We are working with the leading critical legal journal Law & Critique to bring their brilliant output to a broader audience. Many of the papers published with Law & Critique will be accompanied by a shorter discussion on Critical Legal Thinking. In this case, please check out Rosie Woodhouse’s full article which is available open access on the Law & Critique site.

Awaab Ishak died on the 21 December 2020, eight days after his second birthday. The culminating inquest report heard at Rochdale Coroner’s Court on 15 November 2022 confirmed that he had died because of prolonged exposure to damp and toxic mould in his socially-rented home. After arriving in Britain from Sudan in 2016, Awaab’s father, Faisal—later joined by his wife Aisha before Awaab was born in Oldham in 2018—repeatedly raised issues regarding damp, mould, and ventilation in their flat with their housing provider, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH). The inquest cemented a truth already known to countless social and private tenants when it comes to trying to get necessary repair work done to improve the condition of our homes: they were at every step ignored.

“We cannot tell you how many health professionals we’ve cried in front of and Rochdale Boroughwide Housing staff we have pleaded to, expressing concern for the conditions ourselves and Awaab have been living in. (…) We shouted out as loudly as we could, but despite making all of those efforts, every night we would be coming back to the same problem. (…) At present, we see nothing to indicate that the death of our son will, in any way, serve as a defining moment. Accountability must be done and be seen to be done.”

Statement by the Ishak family, 2022.

Since first drafting the above article on the legal and socio-economic conditions that made the death of Awaab Ishak possible, the 2023 Social Housing Regulation Act came into effect; the powers of the Regulator of Social Housing and Housing Ombudsman have been strengthened on multiple occasions; the 2026 round of the report into social housing conditions concluded that 430,000 social homes still fail to meet the Decent Homes Standard (the standardisation of ‘decent homes’ remains contingent, with the 2026 renewed Decent Homes Standard now not expected to be implemented until 2036); the Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) Regulations passed in 2025 as one of the few legislative outcomes of the mammoth and laborious inquiry into the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire; no one to date has been held accountable for the deadly fire even though the inquiry has made responsibility plain, and many blocks remain an open fire risk; the number of deaths related to homelessness have reached record highs year-on-year, spurring new policy promises; the Renters Rights Bill came into force which, as a piece of legislation centring greater stability for private tenants around eviction, is in practice defunct due to no coterminous controls on rent, and has only pushed up rental amounts since its passing into law in May 2026. The first phase of Awaab’s Law, a subsidiary of the Social Housing Regulation Act, came into force in 2025, with phase two coming in November 2026. Awaab’s law specifically addresses the timeframes (for now, only social) landlords must legally adhere to in investigating and fixing hazardous housing conditions. There has been and is much more legislative intricacy and litigation focussed on the mess of British harmful housing provision than this initial, limited list.

As is often the case with the odd temporality of academic publishing and the production of knowledge around open or urgent social questions within academia, I would have approached writing this article differently from the position of the present – not, it should be said, because the ever-growing litany of housing law adequately addresses the conditions that, I argue, made Awaab’s death and his family’s suffering possible. Rather, because of the knowledge gained from many generous directions and all that has been learned with and from others since then. Still, what this article tries to do is adumbrate how the law structurally defers the redress of harm in housing provision insofar as it works with and through capitalism’s temporal drive towards the greater foreclosure of futures alternate to the one for capital, and how this is lived in the present. Where legislation outwardly provides specific opportunities to close this lag (a closure that Awaab’s Law addresses itself to), I argue that the law more broadly speaking cannot break with its internal temporality of deferral, displacement, and indifference because of the characteristic capitalist social experience of foreclosure, that the law does not exhaust. This argument is built through three tenets associated with property that were (and still are) operative in the context in which Awaab was living, the environment that made him sick and was ultimately lethal: ownership, citizenship, and responsibility. 

In this way, the article looks at the legal relations of a kind of “third mode” of social service provision beyond the classic (and inadequate) dichotomy between state or market-led housing. RBH, the Ishak family’s housing provider and landlord, is not simply a quasi-public organisation but Britain’s first ‘tenant and employee co-owned mutual housing society’, as well as enjoying limited liability to allow for paid directors and, as a non-profit, receiving a mixture of direct and indirect public money on top of being privately financed. Building on New Labour’s identification of civil society (especially the housing sector) as a resource for both building state capacity and effecting policies of social repression/regulation, this third mode was called upon as the “third sector” by David Cameron’s 2010 “Big Society,” through which RBH was borne as a social landlord and an acute generalised period of austerity began. Focusing on the historical development of the third sector through and beyond the big society anachronism—in particular its ownership relations—tracks the development of civil society’s legal relations together with social repression that rearranges the boundaries of illegality and/or accountability, in a way that cannot preclude the state and its institutions. I try to demonstrate that this provides much more specificity than spatialised forms of picture-thinking (i.e., inside or outside either the market or state) around housing privatisation processes.

The purpose of this framework that attempts to think together the state, third sector, accountability, and property through the interrelations between ownership, citizenship, and responsibility is to re-centre anti-immigrant racism in a way that tries to go deeper than pre-existing approaches to Awaab’s death. These approaches can take the fact of racism experienced by the Ishak family as either an epiphenomenal problem to or a fixed given of housing provision structures: either singularised in specific actions of RBH’s employees or attributed to a totalising, absolute kind of exclusion from society. How was RBH legitimately able to ignore the Ishak family regarding the condition of their home, maintain a racialised indifference to their situation that was often backed up by, again, a racist feedback loop of blame put on the Ishak’s themselves, that RBH then tried to retroactively mobilise in avoiding responsibility for Awaab’s death that they caused? This trajectory, of course, is not specific to RBH and has a painfully familiar and longstanding history for many, not least because it was promised that Grenfell would be remembered through genuine and effective change to British society’s particularly vicious web of class inequality, racist nativism and nationalism, privatisation, and managed decline.

The question of how I articulate, obviously, on the plane of law: how privatisation processes are often ones of juridification – within harmful housing provision, juridification is most acutely effected through ownership mechanisms and civil society’s property relations. And so, what this means for racialised notions of inclusion and exclusion at an individual and institutional level, as in the case of third sector legal forms of co-owned mutuals such as RBH. To take one example from the litany of maddening injustices experienced by the Ishak’s: as a co-owning member of RBH, Awaab’s parents could only initiate legal proceedings against their landlord regarding the damp and mould after many attempts to get the problem fixed through the laborious model of mutuals’ internal complaint procedures – during which RBH re-butted blame onto the Ishak’s themselves as their “own” problem due to what RBH subsequently reported as the Ishak’s “ritual bathing habits”, for which they had no indication or evidence. At the point of opening a case against RBH, RBH could then cynically defer to a policy shared across the sector that no repair work can be carried out whilst legal proceedings are ongoing. Awaab died because of prolonged exposure to toxic and lethal mould. RBH’s self-evacuation of their responsibility to the Ishak’s was made possible at every single informal and formalised legal level, and through different variations of combining racialised responsibility with forms of ownership.