UK’s biggest housing association fined over four-year failure to fix window

The UK’s biggest housing association has been fined after a watchdog found that its failure to carry out repairs to a child’s bedroom window for four years left the home mouldy and caused serious illness in the family that lived there.

Clarion housing association showed “no urgency” to fix the window, instead leaving it boarded up, despite repeated complaints from the tenant who said the mould caused his asthma to flare up and affected his son’s mental health.

In a statement, Clarion housing association said: “We apologise sincerely to the resident and their family in this case. The issue took too long to resolve and our communication was not good enough. Since then, we have made improvements that would now prevent this from happening.”

Related: Crack down on mouldy homes in England or more will die, warns doctors’ body

The case was one of a number of “severe maladministration” examples highlighted by the housing ombudsman to show that some social landlords were not ready for Awaab’s law regulations requiring them to swiftly fix serious health hazards in the home.

The regulations are named for two-year-old Awaab Ishak , who died in 2020 after direct exposure to mould in his family’s home. The landlord, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH), ignored the family’s complaints and blamed them for causing the mould. RBH later apologised for failing Awaab, his family and community, and said it had accelerated remedial work at the estate where he lived.

The housing ombudsman, Richard Blakeway, said landlords often had “lost sight of the person” in these cases, instead focusing “on the building rather than the individuals within it” and risking overlooking their legal obligations to tenants.

Blakeway said the physical and mental impact of cold, draughty windows or damp and mould regularly came up during ombudsman investigations. “They reveal residents living in insecure conditions, without natural light or ventilation because windows are boarded-up for years as repairs or replacements are delayed.”

He said the cases – involving 13 housing association and local authorities – showed a lack of urgency in landlord responses. “Is it ethical for landlords to decide that windows considered unfit today should not be scheduled for replacement for a decade – and not until 2036 in one case we investigated last month?”

Others cases cited by the ombudsman include the failure of L&Q housing association to fix windows despite it knowing they had needed replacing for over a decade, and Tower Hamlets council “unreasonably” delaying window repairs to a property for 134 weeks. Both were ordered to pay compensation to tenants.

Accent housing association was ordered to pay compensation to a family with two disabled children whose window was boarded up and left unfixed for nine months after it was broken as a result of antisocial behaviour. According to the ombudsman, Accent wrongly told the residents they were responsible for glazing repairs.

A common theme of the cases cited was of landlords ignoring complaints, not returning tenants’ calls and, in some cases, having no record of tenant vulnerabilities, meaning they failed to understand the health impact of delayed repairs.

Awaab’s law , which applies just to social landlords, is not yet in force. The Labour government has pledged to extend the law to private landlords.