Building policy in shaky foundations making things worse for tenants?

Many landlords have stood dazed, on the ropes – taking blow after blow. Confused and unable to think they have been the target of an indiscriminate government-led beating.

Here is some clarity as to why the process will continue to fail to help tenants.

My own experience of taking “bad unpaying” tenants to court saw a procrastination and delay by the courts. The courts showed empathy to whatever false narrative the tenant thought of and allowed them more time and therefore debt to build before eventually allowing me to retake my homes. The adjournments build in months of delay, whilst basic lies are told and used as weapons by the tenants with the legal system accepting them at their lying words.

Since then the government have gone ahead with more punitive legislation and potentially huge disproportionate fines for landlords.

With the new £65 landlord registration database ‘fine’, it’s likely the last straw for many landlords as it feels different to fines, being a direct cost upfront where the landlord has done nothing wrong.

The new policies appear to be layering legislation on top of a wholly unstable base.

Councils are already wholly inept at collecting existing landlords fines and could only collect a quarter. If three-quarters of landlord fines go unpaid, what’s the point in bringing in new ones? No company could survive receiving only 25% of revenue, so that’s where the focus should have been. The councils know where the bad landlords properties are.

Freedom of Information data compiled by the National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) covering the 2023/24 and 2024/25 periods shows that out of £29,707,273 in fines issued by 285 councils, only £7,389,398 was successfully recovered.

So bad landlords like bad tenants don’t pay and the councils didn’t collect the vast majority of the fines and the courts don’t really help landlords get timely justice or their money back.

On what basis does bringing new much bigger fines help anyone, when the existing system and very foundation of the system is broken and unworkable?

If the government wanted to find bad landlords there is perhaps a much easier way it could go about it.

It could ask all tenants to register on a tenant database and charge tenants £30 a year for the privilege. Most landlords will need to pass the new charge on to tenants anyway as there are no magic landlord money trees.

The government could then check on the eligibility of tenants, landlords could select tenants from the database knowing they have a right to be here and avoid the checks we have to do. Bad landlords could be exposed by the tenants. The government could identify the locations of all rental properties as tenants would be obliged to identify their address so non-compliant landlords would be found.

More meddling I know but the government would then receive a list of all tenanted properties. They could quickly identify rental houses, rogue landlords and rogue tenants.

What does the property118 community think?

Paul