BIMinAM AWAAB'S LAW WORKSTREAM MEETING 27-11-2025
GEORGE STEVENSON …I’ll send you something through and actually I ordered a sample of it yesterday to be able to check it out. The way I’m looking at it Stephen is if contractors are being asked to go in and do an immediate solution to the problem as an interim measure then how they go about doing that ought to be auditable and standardised. Whether it works or not I don’t know, he explained to me from a scientific point of view why it works, so it’s certainly something that’s worth exploring.
STEPHEN WESTLEY I’ve just Googled mould check UK and the top result is from one of our partners, a company called Pure Maintenance UK. And they have another system, they have exclusivity for the UK. And I’m trying to get the guy to come in because he is an expert witness for some around mould and his solution is a dry fog. So he can give you all of he reasons why dry fog is better than a wet one. I messaged him a couple of weeks ago and he said we’re a little bit busy.
Pure Maintenance UK claim that they are the UK’s largest mould remediation service. And it’s because the owner actually did suffer with mould and it nearly killed him, that he went on a fact-finding to see what was out there. And he heard about when Trump, the first time that he was in office, had the White House sprayed with this substance and apparently it was the best that he’d found. So he then took the licence and is doing very, very well. I’ll see if I can get one of his team in, they’re all really passionate about mould.
DEBBIE CARLTON But isn’t there a need here, everyone needs to have a better understanding of the science behind this.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, this guy David Thurston from Greentech seemed to be very knowledgeable. And I think he could probably present why, he was explaining to me how mould spores operate and the natural defences that they have. And how spraying it with an ammonia based technology, it just exacerbates it. Whereas this solution that he’s developed over the last few years, it uses a different type of approach.
DEBBIE CARLTON The other guy that I’ve heard is good is Professor Michelle Parrott who was also involved helping the government draft Awaab’s Law. But that’s come through my contact with Russell Thompson at Direct Works. I’m meant to be catching up on him and he says that he’s working with a company that has a new innovation that kills the mould spores on hard and soft surfaces. It's definitely a big area. From a competency perspective, if you look at any of the occupational standards or national occupation standard mould doesn’t exist in any of the standards that underpin qualifications at the moment. It’s just not there.
And the relevant bodies are meant to be addressing it, but it’s been very slow. When the case was raised I went to IFATE which has now become Skills England and said none of this is being addressed in your standards. Oh yes, we’re working on it. Well, that’s now 3 years later and still nothing has been done, so there’s a gap, a lag in the system.
GEORGE STEVENSON Connor, as a landlord, you’re our only landlord on this, what’s happening at your end of things?
CONNOR STEVENSON Being representative one as a landlord and two as a landlord in Scotland, it’s slightly different. There was an attempt to do something called Healthy Homes, but the overall tenant satisfaction of that didn’t work, so it’s now back to the drawing board. We’re having internal meetings over the next couple of days and in the coming weeks, because it’s not mandatory in Scotland yet I think until March next year. But the Healthy Homes thing, whatever they did with it it didn’t quite work. So they drafted me in because I’d worked for a previous business and we’d come up with a sort of process and solution for it. So I think we’re going to try and attempt that.
They’ve not really done much or thought about much in the way of the expansion of Awaab’s Law to the other hazards that it’s covering at the moment, and just trying to get a handle on damp and mould. The damp space sounds really interesting, particularly for ones where we’ve got a little bit more than 24 hours. At least the mould knowledge that I have is it’s 30% that you only see on surfaces. So is the spray that yourself and Stephen had mentioned, is that just cleaning what you see? Or is that going in to the material to kill the root as well?
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s the critical thing.
CONNOR STEVENSON You may not get to the root cause, but if you’re killing the roots you’re at least buying yourself some reprieve. Because if you kill all of the roots then it would take some time to get back to that state, so you can buy yourself sometime in diagnosing it. I’ve waded through all of the Awaab’s Law stuff to re-familiarise myself with it and I don’t know how you can respond to, diagnose and then remediate within a 24-hour period. I don’t know how that’s possible.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s the biggest concern that I’ve got at the moment in that what we’re doing, we’re creating the environment for just lawyers to step in and bankrupt social landlords.
CONNOR STEVENSON I suppose it’s a sort of rocket up the arse that’s supposed to push landlords into doing something. Because the states of the homes you’re supposed to remediate within 24 hours should never have got to the state that they’re in to have to do it within 24 hours.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s exactly the argument that I’ve been hearing as well. At the end of the day you wouldn’t want to start from where you are today.
CONNOR STEVENSON Even the 5 day one, you have to do something within 5 days could be tight. We’ve created and developed a survey that’s being utilised at the moment by Wheatley and we are unable even, the sort of student level guys, they’re able to find and diagnose was probably the likely cause of a lot of issues externally. And we’re working on the internal one at the moment. This is maybe me going off on a tangent because I missed the challenge catchup on Friday.
I think it would be a good idea to have this sort of NBS library type thing so that landlords can access. That you can sort of type ion where your issues are, different types of things that you’re seeing, images that you’re seeing that can help diagnose what and where the likely issue is. Wheatley has got me and a couple of other surveyors, but we’re landlords and we don’t have that and I think that’s maybe something that could be quite useful as a tool.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s where I’m going with this. What I want to do, and certainly within BIM4Housing, I think that’s something we’d like to try and facilitate in some way. We’ve already got all of the standards around fire safety and things like that that we’ve been doing. So I’d like to mirror that with this as well to do exactly what you said there. To be able to identify what the common experiences are, what the common problems are. And then look at ways that we could then address them, so that we can then have an industry best practice that’s actually come from the industry that is peer reviewed.
For example, we’ve got on this call both Stephen and Nick, who are both providing technology sensors to do different things. I was at the Homes Exhibition, there was quite a few other companies, there was a company called Vericon there who seemed to be quite bit into this as well. If we can bring together the people, because I think the demand for this is far greater than any individual supplier is going to be able to satisfy. So therefore if we can agree what a good solution looks like, then we’ve got the opportunity to have something that landlords can actually tap into. And not rely on people that are coming up with solutions that maybe aren’t as well tested.
CONNOR STEVENSON I’ve written down some stuff that I’m going to show to you at a different time about what the solution looked like when we built previous business. Venture capitalists had no interest in it so that’s why they shut it down. I don’t know if changes right now, but we had a solution that we thought would really work. So I’ve written some stuff. It’s just words on an Excel spreadsheet at the moment, but if you give me some time to pretty it up then it’s something I’d be quite happy to share. It was a full process start to finish.
At least for the landlords in Scotland, I know there’s a few more who are technological and BIM savvy out there. It’s just that marrying up between what the IoT sensors say and scales that the landlord has to interrogate that and see what it means, There’s like a surveyor architect built professional link that this solution, the one that we’ve come up with before, sort of relies on. And I think that’s why I go to the NBS library type thing is that over time you can almost get rid of that. If you go my IoT says this, this is what my images say, you can put it in and it spits out what your likely things are.
DEBBIE CARLTON Connor, who do you work for in Scotland?
CONNOR STEVENSON I work for Wheatley Housing Association. I’ve been here over a year now. I’m pretty sure that we’re the biggest housing association in Scotland and we’ll be one of the biggest in the UK. At last count there was over 65,000 houses owned and a further 30 odd thousand factored. They’d hired us, when I was at my previous job, to do a lot of this stuff, they liked what we were so they brought us in and we all went in different directions of what we were doing, but now we’re focused on getting it back to what we were doing before.
The issue when we walked in from 2 or 3 people was there was a significant amount of houses, something like 5,000, where they installed IoT, but everyone was read now…it’s all about getting a good IoT provider and they obviously did not get a good IoT provider. And they did not have somebody that could interrogate the information that the IoTs were talking about.
DEBBIE CARLTON I ask that as a fellow Scot, but you wouldn’t believe that from my accent. But I would do a lot of work with BES which is the built environment innovation centre in Scotland. And I know they would be helpful, George, in promoting this or commenting. And also they’re very good at running lots of hands-on interventions. This could be something we get them to, getting people in a room and going through a process and understanding it. We’re doing a lot at the moment around building physics which obviously relates to building pathology and all of this. And with them in a project we’re building a big kind of knowledge ontology of all of the knowhow and this could be an area we include in that as well.
Because I think getting some good training interventions up and running quickly is important here, there’s a lot of misunderstanding. And also there’s the other side of the story of a lot more consumer protesting going on like mould for mums and all of this stuff. There’s lots of very good people trying to do this, but there’s no shortage of activity but there’s nothing that’s sort of linking everyone together.
CONNOR STEVENSON We’ve done well to educate itself on mould, hiring the right people but you still get the old and I’m thankful that Awaab’s Law says you are not allowed to do this anymore. But there’s an instant it’s the tenant’s fault, it’s the tenant’s fault, I Scotland building regulations say that you can dry your clothes inside, it’s up to the architect, the designer or the landlord to make sure that you can ventilate it well enough.
Obviously the bit that the landlords are struggling with, if there are clothes getting dried inside or there’s larger families having more people than what the house was originally designed for. And other than the sort of BIM dimension where you actually think of the people. So five people in a 2-bed needs this, 2 people in a 2-bed needs this.
STEPHEN WESTLEY Do you know where mould is most prevalent? It’s in new builds because they build them so quickly, seal them up and the mould just goes in and has a party. There’s a great one close to me at Silverstone racetrack and over the last 12=18 months they’ve released some lovely properties which look over the racetrack called the Escalades. Every single one of them has got mould in.
CONNOR STEVENSON I can almost guarantee that the loft insulation hasn’t been rolled properly in to the eaves and all the extraction fans have not been properly ducted to the outside. That seems to be the most common thing that we’ve found. We’ve found 244 fans that had not been ducted, they’d just been attached. And I think that’s not just us. In my old flat we couldn’t figure out, we had a plumber and an electrician come out to test the fan to see if I needed a new one in mould, a dark bathroom, no windows.
It was yeah, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this fan. I paid good money for them to come out and have a look and eventually I was like no, I don’t believe it, there’s something wrong with this. So I moved the fan out and there it was, it wasn’t ducted. The duct was running, but they hadn’t connected the fan to it. Probably what was happening was moistures got in and then into the void.
STEPHEN WESTLEY Personally we’ve just upgraded our fan. We’ve got a problem in part of our house and I’ve done everything. We had the roof rechecked because there was leaks apparently. We then had somebody come in to check the fans and they said they’re not sufficient for the size of the room, you need a more powerful, the fan is probably 30-40 years old and they said it’s not compliant with what it should be now, it needs to pump out a certain amount of the air.
So we upgraded that and then we even went as far as having a full mould analysis. So we took, there’s a company, a laboratory where you do an air sample and then you send it off for analysis and it gives you a full report. I’m happy to share that to show you what extremes you can go to. It was a concern, 2 years ago before we started this journey knowing nothing about mould, but then speaking to specialists and hearing about it and how it effects people so badly. I’ve got my family here, I know I’ve got mould, why have I not done anything about it.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, I’ve had it in my house as well. I think it’s very, very common. The other thing, before we started the first of these calls a couple of weeks ago, one of the building safety managers from Metropolitan Thames Valley said to me he’d been told of a natural remedy to this and it’s a plant called a Mother’s Tongue. And I bought one, I put it in our bathroom and it works, it absorbs the moisture. I’m not saying it solves all problems, but it’s quite a nice looking plant as well and for £20 you’ve got something that certainly can help.
I think part of where I’m going with this is to look at things from a point of view of, as you’re saying Stephen, stop it from happening in the first place. So, to inform the construction activity. Also then to be able to do investigations to understand what the cause of the problem us, but then have effective ways of contractors being able to deal with it. And then to put, for example, the sensor technology that Nick and you do to prevent it from happening again.
RICHARD FREER Is it possible to see that it’s happening before you see the mould?
STEPHEN WESTLEY What you can do is, what we monitor is temperature plus humidity plus time. So it’s not our science, we’ve got an algorithm, we took reference from different science papers to say what level. And I’m happy to share what we’ve used for the backend of ours and basically yeah, if the high temperature and humidity is to a certain level there is a high risk, low risk or no risk.
But going back to what George says, the contractors, if they were to put them in at the point of build then they’d have a good overview of how they’re buildings are performing and which ones are at risk and which ones aren’t. But it’s a cost, it’s something that’s not happened yet. So somebody needs to get a calculator for them and work out yeah, how much does it cost you to eradicate mould once you’ve got it.
RICHARD FREER But what I mean is before the mould is actually visible on the outside, is there a way of knowing that there is something going on that is invisible? Is there a sensor or something that can say there’s X amount of damp deep in this wall, so it’s going to happen, in an amount of time there’s going to be mould coming through.
CONNOR STEVENSON You’d have to marry up a whole different host. At the moment you’d have to marry up a host of different surveys to give you that. You could do thermographic images to see where your cold spots are, along with the IoT information that says this humidity is over here, here, the dew point is here. So the cold spots could become a problem, so that’s likely to grow there, or that’s a high risk there. That’s a really bad cold spot there, the insulation has failed, it’s not in the eaves, it’s not in this part of the wall, You’ve got high humidity in there, the chances are you’ll reach the dew point so you’ve got a chance of it growing here. But as far as I’m aware there’s no sensor that says you have mould in this house.
NICK DAVIES It’s the same with Stephen as well. Ultimately we’re looking at a number of different factors and calculating dew point and the risk of damp occurring, first of all. And then if damp pervades then the risk of mould occurring. Are we directly measuring whether the mould is there or not? No, absolutely not. What we’re doing is by understanding the dew point, understanding whether there’s enough heat in the home that’s getting into the fabric of the building to prevent the fabric of the building being cold enough and being surfaces where condensation will occur with an accuracy of about 99%.
So with a high degree of accuracy we can predict that if a house is likely to have developed mould or not whether it’s seen or otherwise. So that’s pretty much the business that we’re doing, so we absolutely can do that and it really is from the environmental monitoring.
GEORGE STEVENSON The other thing that I would like to be looking at is, to some extent, what Debbie was saying earlier, being able to look at examples. The digital record should tell you who has done the work, so if there is any retrofit activity, for example, the records should show you who’s done the work. Now, if a problem occurs then it may well be that that’s down to the competence of the contractor that’s carried out the work and diligence. And therefore if we could have proper digital records of who’s done the work at each stage, which we should be capturing now, then you can then use that to say…
It becomes almost like mandatory occurrence reporting, being able to go back and say what circumstances? Is it because of a particular trades person? Or is it a training issue? Or what circumstances is actually leading to that? So that’s one of the things I’d like to be able to do.
DEBBIE CARLTON It also depends whether you have ghosts in your house. If you have ghosts in your house you have cold areas. My brother’s house, he has ghosts and it’s definitely colder where the ghosts go, there’s no doubt about it. And my dog hates it, he goes into the room and barks into the corners where the ghosts visit, dog detection here could be quite useful!
GEORGE STEVENSON Just to clarify, Debbie is leading our consultancy group within BIM4Housing, so I think that’s an interesting measure, the paranormal aspect of things.
CONNOR STEVENSON That’s what we’re saying mould as it’s a ghostbuster, so I said cycloplasm or something like that. Is there a monitor that’s been programmed to count mould spores of the specific bad moulds? Has that been done?
STEPHEN WESTLEY I believe there is one but it’s about £60,000. I’ll see if I can get the details on it if anybody wants one. Obviously there is dust, so there is particular matter, but you're not going to know which kind of mould or why there is a buildup or an increase in dust.
NICK DAVIES We’ve got a partner that’s got basically AI imaging technology, so as part of the triage you can take a photo of the mould and it categorises the mould and the mould type from the image, but that’s not monitoring the spores.
STEPHEN WESTLEY There’s about a thousand different kinds of mould, it’s just never ending.
CONNOR STEVENSON Yes, some are worse than others. I think the guy’s business was Tech that we used, who came and did all of the dry fogging and mould tests and air tests and all of that and they look for certain bad ones.
NICK DAVIES But mould is mould at the end of the day, there’s some that’s worse than others and it’s really they all require similar conditions to thrive in. And it’s just understanding and making sure that we prevent those conditions to exist to begin with and you’re going to prevent the mould occurring. And that’s one of the reasons, I know George you were talking about this magic spray that kills mould, but I’ve been to so many similar networking events recently and any kind of mould killing spray or bleaching agent or mould wash is half the time it does the opposite. It might kill it immediately, it’s not the cure.
GEORGE STEVENSON No, no, I was similarly skeptical, but…
NICK DAVIES The danger though, the problem is…most of the time the sector’s just had faster horses and done more of the same, we’re doing more wash every single time and you’re not fixing the issue. Anything that takes us in that direction is a misdirection because it’s really understanding the root cause. And often there might be contractors that haven’t done a retrofit8 properly, so you’re not compliant with your PAS 202035.
It might be under-heating in the home, it might be a whole different number of factors. So it’s a really complex problem, but it’s making sure that we can go through a sequence and make it data driven, whatever that data looks like, and go through a sequence of understanding. And that’s the other thing, it’s what worked last time, what’s most effective each time, what didn’t work, and have that feedback loop.
GEORGE STEVENSON That feedback loop element, I absolutely agree. We need to look at what’s the problem, analyse the problem, come up with a solution and then capture the learnings from that. And then make those available. One of the things that we’ve done recently, Debbie has been involved with BIM4Housing for a long time. And one of the things we did years ago, we created a blackbox area on BIM4Housing. And the objective of that was to provide the means for people that came across problems to actually take a photograph and upload it so that we could then use that to inform the industry.
And Sharon McClure, she’s now president of the association for passive fire protection, she’s a specialist in fire stopping and things like that. She was a very keen user of this. So when she was coming across some fire stopping that wasn’t done properly that went straight up on to the blackbox site. But we didn’t really have the resources, because remember we’re all volunteers so there’s only so much that we can do. But we were capturing this information. And then I was at an event a couple of months ago that Judith Hackitt was at.
And she was talking about a sprinkler system that was put in and the pump for the sprinkler system could only had the right duty to pump to the 13th floor and there were 20 floors in this block. So the contractor had put in the wrong duty of pump, but they’d done that because the designer had given them that spec. And her argument was understandably that the contractor should have reported that. And i was thinking about that afterwards and I thought well, who would they report it to? Because they’ve won the job probably on a lowest price tender.
Yeah, they should have reported it, but I then learned that the Regulator will only accept notifications from either the principal accountable person or from a resident. So there was no mechanism for them to feed anything through. There’s an organisation called CROSS which is there as a body, again I think they’re volunteers, but there’s some funding behind them, to be able to do analysis of a particular problem, but we need to collect that information.
DEBBIE CARLTON But George, there’s only 30% or so awareness that CROSS exists in the industry. It’s extremely low, a lot of people are just not aware of it.
GEORGE STEVENSON And that’s where I’m coming from with this, Debbie. So what we’ve done, we’ve refreshed the blackbox site. So if anybody is interested in that put ‘blackbox’ in the chat and we can take you through what the blackbox site does. The idea is that if you come across a problem, report it, just put it up, it’s anonymous. You put it up on the blackbox site and what I’m trying to do is have that so that becomes a triage for CROSS, because they’re the ones that have got the resources to actually investigate these things.
But if we can capture the problems and then tie those back. I guess that goes back to what you’re saying as well Nick, let’s identify what the problems are and how they’re being solved, so that we can learn from them. I think it all comes down basically to architects, it’s architect’s fault really, are you there Justin? Shall we just get a little bit of perspective. Justin’s an architect, but he’s passionate in this whole area. How do you think we can do something about this?
JUSTIN GILLARD There was a comment earlier about moisture in current buildings like new builds that came up earlier. I remember being told when I was a teenager, we had relatives that lived in Somerset area. We were told that when new houses were built in that area they’d be left for a year to dry out before they were occupied. So I heard the anecdote earlier about modern buildings and i thought it just shows that there are many factors that lead into these situations, one of them is primarily economic, of course. And the cynical part of anyone things so why don’t we learn?
But no matter how much we all understand the cause of these problems there are other factors that prevent us from the manifestation of mould, let’s say. So that’s one answer to your question George. How do we tackle it? I guess educating people. I know somebody that was in control of a residential block and they were saying that the residents are just overcrowding the houses. So they don’t open the windows because it’s cold, so there’s no change of air.
Years ago when I used to attend CPDs as an architect we had a company come through and they showed us that in that CPD in that era the major cause of mould buildup in buildings was a lack of free flowing are to capture the dampness in the air and take it out of the building. And they showed us examples in the CPD where there was mould and they introduced, in one case, a huge fan. There was a fan that was an entire loft hatch and they said it took it out. So that’s my background and experience and knowledge of mould, how do we deal with it in the present?
I guess systems that make sure, for example, that when the ducts are in place but not attached, how does anyone get away with that? Someone is not joining the dots on that one, surely, but a building is being signed off as occupiable where the ducts are not connected. I do realise that there’s a series of constructions so if I’m the inspector and I come in and the ceiling is up and I can’t see the connection between the instruction device and the ducting, then how am I ever, without deconstructing the ceiling, how am I going to know whether it’s connected or not? I guess you can do smoke tests. Is that the sort of direction that you’re thinking of George? As in my response to the issues coming up.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, definitely. I think also looking at things in a joined up way. One of the things I think we’ve lost is the architect’s role in having an oversight of everything. Because the way that work packages are broken up now and design & build, there is a disconnect between anybody that’s got an overarching view of things and that’s a shame.
JUSTIN GILLARD There’s another part, conscientiousness, there’s another part of this as well, accountability. I know that the law is now aligning accountability with the responsible person. But if your reputation was on the line you wouldn’t allow a building to be occupied that actually has a problem with lack of ventilation that’s leading to mould that can lead to health issues. Between these meetings, I’ve actually got a friend who lives in a large house that they can’t afford to run. And as a result the house has got mould on the walls, because they don’t heat it, as I mentioned earlier about under-heated houses.
That friend of mine, he’s my age, he’s had bronchitis for 5 weeks. But myself and another friend know that part of the reason that he’s got bronchitis for 5 weeks is because he lives in an under-heated house with dry rot and it’s double fronted Georgian house, quite impressive, but it’s just not being maintained. So I’ve got a friend my age who’s got health issues and extended illnesses that are as a result of I think the mould in his house. And I’ve done other research into mould and it would appear that it can affect the central nervous system as well, there’s all kinds of health issues that relate to it.
I think some of them are not scientifically proven, but there is strong observable suggestion that some people can develop central nervous system type dysfunction because they are exposed to certain moulds and spores. I’m not an expert, I’ve done my own research because I’ve got a friend who is ill, lives in a mouldy house.
GEORGE STEVENSON One of the things I’m quite passionate about in this whole arena is the whole philosophy of risk transfer. So somebody must be to blame. And we’ve had that already on the fire safety side of things and I think this has got the potential for being even greater. Because as has been said already, the causes of mould are complex. And I agree with Connor that it’s challenging to actually raise the fact that the residents have got some responsibility in this, but clearly they do.
I know that the reason we ended up with mould is that we’re living in the house we have. It’s a small amount in the bathroom, for the reasons you were saying earlier Stephen, we didn’t have enough ventilation. So now we’ve replaced the fan and that seems to have addressed it. But I think one of the things that concerns me is if we just come back to the fact that the resident has got no equity or responsibility in this then we’re not going to actually solve the problem and people like Justin’s friend are going to be affected by it.
I was talking last week with one of the fire safety guys from one of the big councils. And he was saying that the real problem, and he’s got into a bit of a challenging discussion with Dame Judith about this in one of the events. Because she was saying it’s all down to you need to communicate more effectively, resident engagement is so critical. And he challenged her on it, he said so how do you go about doing that? And he explained what they did.
And they put a huge amount of effort into setting up demonstrations, they got suppliers to come and show what the fire safety measures that were being put in the apartments. And what they found is of something like 200 residents only 20 came to the event. And he said if they just won’t engage then what actually do we do. I’ve got one other bit to contribute on this, I met some guys a couple of years ago from a company I think it’s JML. And what they do is they put laundry systems and things like that into resident blocks.
And one of the reasons they do that is to give the tenants the means of drying their clothes in a proper industrial drying system. He said that quite often that’s either cut out from the project fee or even if it is installed the residents don’t use it. And therefore they need, I think they’re on some sort of basis of they have to pay something for it. They’re not getting any income because the residents are not choosing to use it. So there has to be some sort of responsibility there.
STEPHEN WESTLEY There is a government competition at the moment to address that. Because that landlord tenant engagement, how do they get their message to them, especially around Awaab’s Law? So if somebody reports an issue, obviously the landlord then takes action, but how do you keep the tenant updated around, not to say it’s the tenants fault but education around how to improve. And having sensors…I’ve seen this work before, if you show people information and show they’re improving the situation they will act.
I’ll give you an example. We did a project in France for a load of holiday homes around energy monitoring and people were abusing the system, using their EV chargers and leaving the aircon on all day when they went to the beach. What we did is we put some energy monitors in and they were allowed to use X amount per week, so 10 kilowatts per week. And we put an LED screen which was a smiley face/sad face if you were either below or above.
And they from going most people to abusing it to I think an 80% decrease in people actually hitting their limit. Because they were seeing or if they felt involved. And I think there is something there for Awaab’s Law, and obviously the government knows that it’s a weak spot of how do you get that message, how do you engage with the tenants and keep them updated.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s right, but for any communication it’s got to be two way and people have got to accept it. And again anecdotally when I was talking to people last week, they were saying what people are doing with fans, even though you’ve got a working fan people are taking the fuse out. Either because it’s noisy or they perceive it’s using too much energy or whatever.
DEBBIE CARLTON Another factor here is we’ve got to educate people, from kids as well, there’s bad parenting here. Anyone who;’s got teenagers, it’s very hard to even persuade a teenager to open a bedroom window to let any air in. So if you’re brought up you are always told you’ve got to open your bedroom window or whatever as a kid then you’re going to be a bit more open minded to some of the stuff later. But if you’re not brought up with any of that parenting around this then there is a gap as well, it’s a fact.
GEORGE STEVENSON I’m conscious that we’ve had a couple of new people join. Graham, where are you from?
GRAHAM WHITTINGHAM To be honest since 1990 I’ve had 35 years working in social housing. And for the last 3 1/2 years I’ve been working with a partner Danny, as well as with David Thurston, on supplying a product and a service in regard to mould. And I think you’re all hitting the nails, but there’s that many different nails that it becomes a bit of a confusion. In regard to mould itself and the point that Justin was raising, there are 150,000+ different moulds. And not all of them give off mycotoxins that are harmful to people.
And even everyone of us now, we’re sat in rooms inside houses and offices and there is mould there, there is mould in the air, you just can’t get away from it. But the readings would be acceptable under the circumstances. And the ones where the mycotoxins that are give-out, the Aspergillus and Penicillium being classic mycotoxins that are given out, it’s the repeated exposure that causes the problem, that causes the symptoms that people have. And they can have varying different degrees to it. In our experience a lot of the time it’s that multitude of things that you’re talking about.
I mean how many times does a surveyor go in a property and say click, oh there’s the noise, the fan is working, and never uses an anemometer to check whether it’s drawing adequately. The other thing we found is how many times do they get cleaned and serviced? There should be an annual inspection, landlords don’t do it. Is it the tenants responsibility to clean the fan? Well, I wouldn’t have thought so. Cleanliness is a massive thing with mould. If there’s not food there the mould won’t grow, it’s quite simple. The spores and the moisture can be there, but if there’s nothing for it to feed on then it won’t grow.
My partner Danny is a mould expert. He was a loss adjustor who went into a property and saw mushrooms flying about, the infrared heater is on, the blower is blowing in the insurance sector. And again, working in social housing as I have done, I also did a spell in insurance in the early 2000s. And when you get a bad leak in a property on a private job you have to have a drying certificate, that property has to be dry. In social housing they repair the leak and then they continue as if normal. And sometimes these leaks are that bad they can take 6, 9, 12 months to dry out in a property.
So the relative humidity, having fans on it’s still going to be an opportunity if everything else is right for mould to grow. I’m based in South Manchester and locally we were working with a landlord here. And there was a lady in a property and every morning she woke up and she felt really, really ill. And during the day she got better, she said I feel fine. And the mould on the ceiling in the bedroom was actually causing her to feel unwell. So there’s a massive knowledge gap on mould. And one of the things that we do at Mould Specialist UK is we want to train and educate and we do that with all of the social landlords that we work with.
We’re working with L&Q, Taurus, Star Housing, St Ledger Homes, and St Ledger in particular are revolutionising the way that they operate with their tenants. And you’re right, a lot of it is communication. And going back to the point that Debbie made about opening windows. Technically you only have to open them for 5 minutes a day, you let most of the dampness that’s in. Because don’t forget every night when we’re in bed sleeping we give off a third of a pint of water. So if there’s two of you in a room that’s two-thirds of a pint of water and that moisture you need to get rid of. And opening the windows for 5 minutes, it’s gone and it’s a simple thing.
But if you open the windows, and I live in Manchester and it’s absolutely peeing down outside and he relative humidity outside is 70-odd percent, then I’m just letting all of that moisture in. So you’ve got to have that level of understanding and awareness. Another unknown fact about mould and Penicillium, 50% of the UK population are allergic to it. You go to the doctors and you are not feeling well, they want to put you on antibiotics. The next question is are you allergic to Penicillium? Because if he gives you Penicillium as an antibiotic it will make you feel even worse. So it really is about knowledge.
DAVID THURSTON I think the other important thing there is that there are very few chemical products on the market that actually can inactivate Penicillium or Aspergillus mould. Which is my learning with my business, our relationship. My business is all about two technologies, in principle. One is the use of gaseous ozone aqueous ozone for different applications of use. My journey with gaseous ozones started at Oxford University back in 2012 where I was approached about mould issues inside student accommodation.
And we put very small, unobtrusive ozone devices into student rooms by the windows, just to try and manage the circulation of the air by using ozone to inactivate the mould spores, and it worked quite well. More recently, my business does work within the prison service on four different fronts using a solution that we produce that Graham markets called HOCL Hypochlorous Acid. Well, Hypochlorous Acid in my experience and knowledge is really the only real effective tool for killing mould spores, Penicillium or Aspergillus.
And we know this because my business is very much in the food industry. We work with food manufacturers and food processors and they have big problems with mould spores, particularly Penicillium and Aspergillus in cold store. And we manage the environmental air space by fogging with our fogging systems into those cold stores to breakdown any Penicillium or Aspergillus. And to be able to say that we can kill it we had to go through a process with an independent laboratory which is a BSI 17025 approved laboratory specific to manufacturing…
where we did all of the testing relevant to mould spores and yeasts and bacteria where we have to go through due diligence to test to see whether or not our solution can kill it, the contact time which is important, and the log kill. So the log kill needs to be in excess of 5 logs, so 99.99%. And the contact time needs to be the contact time defined by the BSI standard. All of that we’ve done and all of that we have the knowledge for. And the great thing about HOCL is unlike its counterparts, its counterparts rely upon high toxicity. What does that mean?
High alkalinity, so anything north of a pH of 9, 10, 11, 12 or more which makes it toxic which means you have to use Kosh. Whereas the pH of our solution is only 5.5-5.6. And the difference is that HOCL is like a silver bullet, whereas your alkaline based bleach and chemical solutions has to overwhelm the spore. The spores are notoriously tough because they wear a coat of armour. And it’s the coat of armour that protects the bacterium from being destroyed. And that’s the point, if you don’t kill it correctly then you never get rid of it. And it’s how you kill it and it’s the contact time of kill that’s relveant.
With HOCL, unlike its alkaline counterpart, the microbe of HOCL passes directly through the around into the spore and it destroys the proteins being produced inside that spore almost instantly. It can’t reform, it can’t re-mass. And that’s the benefit, and of course it’s safe because HOCL is produced from tap water, a little bit of salt and a little bit of vinegar. Which has been my quest for 13 years to bring an innovation to market that has the point of difference over all of its counterparts. And it’s safe and it’s non-allergenic, so if you’re going into a property where you have got Penicillium mould and you’re dealing with it using a chemical, the chances are the client is suffering from the effects of Penicillium or Aspergillus mould and then you’re chucking some form of chemical around. Well, guess what? Neither are going to help in their health, so that’s why the technology we have…
GRAHAM WHITTINGHAM Can I just add there, David, because I think you’ve hit a critical point. Mould has a root system, so when a lot of the social landlords have been using the chemical base, they’ve been wiping the mould down and thinking oh yeah, it’s done it, the bleach has discoloured it. But they don’t understand that the roots are left behind and like mowing the lawn when you’ve got weeds in you think you’ve got rid of the weeds but you haven’t, the roots are there and it comes again. And that’s why there is this vicious circle going round of killing it with chemical based stuff that doesn’t work.
DAVID THURSTON And that’s why the reference I make to the silver bullet is really important because the silver bullet passes through the cell wall and directly into the centre of the spore of the bacterium. And at that point it breaks down the proteins that are being produced by that spore that cause it to live and to multiply. And that’s the critical part, so you’re killing it from the inside. And once you’ve killed it that spore can’t reform or remass because you’ve killed the stem.
GEORGE STEVENSON Connor, does that answer the question that you asked earlier?
CONNOR STEVENSON I think so, it sounds like there is a solution there. We discussed earlier before you came on that you only see about 30% of the actual mould and there’s still 70% that’s sat inside the building material, inside the fabric of the building that you don’t see. So if that’s a solution that can penetrate into the roots then I think it’s definitely something that I’d like to take to the executive.
DAVID THURSTON We did a lot of research with the NHS a few years ago at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham where we did direct comparison between their chlorine based chemical solution and HOCL. And one of the interesting points that came out of a 6 month pilot was yes, we achieved all of the microbial kill that we were looking to obtain, particularly on MRSA and also on C difficile.
But we also had feedback from patients in wards where the cleaners were cleaning around elderly infirm patients, who said when you’re using that solution we don’t end up having breathing issues or feeling unwell compared to when you’re using your chemical base. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s like no shit Sherlock. You shouldn’t be using it. If you’re going to take your bottle of bleach from underneath your kitchen sink that you use to clean your bathroom, guess what it says? Don’t breathe the spray in. Well, good luck with that one, it’s a spray.
GRAHAM WHITTINGHAM And they put perfume in it and when you can smell the perfume, oh, you’re breathing in the spray.
DAVID THURSTON HOCL was tested by the World Health Organisation back in 2019, fortuitously before Covid, to see whether or not its antiseptic tendencies were better than any of its counterparts used for burns, used for gangrene and other open lesions, Staphylococcus being another. And they proved without any doubt at all that it was far more effective and far more efficient.
And I’ll give you one last scenario. I’ve had an enquiry recently through the RFU for Bath Rugby Club who train at Bath University where one of their up and coming players recently had an operation to a shoulder. And that operation had healed almost, and he was having a training night on an astroturf type synthetic surface. And he caught Staphylococcus in the wound and Staphylococcus is not nice. And they tried to blame it on animal faeces, bird faeces which of course Staphylococcus doesn’t come from animal or bird faeces.
But when we did some more testing we found that the Staphylococcus was actually coming from phlegm that players were spitting onto the synthetic surface and that’s where this kid caught it from. So what we’re not using is a small tractor with a spray bar, spraying the surface with HOCL to kill off the Staphylococcus. For spores in mould we have had success in the prison service, we’ve had success in food manufacturing and food processing in the same way because it’s a big problem. And we’ve had success in other sectors as well, private health care, care homes.
GRAHAM WHITTINGHAM Yeah, we’ve never had a call; back. We’ve been using the product for 4 and a half years, we’ve never had a call back.
GEORGE STEVENSON HOCL, what does that stand for?
DAVID THURSTON Hypochlorous Acid.
GEORGE STEVENSON So that isn’t your product, that’s a technology that you are implementing.
DAVID THURSTON HOCL is the terminology of the solution that we produce, the chemical infrastructure is called HOCL. It’s how you make it, how you produce it and the ingredients that go into producing it. So when we produce our HOCL we’re looking to achieve in excess of 99% purity. What does that mean? Competitors in the market, depending on how they produce it, may only achieve say somewhere between 60-80% purity. The other 20 or 30% is hypochlorite. Well, hypochlorite is bleach.
What we look to do we’ve our electrolysis process which is the sweet spot, is we buffer the soltuon before electrolysis and we fix the pH at 5.5-5.6. By fixing the pH we guarantee that our end product is over 99% pure HOCL which is what the World Health Organisation achieved when they tested it as an antiseptic. So that’s the point. HOCL is the word for Hypochlorous solution, hypochlorite is your bleach and they’re determined by their pH levels. Hypochlorous is very different in effect and obviously it doesn’t have the same detrimental effect on human health or the eco-structure or the environment either.
JUSTIN GILLARD Just going back to the question a while back. I was involved in health care medical planning for a decade, I’ve been involved in hospital design and infection control. So I’ve also got a bit of an understanding of what’s being said and we know about myocilin resistance, Staphylococcus, MRSA. But the reason I put my hand up was this. Debbie mentioned about teenagers not opening windows. When we talked about the basic point, how do we fix this? How, from a design point of view, might this be addressed? And I said about education and whatever.
One of the things I think with some of these moulds, there’s many moulds but not all of them are damaging to people’s health, But if you could see the mould then you’d take action and I think potentially part of what’s happening is that people can’t visually see the problem. Now, if you had some kind of monitoring device. if there was a monitoring device in my room that basically lit up when spores that were damaging to household’s health were detected. And it basically said take action: open all of the windows and doors for 4 minutes, as apparently they do in Germany, and close them again.
If there were some kind of device that said at present there is an elevated level of dangerous mould, perhaps people would take the required action instead of saying…you mention, Graham, about relative humidity outside, so what’s the point of opening the window on a rainy day with high humidity? When the air quality outside might be worse than it is inside the house. And I learned something, the fact that mould requires food, I had no idea. Because I know that it lives on walls in my friends’ house, but it requires a food source, is that right?
GRAHAM WHITTINGHAM Yeah, it does. It loves cellulose. And don’t forget that the big thing with mould is that people need to understand that the spores are between 1 and 20 microns in size. Now asbestos is between 1 and 10 microns, and that’s why it gets through the respiratory system so easily. And if it’s in your lungs, we know that your lungs can’t break down asbestos. But with mould, depending upon your own bodily reaction to the mould and the mycotoxins, it can cause anything from mild symptoms to really severe.
When we’re talking about Awaab’s Law, we worked for Rochdale Borough wide Housing, we’re now debarred because one of our directors is a board member there so we can’t work for them. And basically, that was a disrepair case. So what you won’t hear is that their solicitor says oh yes, if you elongate the case you get more cash out of this. And in the meantime that young lad is in a property that’s having a really adverse effect on his health, it’s crazy.
RICHARD FREER Can I just bring someone in please. We’ve had hundreds of meetings over the last few years and never once has our admin manager said anything during a meeting. Jiss, you’ve got a question.
JISS I was thinking about trickle vents, nobody was talking about trickle vents in a property. The trickle vents should be always open so that will reduce the condensation inside the house and they’ll reduce the mould growth.
CONNOR STEVENSON Yeah, we did an experiment with trickle vents and found actually unless it’s really windy the change to your indoor temperature is so miniscule. But the change to the air quality was massive. That was with different types of heating as well, dealing with quantum storage heaters, old storage heaters, standard gas and infrared and it made no difference. Particularly with infrared heating, it made no difference to the temperature. And that’s the thing that people, oh no, I always keep my trickle vents closed in the winter because it’s cold outside. And then explain it to tenants well, actually, unless it’s winds over a certain amount, you’re not going to see any difference.
NICK DAVIES Yeah, I’ll back that up. There’s a number of different things I probably want to bring together on this, but absolutely trickle vents, looking at the whole home ventilation strategy is really fundamental. It comes back to what we were talking about earlier on which is the root cause. I sounds like, by the way, there is an amazing product there that’s not going to end of itself having any volatiles and harm people around cleaning mould. Great, cleaned it, but what’s the root cause?
And root cause is poor ventilation, excess humidity and under heating. They’re the three main root causes of mould occurring in the property to begin with. So ventilation, the ability of the property to make sure that it’s getting rid of that excess humidity from the property is really important. Trickle vents, effective ventilation in your wet rooms the bathroom and the kitchen. Has it been serviced? Has it been cleaned? Has it been deactivated? Was it the right specification to begin with? Have you got undercuts underneath the door? There’s a whole backlog to that. Under heating, OK great, you’ve got the most efficient heating system on the planet, but can the resident afford to heat their home?
Under heating in 50% of cases in our data shows is the primary causal factor. So it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the ventilation, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got effective fans. If you can’t afford to heat the home, guess what? You’re going to create surfaces where condensation is going to occur because you’re going to achieve the dew point, no matter how many times you go out and clean it. So you’re coming back to what’s the root causes that’s going on. And we’ve got some great different disparate solutions that we’re all talking about here, we’re all part of the jigsaw. But if we come back to the question.
The question is what’s the framework look like for Awaab’s Law? And Awaab’s Law is quite specific in terms of things like response times and that…decision making to make sure that you’re doing effective fixes. And I think we probably need to come back to, there’s a huge amount of science behind a lot of these things, but what have we got to do to make sure that we respond effectively and arm and give the right tools, the right insights, the right capabilities to housing providers to respond first of all to Awaab’s Law. And then we move from that response, which is reactive.
And to be honest, the 4.4 million social houses out there, we’re not suddenly going to remodel all of those houses to modern standards. So we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got. Be more reactive and be more focused and targeted, then move to how do we prevent this moving forward? Because you’re certainly not going to change all of these properties overnight. And resident education, there is a perception that trickle vents let all of the heat out of the house. That’s a resident education and resident engagement piece.
Turning the fans off, that’s a resident education piece, it’s what’s best for them, to make sure that we can feed this information back to them.
Did you know by turning that fan off you’re causing this problem in your home? Did you know by blocking these vents you’re causing this problem in your home? Did you know that by not heating long enough is causing a problem in your home? We’ve got to engage the resident as part of this and not treat them as the enemy. I work fora really large housing provider in Merseyside. And let’s be honest, within some of the vulnerable society. They are not cash rich, let’s be really clear. Someone and knocks on their door and says we can get you £5,000 for doing nothing, who’s going to say no?
We follow the claims farmers going postcode by postcode from the disrepair claims that come in. That didn’t follow our data in terms of where the actual issues were, it’s absolutely claims farmers. But you can’t always blame the resident for what’s going on, in actual fact you absolutely cannot. I sat with the ombudsman and regulator, you cannot blame the resident in any way, shape or form. Has the home been an effective home to begin with for the people that are living in it? OK, if the resident isn;’t educated enough to understand the impact on that home, OK let’s do out best.
But where we’ve done that and they’re still not obliging but we’ve got the data that sits behind it to show that we’ve done our best, then that isn’t the resident, but they are the outliers. And I think the vast majority of people just want a safe, warm home.
GEORGE STEVENSON I’d just like to come back on that. I absolutely agree with you, Nick. One of the things that we’ve not mentioned which is something that Alex and I have been talking about. Alex is from Totalmobile and he’s working with Nick already. He’s got one of the technologies that we’re hoping to have as part of a solution, is 360 photography. So the point is what we’re doing, in fire safety we’re encouraging people to take 360 photographs so that the evidence of what is there in terms of fire safety measures is actually captured in a way that is then auditable etc.
Now, what I think is possibly part of the solution is when the person goes to first visit the site to identify what the problem is, if they take a 360 photo at that stage, then not only can you see the context of that particular item, rather than simply taking a series of still photographs, you can’t see maybe what’s around it. And it also gives you information about how that space is being used. So my recommendation is that we do that. The second thing is that we’re already capturing, Regulation 38 (the firs safety regulations) requires the landlord to have a set of floor plans with the safety critical assets on them from a fire perspective.
Now that means that you can identify against each space what that space is supposed to be used for. So if, for example, it’s being used for storage or something like that, that needs to be reflected back in a fire strategy plan. Now if we can then look at that from a point of view of what spaces are being affected by the mould? What are they adjacent to? What’s above it, what’s below it? And also then you can look at that from a point of view of if there is any internal ventilation, which systems and circuits are supposed to be performing in that area?
I guess what I’m saying here is looking at things from a golden thread perspective rather than simply looking at we’re solving a problem with damp and mould. Actually what we’re doing is looking at things from a point of view of asset management. What does the building contain? What systems are in place to protect people? And how can we then pull those together? Because then if somebody comes in and does some remedial works, they could turn a good space into a poor space because of the remedial works they’ve done. And that ought to be something that we can pick up.
GRAHAM WHITTINGHAM Has anybody heard of the Swiss cheese model? The Swiss cheese model was developed by the NHS fundamentally. Swiss cheese has holes in it. Can I put something up on the screen? (shares screen). This is one we’ve developed as part of our training. So you’re basically going back to the core issues that was explained before. My view is you go down this route of building design and fabric. And the point you made eloquently, when we change some timber windows to a UPVC and made them hermetically sealed we fundamentally change the way that building was. And nobody ever took any notice of it really because they didn’t know, similarly with doors.
So it’s about the building design and fabric and then going through the stuff that’s on there. The building maintenance issues and then, more particularly, the resident behaviours and awareness. The whole point that everybody has been talking about is what does the customer need to do? And I can tell you now quite categorically and I can show you the evidence in photographic terms that we’ve had for over 4 1/2 years. The biggest problems that we have are down to conditions of the property per the tenant, more so that the building design and fabric. It’s the cleaning, the way that they dry their clothes inside, the way that they do things in their properties. They open pans when they’re cooking, they don’t close the doors to the bathroom.
Has the bathroom door got a gap on it underneath that’s going to allow for the air to be sucked through and out with the fan? There’s loads of stuff and they are your core issues. And the last bit is going down on to the monitoring in the data. And housing associations themselves, a lot of them are still living in many which ways the dark ages. That’s one of the things that we do our training on.
GEORGE STEVENSON One of the things that we announced last time was that we’re looking to get solutions together and we were proposing to do a challenge. So getting maybe a couple of landlords, a couple of technology companies and designers and FMs together to actually come up with some solutions. I still think that’s a good thing to do and we can have different ways of approaching things, perhaps. So if everybody is still onboard with that we’ll arrange another meeting. We’ve got the forum meeting next Wednesday. We have the forum meeting every month and we typically get…
RICHARD FREER We usually get 200-300 people come along, the numbers are building all of the time. This will be a little bit smaller, probably 150-200. It’s regular monthly, we look at different issues every month, have different guest speakers every month. It opens up to a lot of other meetings, some of you have probably come into this meeting via the forum. That’s on the 3rd December at 11am. Actually if you’re interested in doing the challenge put ‘challenge’ in the chat. I know Alex who is co-leading this group with George has got quite a team together.
GEORGE STEVENSON Including Connor.
CONNOR STEVENSON Yeah, Wheatley are very interested in being part of the challenge, taking that to some members of the exec team there.
CHAT
stephen westley (External)… Blackbox. George Stevenson I sent you my own mould report and I am happy for you to share.
Nick Davies (External)… Damp & Mould are just one Hazard as a consequence of under heating, underheating on its own is a significant hazard.
Debbie Carlton (External)…. George, I have to go..we need to build a knowledge map here to close the gap
Andy Cumberpatch (External)… Forum graham@mouldspecialistsuk.co.uk Challenge
Awaab’s Law Workshop – Structured Academic Summary & Key Insights
1. Purpose and Context of the Workshop
This workshop examined the complexity of diagnosing, remediating, and preventing damp and mould within the new statutory environment created by Awaab’s Law. Themes included scientific understanding, building physics, resident behaviour, technology integration, competence gaps, and the need for consistent national practice.
2. Scientific and Technical Understanding of Mould
- Only ~30% of mould is visible; most lies within building fabric.
- Chemical treatments often fail to kill roots; HOCL-based remediation may offer a scientifically validated alternative.
- Mould thrives where ventilation is inadequate, humidity is high, or surfaces reach dew point.
- Sensors (temperature, humidity, time, dew point) can predict mould risk before visible growth develops.
3. Competence, Standards and Regulatory Gaps
- No national occupational standards for mould exist, despite serious health risks.
- Major knowledge gaps persist among FMs and surveyors (e.g., non-ducted fans, untested extraction, poor maintenance).
- Response times under Awaab’s Law (24 hr / 5 days) are widely seen as unrealistic without structured triage and diagnostics.
4. Housing Provider and Operational Challenges
- Fuel poverty, under-heating, and resident behaviours strongly influence mould proliferation.
- Many IoT deployments fail due to poor vendor quality or lack of internal skills to interpret data.
- Large housing associations face scale issues: thousands of homes with inconsistent conditions, behaviours, and retrofit history.
5. Technology, Data and Digital Approaches
- Potential solutions include 360° photography for contextual evidence, IoT + thermography integration, structured libraries of symptoms and causes, and Golden Thread–aligned data sets.
- A multi-source data ecosystem is required; IoT alone cannot diagnose root causes.
6. Behavioural and Social Complexity
- Resident engagement remains low; education must be two-way and supported by feedback loops.
- Tenants often disable fans or close vents due to noise or perceived heat loss.
- Behaviour cannot be blamed, but must be understood and contextualised within building performance and affordability constraints.
7. Industry Collaboration and Best Practice Development
- Participants support creating a shared diagnosis library, evidence base, and case-study-driven best practice.
- BIM4Housing intends to mirror its fire-safety standards with damp & mould frameworks, including knowledge maps and blackbox reporting aligned with CROSS.
KEY INSIGHTS
1. Mould requires a holistic diagnosis involving building fabric, ventilation, heating, and behaviour.
2. HOCL may provide deeper, safer remediation than traditional chemical washes.
3. Under-heating and affordability are central drivers of mould risk.
4. Competence gaps across the sector severely undermine remediation quality.
5. Data fragmentation prevents effective triage and response.
6. IoT requires contextual interpretation to become meaningful.
7. Resident education and behavioural nudges are essential.
8. Digital evidence (360° photos, structured data) increases auditability.
9. Industry must align around standardised workflows and diagnostic tools.
10. Awaab’s Law timelines will be unachievable without systematic triage.
KEY RISKS
1. Legal exposure from failure to meet 24-hour response requirements.
2. Persistent misdiagnosis due to reliance on surface-level inspections.
3. Recurrence of mould when roots remain untreated.
4. Incorrect installation of fans, insulation, or retrofits leading to latent defects.
5. Resident health deterioration from exposure to Aspergillus/Penicillium spores.
6. Low resident engagement undermining treatment success.
7. Absence of mandatory competence frameworks.
8. Over-reliance on ineffective chemical products.
9. Lack of digital evidence complicates liability and learning.
10. Market infiltration of unverified “solutions.”
ACTION POINTS
Immediate
- Create a standardised triage pathway combining environmental data, building condition, and behavioural indicators.
- Begin collecting 360° evidence during first visits.
- Establish a cross-industry diagnosis library of symptoms, causes, and interventions.
- Formalise a multi-organisation “challenge team” to prototype solutions.
Medium-Term
- Develop a national competence framework for mould assessment.
- Define Golden Thread–aligned data standards for mould-related assets and interventions.
- Evaluate remediation technologies (including HOCL) via independent trials.
- Build scalable resident engagement tools based on feedback loops and real-time data.
Long-Term
- Create an integrated national knowledge map for damp & mould.
- Align blackbox reporting with CROSS to form a national learning loop.
- Develop digital diagnostic tools (similar to NBS rulebases).
- Support capital planning for retrofit of ventilation, insulation and heating systems.