Awaab’s Law, coming into effect on October 27th, introduces fixed, detailed timeframes for responding to all emergency hazards, as well as significant damp and mould hazards. For housing providers, meeting these obligations will not only depend on external contractors, but on how effectively internal teams raise, manage, and escalate repair cases. This means workflow readiness is no longer merely an operational advantage, but a core capability for complying with the proposed legal timelines.
What Failing Workflows Really Look Like
The Housing Ombudsman has been explicit: too many providers still experience breakdowns at the earliest stages of repair handling. Missed inspections, lost records, and unclear escalation paths create delays that can stretch from weeks to years. In some cases, even the most vulnerable residents have faced prolonged delays, not due to a lack of concern, but often because overstretched teams working within tight budgets have struggled to coordinate across complex systems and rising demand.And that’s an important truth in the journey toward better outcomes: no matter how strong the intent, good intentions alone can’t navigate broken workflows and prevent compliance failures.
Legal Timelines Raise the Stakes for Internal Systems
Awaab’s Law doesn’t leave any room for administrative lag. Workflows must now be built for immediate response, as the day a hazard is reported marks Day 0 in the legal timeline, so every step of the hazard repair journey must be clearly tracked:
Job creation and categorisation must be accurate
Inspections must be scheduled and actioned promptly, with traceable records
Escalations must be automated and rule-based, not reliant on manual reminders
Communication must be updated in real time and visible across teams
This isn’t just about fixing faster. It’s about being able to prove your teams responded in the right way, with the right actions and on time.
Where Tech Closes the Gap
Going forward, it’s becoming increasingly clear that legacy systems and manual handoffs won’t be able to keep up with the requirements of Awaab’s Law. A new era of tenant support and responsiveness is being heralded in, and unsurprisingly, it will require a new era’s technology to support the teams responsible for delivering it.
As Tony Smith (That Housing IT Guy) noted in a recent review of Plentific’s resident solution: “All the emphasis is on early reporting, diagnosis with AI support to nip small incidents in the bud, before there are major spore health hazards for residents and landlord asset damage can escalate.”
Plentific’s modern operations platform allows providers to:
Raise work orders quickly using pre-set templates for reactive, void, and planned works
Prioritise jobs using built-in urgency filters based on SLA and HHSRS risk
Flag vulnerabilities and trigger automated actions where needed
Generate repairs directly from inspection results, including via offline app
Track real-time job status across all teams, including resident notifications via SMS/email
Monitor progress against deadlines with centralised audit trails
Trigger alerts and escalations automatically for overdue or high-risk tasks
Set custom workflows that guide escalation logic without relying on manual oversight
Sync housing, asset, and finance data systems with real-time connections to reduce duplication
Define user roles and permissions clearly, with every action time-stamped and traceable
Use operational dashboards to track key metrics like completion times and first-time fix rates
Export detailed reports to support board-level oversight and regulatory requirements
Case Study Insight
Network Homes, a Plentific customer, reported completing 90% of repairs across 18,000 properties within 14 days of go-live, thus demonstrating the kind of operational resilience needed under Awaab’s Law. Anchor, another Plentific customer, reports that at any time during the month, they can view status across all jobs: what’s completed, overdue, in-progress, or awaiting access.
Readiness Is About Visibility and Control
Workflow readiness isn’t just about improving performance. It’s about enabling visibility, assigning accountability, and removing manual drag. Most of all, it’s about aligning internal processes with a legal framework that will only get stricter from 2026 onward. In the end, Tony Smith sums up the real reason for getting it right: “More important than pleasing the regulator, of course, is the confidence that councils and RSLs are keeping residents safer, particularly some of the most vulnerable in our communities.”Providers need to ask: can we see where every job is, at every stage? Can we prove when and how decisions were made? Can we trust our systems to surface issues before they become breaches?
To help your teams ask the right questions as they prepare for October’s go live, you can download the Operational Workflow Readiness Scorecard to self-assess your current workflow resilience and understand how your systems measure up against Awaab’s Law requirements.
