The seven clocks
Prescribed by the Hazards in Social Housing (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2025. Working days are counted in the landlord's own calendar, against England and Wales bank holidays.
| Obligation | Runs from | Within |
|---|---|---|
| Investigate an emergency hazard | Awareness | 24 hours |
| Make an emergency hazard safe | Awareness | 24 hours |
| Investigate a significant hazard | Awareness | 10 working days |
| Written summary to the resident | Day after conclusion | 3 working days |
| Safety work completed | Day after conclusion | 5 working days |
| Preventative work begun | Day after conclusion | 5 working days, or 12 weeks |
| Preventative work completed | Day after conclusion | No prescribed deadline |
Three of those are easy to get wrong, and expensive.
Safety work must be completed within five working days, not begun — a landlord tracking a start date reads as compliant while in breach.
Every post-investigation clock runs from the day after the investigation concludes, which is an off-by-one on every significant-hazard case if you anchor on the conclusion day itself.
Regulation 13 sets no completion deadline for preventative work. A system that shows your own internal target as a statutory breach is holding you to a standard the law does not impose, in the document an Ombudsman reads.
What it does
A resident reports a hazard through a public form that needs no account. The report is classified against explainable rules — every proposal shows which rules fired, which nearly fired, and the exact rule version behind them — and an officer makes the decision, because the Regulations define an emergency by what a reasonable landlord would do, which is a judgement rather than a calculation.
From there the clocks run themselves. They are reconciled from stored dates rather than scheduled, so a system that was down over a weekend still finds a deadline that passed on Saturday and dates the breach to Saturday. Warnings arrive at half and three-quarters of each period, which on a 24-hour emergency is twelve hours and six, and on a ten-working-day investigation is a week and ten days.
Everything an Ombudsman or the Regulator would ask for is recorded as it happens: who decided what and why, what the rules said at the time, when work started and finished, and what was still outstanding when a case was closed.
Where the data lives
These are the answers a data protection officer asks for first, so they are on the front page rather than in a sales conversation.
- Case database
- PostgreSQL, London region
- Photographs and evidence
- Object storage pinned to EU jurisdiction at bucket creation, which cannot be changed afterwards. Private, reachable only through short-lived signed links.
- Processing
- Frankfurt. There is no London region on our platform, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.
- Health and vulnerability data
- Treated as special category data under Article 9, with field-level access separate from ordinary case access. It is never sent to a logging service, an error tracker or an AI provider.
- Retention
- Six years by default for statutory case and audit records, configurable per landlord.
- Subprocessors
- Named in full in the data processing agreement, before you sign it.
- AI
- Advisory only, off by default, and it can never change a classification or a deadline.
Where this has got to
Statutory Clock is in build, and looking for one housing association to run the first pilot with. Intake, triage, the deadline engine and the investigation workflow are working. Communications, reporting and the export pack are next.
Regulatory Phase 2 commences 30 November 2026, extending the duties beyond damp and mould to the wider set of hazards. Intake and the clocks already cover every category in scope.
If you are responsible for this at a landlord and would rather shape the thing than be sold it, that is the conversation worth having.
julian@statutoryclock.co.uk