A family reports mould on a Monday. By Friday, one household knows the statutory deadline, knows a surveyor is booked and knows the work is ordered. Another has heard nothing. No repair has happened in either home, and the two weeks are not remotely alike. That difference belongs to the household, and it is available immediately, at almost no cost, to any landlord willing to show its own workings.
We built TenantSafe around that gap. The return we are chasing is a better week for the person waiting.
Everyone in the chain wants the same week to go well
Phase 2 of Awaab's Law comes into force on 30 November 2026, and the part worth attention is not the longer hazard list. MHCLG's Phase 2 guidance asks landlords to "take reasonable steps to understand the circumstances of the tenant, including any vulnerabilities of the household which could worsen the potential impact of the hazard such as age, health conditions or disability", and to weigh "the age and physical and mental health of the tenants".
From the end of November, the household health a landlord has to understand is the same household health an integrated care board is already responsible for. The duty puts housing and health in front of the same family, holding the same facts, for the first time.
The overlap is not small. Among households living in damp homes, the English Housing Survey found someone with a health condition in 69% of housing association homes and 66% of local authority homes, against 35% of owner-occupied homes. These are the same people on a GP list, a respiratory pathway or a virtual ward.
Government has already written down what the benefit is
The wellbeing case does not need inventing. It sits in MHCLG's own impact assessment for Awaab's Law, which expects that "having reports of hazards being dealt with quickly by landlords will address the frustration residents often feel as a result of not being heard by their landlord", and that the new duties will "offer peace of mind to tenants". The same document cites Shelter's finding that housing problems had harmed the mental health of one in five UK adults over five years, that three in ten of those had no previous mental health issue, and that 38% of the concerns raised were about the repair or condition of the property.
Handling is a large part of that, and handling is the part a landlord can improve this quarter. The Housing Ombudsman's damp and mould spotlight found maladministration in 56% of the 410 complaints it investigated, rising to 64% for complaint handling on its own. Read the second number as headroom. The failure it describes is silence, delay and repeat-explaining, and every one of those is fixable without a penny of additional repairs spend.
A tenant who can see the clock has not been given authority over the repair. They have been given back a normal week, and the confidence that somebody is counting.
The waiting is the thing we can now measure
MHCLG was candid about what it could not do. Its impact assessment records that "it has not been possible to provide a headline estimate of monetised benefits of this policy", and that the health benefits sit outside the appraisal "given lack of quantitative evidence with which to establish a robust counterfactual".
That gap is an invitation. Awaab's Law turns on one variable, how much sooner a hazard is made safe than it otherwise would have been, and nobody currently records it. Repairs systems hold job types and completion dates against work orders, not the interval a household actually spent living with the hazard.
TenantSafe timestamps the report, the investigation, the make-safe and the completion, from the resident's side, on every case. Run that against a matched local cohort and an ICB has something no prevention programme in this space has had: evidence about its own population, generated as a by-product of a landlord doing its statutory job properly.
The return is quality of life, and that is enough
There is a cash figure available and it is honest about its own size. The impact assessment's BRE estimate puts around 217,000 social rented homes with the most serious hazards at roughly £65m of NHS cost a year, which is about 82 pence per home per day. We could dress that up. We would rather point at the thing Treasury already lets you count, because its supplementary Green Book guidance on wellbeing exists precisely so that a life going better carries weight in an appraisal without pretending to be a saving.
For the same reason we make no claim about bed days or hospital infection. The Health Foundation reports that "it is not yet clear if virtual wards reduce pressure on hospital beds", so we would be building on a step nobody has established. We would rather bring an ICB something we can show.
So the question to put to a housing-health proposition is not what it saves. It is whose week gets better, how you will know, and what you would accept as proof that it did.
Sources: MHCLG's Awaab's Law final stage impact assessment and Phase 2 guidance for social landlords, the English Housing Survey 2023-24 health and housing fact sheet, Shelter's research on housing problems and mental health as cited in that impact assessment, the Housing Ombudsman's damp and mould spotlight report, HM Treasury's supplementary Green Book guidance on wellbeing, and the Health Foundation's February 2024 working paper on virtual wards in England, current at 1 September 2026. The 82 pence figure is derived from the impact assessment's own BRE estimate.