Landlords face fines of up to £35,000 under new council policy

Well of course landlords used to be able to use section 21 to remove tenants who caused anti social behavior.
But that was a bad idea………….apparently!
Unintended consequences are a b***h

Reply to the comment left by David100 at 21/08/2026 – 10:22
V true.

Mmm, been in Bristol quite a bit with the son and heir recently. Stokes Cross, a big student area in middle of town, is full of grafitti (ruling junta there would probably call it “art” inspired by that “ever so risky” (not) Banksy clown) and drug dealing, especially on the green there. Talk about being blatant.
Local authority should be looking at that stuff as a priority.

Reply to the comment left by David Lawrenson at 13:28

I have to say, I think all these goings on atm are just more visible now because everyone knows the police do nothing.
I mean let’s face it – it’s an ideal location for their target audience. I think all antisocial behaviours have become brazen over the past year. People don’t care. In this economy, they are panicking & so just getting on with things regardless of harm to others. I’d probably explore the art, if it’s done well & tiddly. But it’s very sad to see students with a door to door delivery of what could contain dangerous substances.
Good luck reporting it.
Police are too busy. Many are in mental health crisis and character disorders are evolving being exposed.
Stay safe.
Be cautious interacting with other individuals.
Look forward to no longer having a relationship with this exhausting tenant!

… so, as well as becoming de facto Housing Officers, landlords are now being forced to become Anti-Social Behaviour Officers. Is there no end to the functions of the state that government expects private landlords to absorb and perform at their own cost and risk?

And when regulation has extracted all the remaining value and incentive from the sector, taxation can extract the rest — and politically it will be a vote winner.

When, exactly, do landlords get back to being business people? Or have those days gone, with private rented housing now effectively regarded as a public utility, to be provided according to social need irrespective of the occupier’s ability to pay? If that is the model, then at least follow the logic through: Ofwat regulates water companies on the basis that investors are entitled to a “reasonable return” on the capital committed to essential infrastructure. In recent years, investor returns have averaged around 2.7%.

And remember the extraordinary contradiction at the heart of all this. George Osborne introduced Section 24 on the premise that individual landlords were essentially passive investors, rather than people actively running businesses. Yet those same supposedly “passive investors” are now expected to undertake ever more of the functions traditionally performed by housing officers, enforcement officers and local government.

Where are the property-industry voices asking the obvious question: why are landlords being burdened with the responsibilities of public-sector housing officers while continuing to be taxed as though they are merely passive investors?

And just wait until the inevitable consequence of all this — rising rents — provides the political cover for the next intervention: formal rent controls.

And to demonstrate the government’s disregard for the sector, a former Conservative housing official explained that the fine levels under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 were deliberately set high to force landlords to comply, rather than simply treating the penalties as another cost to be absorbed into their business model. Yet those fines can only be paid from landlords’ after-tax income — making the financial punishment considerably greater than the already massive headline figure.

Reply to the comment left by Person Of The People at 21/08/2026 – 16:15
Superb comment, totally nails it.
We are the modern-day “kulaks” that the intellectual poseurs in Labour and the clowns in the previous Tory administrations love to hate, just as they hate all small scale people who have the gall to have made a little cash through hard work – and outside the large corporations and public sector establishments.

Spot on David and a valuable lesson:

“Kulaks were wealthy or affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. They were relatively prosperous farmers who owned larger tracts of land, held more livestock, and could afford to hire surplus labor, unlike poorer subsistence peasants.

The term comes from the Russian word for “fist” (kulak), implying that these individuals were tight-fisted or grasping.

The Campaign Against the Kulaks (“Dekulakisation”)

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet government led by Joseph Stalin launched a brutal political campaign known as dekulakisation (raskulachivanie).

The state aimed to seize all private land to create state-run collective farms (collectivisation). The kulaks were viewed as class enemies and obstacles to socialist progress.

The campaign included:

• Mass Classifications: The definition of a “kulak” was deliberately kept vague by the state, allowing local authorities to label almost any peasant who resisted government grain requisitions or collectivisation as a kulak.

• Property Confiscation: The state seized their land, livestock, machinery, and homes.

• Deportation: Millions of kulaks and their families were forcibly relocated to remote, unpopulated regions of Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan.

• Imprisonment and Execution: Hundreds of thousands were arrested and sent to Gulag labor camps or executed.

This violent dismantling of the most productive farming class, combined with the chaos of forced collectivisation, contributed directly to the catastrophic Soviet Famine of 1930–1933 (including the Holodomor in Ukraine).

The PRS could easily come to an end through the same political dogma. And with unrealistic Renters Rights Act 2025 benchmarks designed for landlords to fail Labour will blame them, pick up the remnants and seek to rebuild the pre-Thatcher council housing estates. A Fabian Society masterstroke which will keep Labour in power for at least two or three terms.

Reply to the comment left by Person Of The People at 17:34
The left wing socialists are usually middle class city types, university educated, urbanites, often work for government…. they actually hate the real workers, regarding them as uneducated oafs…..
Lenin, Trotsky, Pol Pot, Che, that clown in Zim…. all from the same background

… and it won’t change unless there is a real coming together of the PRS so that it can, and is willing, to inflict real pain on those in power… there is no working together because to them that means they do all the taking and landlords do all the giving… and this is driven by their belief that landlords have made windfall gains and not worked since the Housing Act 1988 brought in the PRS. It’s driven also by a mission to get back at Thatcher for selling off council house estates… these are powerful drivers that no amount off economic harm today will moderate…

Where I live, (Northern Ireland) there was a bit of a drink filled mele, bordering on riot, in an area of predominately student lets, on Saint Patricks day.
So who did our “justice” minister blame………you guessed it……….landlords!
She said landlords must do much more to keep students under control!!!
HOW!
We cant even evict them now. By the time any court proceeding had completed, they would be long gone anyway.
These people are thick as champ (a potato dish local to my area).