Government confirms councils will use PRS database for landlord enforcement

I do not think they thought this one through yet…. and in fact it does not look as though they thought this one through at all.
In theory this proposed landlord database is supposed to give landlord contact details. But I use an agent. When I sent the Renters Rights Act Information Leaflet to the tenants I sent it with a covering letter saying that I was obliged to send it to them because the Renters Rights Act obliges me to send it to them as the LANDLORD even though I use an AGENT, but all further queries concerning their tenancy should be directed to my agent as usual.
It is largely meaningless and in my experience tenants never ask about it but the EPC Certificate is already on gov.uk.
https://www.gov.uk/find-energy-certificate
The safety information (gas/electricity) has to be provided to the tenant anyway. My agent arranges these things and sends a copy to both me and the tenants. If you have not got these things you cannot rent the property out in the first place.
My postal contact details as a landlord are already available via the land registry:
https://www.gov.uk/search-property-information-land-registry
This costs anybody who wants to get postal details less than a fiver. I already get lots of letters via this route but never respond to them; they are just junk mail which I ignore.
This just looks like an additional layer of bureaucracy and cost to me. A means of continuing to other and attack landlords, most of whom are just private individuals, the majority being non-incorporated. But even if somebody puts my contact details on a landlord database I am not going to be responding to their enquiries because I do not have to. They will be wasting their time and wasting their paper and if anybody I do not want to have access to my phone number does so without my permission and phones me, I will just block their calls. Same if they email me, I will add them to my spam filter.
Presumably somebody high up in the labour politburo will be told at some point to consider landlords rights to privacy and consider how they are going to safeguard landlord personal data and prevent fraud, as for example Companies House does for directors. As a director you can apply to have your personal details removed – residential address, signature, business occupation, day and date of birth. That is because unnecessarily disclosing the data is a recipe for fraud. The Labour Landlord Database, if it does go ahead as proposed, will mostly be used by criminals and fraudsters.
Labour have already been told that landlords can raise rents to pay for EPC upgrades:
https://www.property118.com/landlords-can-raise-rents-to-pay-for-epc-upgrades-labour/
If labour do go ahead with proposals for a landlord database that clearly add no value whatsoever, other than for fraudsters, then the effect of this will be to raise rents, and raise insurance costs, which will in turn be passed on as higher rents.

My tenants have my contact details. Why does anyone else need them?

It should be renamed the Register of Fraudster’s Targets.

Reply to the comment left by Cathie at 27/05/2026 – 16:03
My tenants also have my personal details but I tell them always to contact my agent (which they do).

In answer to your question, some of the people who ‘need’ the details are identity fraudsters. The land registry and gov.uk give advice on this which is here:

https://www.gov.uk/protect-land-property-from-fraud

This information on gov.uk tells you that you are more at risk of fraud if your identity has been stolen, you rent your property out, or the property’s empty (which it is during void periods or when you are working on the property).

The other people who feel they ‘need’ your details in addition to the direct (i.e. junk) marketing industry generally are rogue tradesmen, credit-referencing agencies (who want to access your personal data free in order to sell it to other people), and property speculators who want to target large numbers of properties. Apparently AI has made the problem worse because AI can harvest a lot of public details from a lot of sites very quickly in order to target them. That’s not so easy with the land registry database as you have to register and pay to be able to download title documents and plans, although conveyancing fraud does still happen and when it does, the impact is high.

Labour’s proposals would be a gift for organised crime. You wouldn’t expect labour MPs collectively to know much about this, because collectively, when it comes to business, labour MPs don’t know much about anything. But NON-BUSINESSES are often targeted by fraudsters as being an easy target.

BUT even if labour does go ahead with their landlord database despite the fact that there is no benefit to it over and above what the land registry does, in addition to measures to protect landlords from identity theft, there also needs to be a a process to IMMEDIATELY REMOVE details of a rental property from the database during periods when it is not being rented out.

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 27/05/2026 – 16:42
Absolutely. All the data is probably available to those who wish to find it for nefarious reasons – this just makes it easy.

For enforcement, it is to catch the low hanging fruit as always and will do little to catch the real rogues who will stay under the radar. When a Council does prosecute a rogue LL they often struggle to get payment. Mrs Smith, who relies on it as a pension but forgot to upload the valid Gas Safety Cert, is far more likely to pay up.

ACORN will love it.

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 27/05/2026 – 16:42
If your property is managed by a letting agent then they legally need to send the tenant the info sheet, the landlord does not have to

If the landlord sends it then this doesn’t mean the agent doesn’t have to, they still do, but the landlord doesn’t need to send it themselves unless they manage it themselves

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 27/05/2026 – 15:35
If an agent manages your property then they legally need to send the new info sheet, you don’t have to

Landlords only have to if they manage it themselves

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 27/05/2026 – 15:35
Indeed – there’ll be more than a few interested in knowing ‘property details, including full address, ….
and whether the property is occupied or furnished.’
Might as well publish the facts in the local papers – form an orderly queue to break into my unoccupied furnished house.

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 27/05/2026 – 15:35
Again how much can renters afford if landlords have to increase rents to cover all this rubbish. Increased rents also mean increased taxes and higher tax bands.Landlords are chasing an endless stream of this rubbish from Labour.
As you mention, very importantly so much of this seems to breach data protection and landlord’s privacy.I have to inform my tenants exactly who I have to give their data to in order to run the rental, whereas landlord’s data could be exposed to everyone, especially those that should not know.

Reply to the comment left by Billy Gunn at 27/05/2026 – 21:25
Well that’s some reassurance. But it’s still not clear to me what this labour landlord database is for. If a council needs to know the ownership of a property they can already find that out cheaply and easily from the land registry. What is this labour landlord database supposed to achieve that the land registry does not already do?

Reply to the comment left by David at 28/05/2026 – 10:20
Yes, every bit of additional unnecessary bureaucracy that government imposes increases risk for landlords, drives rents up and the truth is that both the conservatives and labour have done it over the last decade. Unless the government of the day is very clear about what they are going to fix with any new measure they just end up fixing a problem that doesn’t need fixing and leaving the real problems unaddressed. There’s a lot of collateral damage, competition is driven out of the market and rents are driven up. I was involved in a conversation with a couple of landlords this morning, one who spent many months trying to get rid of a tenant who wouldn’t leave, another who had the (not uncommon as you might think) problem of a tenant trashing the flat. One of them decided not to rent the property out again because in his view it just isn’t worth the risk of doing it under the Renters Rights Act.

Does anybody know specifically what problem this labour landlord database is actually supposed to fix? What is the landlord database supposed to do that the land registry does not do?