Why Dunbartonshire Chamber of Commerce brought Scotland’s housing, health and enterprise sectors into one room and what we told them.
Britain runs its public services as if enterprise and public health belong to separate worlds. They don’t. The nurses and porters keeping a hospital running live in the very housing stock that sends patients through its doors. The businesses on a high street generate the tax base that pays for the council’s repairs team. Community, health and enterprise aren’t three systems. They’re one.
That is why Dunbartonshire Chamber of Commerce chose to lead on mould. Not because it is a Chamber’s traditional territory, but because if business is willing to convene the people who can actually move an issue like this forward, that can only be a good thing for the communities we all depend on. On 23 June 2026, we did exactly that: around 70 people from local authorities, housing associations, universities, charities, local and Scottish enterprise, and Scottish procurement filled Dumbarton Football Club for the Scottish Mould Awareness and Action Seminar, convened by the Chamber with Steri Systems Ltd as lead sponsor.
Steri Systems’ place as lead sponsor was not incidental. For close to eleven years, the company has worked specifically in mould neutralisation, built on a health background rather than a trades one: applying the same evidence based rigour used to decontaminate laboratory and clinical environments to a very different but equally serious challenge; mould in the homes people live in, with the same aim of protecting lives. That is why sharing the room with the other specialists on the day’s programme mattered. It placed mould where it actually belongs: in a genuinely specialist forum, treated with the seriousness of a health risk and not dismissed as something a wipe and a coat of paint can fix.
The Law Is Coming. The Standard Is Not.
Awaab’s Law comes into force in Scotland on 6 October 2026. Named after Awaab Ishak, the two-year-old whose death from prolonged mould exposure became a catalyst for change across the UK, it places a legal duty on landlords to investigate and act on damp and mould within fixed timeframes. The sector has been waiting for this moment, and rightly so.
But in my address to the room, I put a harder point to Scotland’s housing sector: Awaab’s Law tells landlords what they must do, and by when. It does not tell them what good looks like. There is no equivalent, anywhere in the legislation, of the MOT, the single, unified standard that every car in this country must meet, regardless of make, model or age, because we decided as a society that road safety was too important to leave to individual interpretation. We have never built that equivalent for mould. We have compliance timescales. We do not have a health standard.
That gap matters because it will be filled one way or another. Either the sector fills it deliberately, with an evidence-based standard built around what actually keeps people well or the market fills it by default, with whichever contractor sells the loudest, and mould gets treated as a paperwork exercise rather than the health risk it is. I told the room plainly: this is not a problem that structures and processes alone will solve. A tighter timescale and a better spreadsheet will not, on their own, make a home healthy. Only treating mould as what it is, a health issue, not a decorating one will.
Two Gaps, Not One
The seminar was built to address both halves of that challenge, because they are genuinely separate problems. The first is operational: how do housing associations and local authorities move from reactive, case by case firefighting to proactive, whole system management before October arrives? The second, the one I asked the room to sit with, is that Scotland has no health policy attached to its mould response at all. Compliance without a health standard is a floor, not a ceiling. It tells landlords when they have broken the law. It does not tell anyone what a genuinely safe home looks like.
A programme of expert speakers brought both dimensions to life across the day: Patrick McRedmond of Alator Data Services, on global standards in air quality; David McKie, Senior Partner at Levy & McRae, on the litigation risk landlords now face; Grant Mackintosh, an independent housing specialist, on the reality of implementing a mould strategy inside a local authority; Jonathan Lintott, Managing Director of Andersen Caledonia, on the microbiology and air sampling behind the science; Dr Chunli Cao, Managing Director of Healthy Air Technology, on building standards and air quality; and Richard Crossland of Steri Systems on the regulatory and compliance landscape. An afternoon panel bringing together Paddy Gray, Housing Professor, OBE, Ray Gribbon of Levy & McRae, Mel Robson, Steri Systems Director & Co-Founder opened the debate to the floor.
What the Room Built Together
The day did not end on a panel. It ended with every attendee working across organisational lines in a facilitated workshop, generating real next steps and priorities for how Scotland implements Awaab’s Law well, not just on time. That is the model I want the Chamber to keep building: business convening the people who hold different pieces of a problem and giving them a room in which to actually solve it together, rather than another conference at which it is simply discussed.
With October now less than four months away, Scotland has a genuine choice: meet this law as a compliance exercise, or use the window before it lands to build the health-led standard that should sit alongside it. Dumbartonshire Chamber of Commerce and Steri Systems intend to keep convening that conversation, with further sector work planned in the months ahead. The 23 June seminar was the opening move. It will not be the last.
