The Cold Inside the Wall: Building a Damp Scorecard for Council Housing Repairs

Every autumn the same ritual repeats itself in town halls across the country. A housing committee receives a report noting that winter presents challenges, that demand for repairs rises, and that additional resources have been identified where possible. The report is approved without a vote. Somewhere in a third-floor flat, a tenant is wiping black mould from a bedroom wall with a supermarket spray and wondering whether anyone will ever knock on the door.

The gap between those two scenes is not a gap in compassion. It is a gap in data. Councils know how many damp and mould cases they have opened. They know how long those cases have been open. They know how many repair jobs required a second visit because the first one did not hold. What they rarely do is publish that information in a form that a tenant, a scrutiny councillor or a local campaign group can act on.

That is the work. Not a petition, not a protest outside the civic centre, but a ledger — assembled from the council's own records, checked against its own budget, and published before the next housing revenue account decision lands.

What the rulebook now gives you

The ground has shifted. Since October 2025, social landlords have been bound by statutory timescales for investigating and remedying hazards in the home, covering damp and mould alongside other serious risks, with emergency cases handled in days rather than months. The Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code sets out what a reasonable response to a repair complaint looks like, and its published determinations name landlords who fail those standards. The Regulator of Social Housing's consumer standards and tenant satisfaction measures create a further set of public numbers — on repairs completed within timescale, on whether homes are well maintained, on complaint handling.

None of this enforces itself. A statutory deadline that nobody counts is a sentence in a document. Your job is to be the counter.

The five figures that make a scorecard

You do not need every dataset the housing department holds. You need five that, taken together, tell an honest story.

Open damp and mould cases, and their age. Not just the total, but how many have been open for more than thirty days, more than ninety days, more than six months. The tail of the distribution is where the scandal lives.

Time from report to inspection, and inspection to completion. Ask for medians and for the number of cases exceeding the statutory timescale. Averages flatter; counts of breaches do not.

Repeat visits. What proportion of repair jobs needed more than one attendance? A repair that is completed twice is a repair that was not completed. This single figure exposes poor diagnosis, rushed work and contractor incentive structures better than any service satisfaction survey.

Budget against spend. What was allocated for responsive repairs and for planned works in the last two financial years, and what was actually spent? Look for underspend. An underspend on repairs in a year when the damp backlog grew is the most damning number a council can produce.

Contractor performance. Monthly key performance indicator reports, any service credits or penalties applied, and the value of variations to the repairs contract. These sit with the client-side contract manager and are almost always disclosable.

Asking for the receipts

Requests for this material generally fall under the Environmental Information Regulations rather than the Freedom of Information Act, because housing conditions engage the state of the elements of the environment and factors affecting human health. The distinction matters less than the drafting.

Be specific. Name the period, name the report, name the contractor. Ask for existing documents and datasets in their existing format, including spreadsheets, rather than asking the authority to produce new analysis — a request to compile and calculate invites refusal on cost grounds. Ask for the anonymised complaint log with dates, categories and outcomes. Ask for the damp and mould action plan submitted to the regulator, where a landlord has referred itself or been asked to produce one. Ask for the housing revenue account business plan and the current capital programme, both of which are ordinarily public anyway.

If your council has an arm's-length management organisation, the request must go there as well. If the repairs service is delivered through a wholly owned company, that entity holds the operational data and cannot hide behind the parent authority.

Set a reminder for the statutory deadline. Log the date of the response. If material is late or withheld, ask for an internal review immediately — and if the pattern repeats, refer the matter to the Information Commissioner. A council that cannot answer questions about mould in its own housing stock is itself a finding.

Turning numbers into a public scorecard

Build one table. Rows for each measure; columns for the last eight quarters; a final column for what the council said it would achieve. Put it on a single page, date it, and state in the footer where every figure came from and when it was released.

Then publish it monthly, on the same day, so that comparison is possible. Send it to every tenant and resident association in the borough. Send it to the chair of the housing scrutiny panel and to the relevant opposition spokesperson. Send it, courteously and with a covering note, to the director of housing.

The point is not to embarrass individuals. It is to make the invisible visible, in a form that can be read aloud in ninety seconds at a public meeting.

The budget moment

Housing revenue accounts are long documents covering thirty years, which is precisely why they reward close reading. Ask where the responsive repairs line sits, how it has moved year on year, and what assumptions about inflation and workload underpin it. Ask whether money has been transferred out of the repairs budget to support other pressures, and whether the capital programme for kitchens, bathrooms and roof renewals has been reprofiled into later years.

A reprofiled capital programme is not a neutral accounting decision. It is a decision that a home can wait. Be ready to say which homes, and for how long.

Damp is a choice, made annually

No council sets out to house people in conditions that make children ill. But every year, budgets are set, contracts are signed, and certain works slip into the following financial year. Those are choices, and they should be countable.

The thermometer will do the talking for the next four months. What the rest of us can do is make sure the paperwork is ready before spring, so that when the next housing budget arrives, the question is not whether the council cares about damp, but why its own figures say it has not spent the money to fix it.