means fixing more than damp walls and leaking pipes; it means rebuilding the existing systems, attitudes, and priorities that failed people like Awaab in the first place.

Awaab’s Law has drawn a line in the sand. It reminds us that safe housing isn’t something people should have to fight for; it’s a basic right. But for it to mean anything, landlords need to see it as more than a box to tick. It must be a call to do better, to take responsibility for the lives behind every door. Social housing can only be fixed if the people running it start putting people first, and that begins with real, radical, and sustained change.

Joe Carpenter* is the author of new ebook Middle Ground: A Frontline Journey In Social Housing.

*Not his real name.

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