Landlords with the most damp & mould complaints

London & Quadrant Housing Trust has the most upheld damp and mould findings in this Landlord Record ranking, with 355 adverse published decisions tagged to damp or mould. The full live table is available in the worst damp and mould ranking.

The phrase "worst landlords for damp and mould" needs a precise definition. This page does not count every repair report, every internal complaint, or every tenant affected by damp. It counts published Housing Ombudsman determinations that Landlord Record has structured, where the decision has a damp or mould theme and an adverse outcome against the landlord.

That makes the ranking narrow, but useful. Ombudsman decisions are not casual anecdotes: they are formal determinations after a complaint has travelled through the landlord's own process and reached an external decision. When damp and mould appears repeatedly in those determinations, it gives residents and researchers a traceable way to see where published service failures are clustering.

The ranking sits inside our current index of 16,224 published decisions across 603 landlords, including 2,499 decisions marked as severe maladministration. Source: Landlord Record analysis of Housing Ombudsman decisions (OGL v3.0).

The largest damp-related theme row returned by getThemeCounts() is Damp and mould, with 5,641 tagged decisions in the current build. Source: Landlord Record analysis of Housing Ombudsman decisions (OGL v3.0).

Damp and mould ranking table

The table ranks landlords by adverse published decisions tagged to damp or mould. A row means the landlord appeared in the Ombudsman's published decision data and the decision was tagged with a damp-related theme. It does not mean the landlord has the same number of current unresolved damp cases.

How to read the ranking

Read the table as an Ombudsman-record signal, not as a complete landlord quality score. A large landlord may generate more published decisions because it manages more homes and more repairs. A smaller landlord may appear lower on raw volume but still have serious findings in individual cases. The ranking is useful because it identifies where upheld damp and mould determinations are concentrated in the published record.

The safest next step is to open the landlord profile, read the decision summaries and look for patterns. Repeated findings about inspection delays, missed repairs, complaint handling or failure to consider the resident's circumstances are more informative than a single number on its own. You can browse all landlord records from the landlords index or compare social landlords through worst housing associations.

Also watch what the Ombudsman was actually asked to decide. Damp and mould cases often sit across several issues at once: the original repair, the inspection record, communication with the resident, missed appointments, temporary works, complaint handling and whether the landlord learned from the case. The table tells you which landlords appear most often in the damp-related adverse record. The decision pages explain the conduct behind the count.

If you are a resident, the ranking should not replace your own evidence. Photos, dates, medical letters where relevant, repair logs, complaint acknowledgements and copies of the landlord's replies matter more for your individual case than a league-table position. Use the ranking to understand the landlord's published record, then keep your own complaint focused on what happened in your home and what outcome you need.

Why Awaab's Law matters here

Damp and mould is not just a comfort issue. The official response to serious damp and mould in social housing now sits in the shadow of Awaab's Law, the name commonly used for legal duties introduced after Awaab Ishak's death. Those duties are about requiring social landlords to respond to serious hazards within fixed timeframes.

This page does not try to decide whether a landlord has breached Awaab's Law. The ranking is built from Housing Ombudsman decisions, not court findings. What it can show is which landlords have the most published adverse determinations involving damp or mould, and that can be a useful starting point for residents, journalists and campaigners looking for repeated service-failure patterns.

The link between the law and this ranking is practical rather than automatic. Awaab's Law raises the standard expected when social landlords face serious hazards. Ombudsman decisions show how landlords handled real complaints, including whether they acted reasonably, kept residents informed and put things right. Those are different routes, but they point to the same underlying question: did the landlord respond properly when damp and mould affected someone's home?

For the legal framework, read our guide to Awaab's Law explained. If you are dealing with mould now, use the practical guide to black mould in a rented home alongside your landlord's complaint process.

Compensation context

The damp-related compensation row returned by getCompensationByIssue() for Damp and mould contains 3,759 compensated decisions, with a median ordered award of £700, an interquartile range of £350 to £1,320, and a maximum ordered award of £358,282. Source: Landlord Record analysis of Housing Ombudsman decisions (OGL v3.0).

Compensation is a useful severity signal, but it is not a simple price list. The Ombudsman can order money for distress, inconvenience, delay, missed appointments, complaint handling failure and other impacts. A large award may reflect the impact of one case; a large count may reflect repeated lower-level failures. The decision text matters.

Caveats before naming a landlord "worst"

Published Ombudsman decisions are late-stage records. Many damp complaints are resolved by the landlord before they reach a determination. Some residents do not complain. Some issues fall outside the Ombudsman's jurisdiction. The table therefore tells you about the published adverse decision record, not the total number of damp reports made by residents.

The query also ranks raw counts. Raw counts are easy to understand and useful for visibility, but they are not adjusted for landlord size, homes managed, repair volume or tenant demographics. That is why the page uses careful language: "most upheld damp and mould findings" is more accurate than saying a provider is the worst landlord in every possible sense.

The data also reflects publication and extraction boundaries. Landlord Record works from Housing Ombudsman decisions that are available to analyse, then applies the site's existing structured fields. If a decision does not carry a damp-related theme tag in the current build, it is not pulled into this damp and mould table. If compensation is not returned by the existing issue-compensation query, the article does not fill the gap from another source.

That restraint is deliberate. It is tempting to improve a league table by adding manual notes, outside news stories or one-off corrections. For this guide, the point is repeatability. A reader should be able to see that the ranking, theme context and compensation context all come from the same build-time data layer, with the Housing Ombudsman decision archive as the underlying source.

Method

The landlord table is built from getRanking('worst-landlords-damp-mould'). That existing query counts adverse published decisions tagged with damp-related themes and groups them by landlord. The dataset snapshot uses getGlobalStats(). The theme context uses getThemeCounts(). The compensation context uses getCompensationByIssue().

The public ranking URL is /rankings/worst-damp-mould. Internally, that route is backed by the damp and mould ranking metric used here. This guide keeps the public link and the article canonical separate: the ranking page is the live sortable table, while this guide explains the answer, caveats, Awaab's Law context and method in plain English.

The page deliberately does not add outside spreadsheets, manual corrections or estimated figures. If a number is not returned by an existing query function, it is left out. That keeps the article reproducible from the site's build-time data and avoids mixing official Ombudsman source material with unsupported calculations.

Sources

The primary source is the Housing Ombudsman decisions archive . The Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code explains the complaint-handling framework for member landlords. For Awaab's Law context, see the gov.uk tenant guidance and the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 .