Landlords face £7,000 fines for damp and mould in government crackdown

So the 16th Housing Minister in 16 years wants to encourage Councils to Fine landlords for not providing Safe, Warm and Mould free Homes
I wonder how long he will be in the job ?
Can’t be bothered to remember his name as they might be gone next week !
Meanwhile in the real world More and More Landlords are selling up.
Please Check Roghtmove and other house selling websites if you think its not happening
London as always leading the charge

So, an on the spot fine if there is damp and mould!
What about due process and justice? What about investigating if the tenant is responsible for the damp and mould? Has the tenant reported it in a timely fashion and taken steps recommended by the landlord such as using fungicide, ventilating the property and heating it properly? I think we need some test cases as I think judges will not be impressed by a claim that this is a matter of strict liability.
A question for the politicians: If there is mould in an owner/occupier’s home, whose fault is that?

I had a tenant who had a mould issue caused by her placing her chest of drawers next to a radiator and right up against an outside wall, thus restricting air flow. It caused a relatively tiny amount of mould spores, but she became convinced it was affecting herself and her child. So I got the minor treatment done and she was happy, but still kept putting the chest against the wall. I don’t think council inspectors would care about the truth but lick their lips at the thought of the draconian power they have to punish us.

Woops, I misread the 2nd paragraph:
‘Housing Secretary Steve Reed has written to England’s councils calling on them to use the powers at their disposal to tackle poor conditions in the private rented sector and protect tenants’

I thought he was asking councils to eliminate poor conditions from their properties.

If they seriously want safe and good conditions instead of fining they could authorise the repairs and the landlord has to pay. No fine but problem rectified.

I am sorry to use gritty language, but are some of these so-called property voices completely brain dead, or have they just arrived from the planet Zog?

Property is only owned in this country because the state says it is owned. That ownership is not floating around in some romantic, untouchable, private-law bubble. It is tethered to HM Land Registry, and every registered title is therefore capable of being identified, charged, restricted, controlled, taxed, regulated, penalised and, ultimately, sold.

That is the point too many of the so-called property representatives still do not seem to grasp.

A landlord can huff and puff about not paying a fine, but unpaid statutory penalties do not just disappear because somebody is cross on the internet. They can be turned into enforceable debt. That debt can be pursued. It can be secured. It can sit against the property like unpaid council tax, with interest and costs added until somebody pays it, refinances it, sells to clear it, or is forced into a worse outcome.

The notice will arrive in calm administrative language. It will not say, “We are dismantling your property business.” It will say, in effect:

“You have been issued with a penalty. You have the statutory period stated in the notice to make representations or appeal. If you do not pay, further enforcement action may follow.”

And in many cases, unless there is a real factual, procedural or proportionality argument, there will be no meaningful ground of appeal. It will not be a debate about whether the landlord likes the policy. It will be a statutory penalty imposed under a statutory scheme by a public authority exercising statutory powers.

That is the machinery.

The council does not need to run around with a pitchfork. It does not need to nationalise anything in one dramatic parliamentary announcement. It simply needs to issue notices, impose penalties, enforce debts, recover costs and, where necessary, secure those debts against the one thing landlords cannot hide: the property.

Then comes the collection machine. Councils can outsource recovery to the growing industry of private law firms, enforcement agents and debt-recovery operators plugged into local authority systems and procedures. The debt can be pursued through the courts. The property can be charged. If the registered proprietor is an individual, bankruptcy is a possible route. If the property is held in a company, winding-up is a possible route. If the charge remains unpaid, the eventual destination can be sale.

That is not fantasy. That is not conspiracy. That is how the system works.

Instead of poring over carefully constructed, performative statements — to use the latest political expression — designed mainly to keep members paying fees of questionable value, these property voices should spend a week in the library of property and political history. They might discover that much of this has happened before, probably before many of the current operators of these landlord “voices” were even born.

This is confiscatory property history on steroids.

It destroyed the property industry before, and it will destroy it again unless the supposed representatives of landlords acquire some knowledge, some wisdom, and, above all, a backbone. Their job is not to pander to government. Their job is to fight for the people who pay them to understand the threat before it is too late.

This is not really about economics. It is an ideological shift, delivered partly through tax, but more stealthily through regulation. The object is to transfer wealth away from asset holders while avoiding the political ugliness of saying so directly.

Property owners are the low-hanging fruit because property cannot run away. It cannot be moved abroad. It cannot be put in a suitcase. It exists because the state records it, recognises it and controls the machinery around it. That is why property is so easy to tax, so easy to regulate and so easy to penalise.

Regulation has effectively turned many registered proprietors into bare trustees of their own properties. The beneficial claimants are now government, councils and renters, with the former landlord reduced to a sort of unpaid housing officer, left to discover how much of the income, capital and control the state is still prepared to leave in his hands.

The country is financially exhausted. Government cannot generate meaningful growth, so it must look for capital that already exists. That means redistribution, not by one grand confiscatory act, but by a steady chain of tax, compliance, penalty, enforcement and forced adjustment.

As one Labour MP was said to have observed:

“It is only property returning to the state.”

That may have been said quietly, but the policy direction is shouting it.

P.S. The Telegraph recently published an excellent exposé showing how councils are handing up to 90% of regulatory fines to private enforcement companies. It is a bonanza for them and for the councils. As the system beds in, councils will no doubt demand a larger share, but one thing is certain: landlords will still be expected to pay 100%, plus costs and interest, to whoever has been empowered to do the collecting.

It is absolutely right that rogue landlords are taken out of the industry.

However, many homes are damp because of poor installation of government-inspired EPC improvements.

People living in council and housing association homes suffer from damp and mould just as much as those renting privately. It seems unfair that private landlords can face fines of up to £7,000 per hazard while social landlords are subject to a different regime. Tenants’ health is affected in exactly the same way regardless of who owns the property. The focus should be on equal protection and equal accountability for all landlords, whether private, housing association, or council-run.

Reply to the comment left by Person Of The People at 22/06/2026 – 14:43
so then the council can be challenged on the basis that 100% of the proceeds from enforcement fines clearly do NOT go directly back to either ‘running the system’ nor ‘raising standards’ in the PRS then. If taxpayers are funding money to give to councils (from general taxation) then surely this is misuse of public funds if they simply pay more to subcontract out that they ever receive back?