Photo: ‘Mould is Political’ protest outside the Affordable Housing Awards, Manchester, November 2023.
On 21 December 2020, just eight days after his second birthday, Awaab Ishak died in Rochdale, North-West England. The coroner concluded that the severe respiratory condition that killed him was ‘entirely due to the prolonged exposure he had to mould in his home environment’. In a new open-access article in Antipode, ‘A Licence to Kill: Necroeconomic Suffocation by Stealth and the Fight for Life’, Bev Skeggs and I examine Awaab’s case to ask how a child could be allowed to die from mould pollution in one of the wealthiest countries.
Our answer centres on what we call necroeconomics: policies and practices that condemn people, disproportionately migrant and racialised working-class communities, to premature death in the interest of assuring profit. Building on Bev’s earlier analysis of the UK government’s handling of Covid-19, we trace how three decades of austerity, and a longer history of deregulation, privatisation and financialisation, have degraded the elemental infrastructures that once provided a basic level of security for the most vulnerable. We argue that the state’s invitation to asset managers to take over social housing has granted property owners and managers a licence to kill.
But the article is also a story of resistance. Awaab’s family, their pro bono lawyers, the coroner, clinicians, journalists, tenant organisations and Shelter together forced a national response: Awaab’s Law (2025), which requires social landlords (and it will eventually extend to private landlords) to investigate and fix hazards such as damp and mould within set timeframes.
This article lays some of the groundwork for my new research project, Elemental Inequalities. An earlier version of this paper was given as the 2025 Eleanor Rathbone Social Justice Public Lecture at the University of Liverpool, with Ian Sinha, paediatric respiratory consultant at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, as discussant.
Read the article (open access): Tyler, I. and Skeggs, B. (2026) ‘A Licence to Kill: Necroeconomic Suffocation by Stealth and the Fight for Life’, Antipode, 58(1), e70108.
