The spite and division in the Renters’ Rights Act?

The Labour party stands for equality and fairness. Of course Landlords are evil and nasty so the Labour values don’t apply to them.
Rent increases in council/social housing last year was 4.8% but evil private sector landlords increased rents by a headline grabbing 3.4% for the same period. If the kind caring equality focused government wants equality then maybe private sector rent increases should be aligned with council increases of CPI+1%….If all landlords adopt this then it becomes the market rate.
The RRA applies to council and social housing next year although I don’t know if the rent challenge process? I’ll apply. Hopefully it does….Maybe we can get all social tenants to challenge the increase so it breaks the system.

Hi Paul. That’s a great article!
I highlighted both the outrageous topic of not being able to backdate rental at adjudication, and how “market rate”will be determined consistently by judges probably a year ago. Very limited responses from fellow landlords at the time.

NRLA, Guild members and all others need to unite to protest against the probable loss of eight months rental increase on an annual basis (in cases where rogue tenants automatically challenge everything), because we will otherwise be taken for a ride by a whole sector of the rental market, particularly where we are providing good, albeit basic homes at meagre rental income.

I fear it is even worse than this excellent article suggests. So, once the tenant has delayed THIS YEARS rent increase to whatever the Tribunal (possibly with an unspoken remit to reduce rents generally) decides, we are into the NEXT YEARS increase. The rent increase form requests the date when the previous rent increase TOOK EFFECT, not when it was requested and prevents the landlord from increasing the rent more frequently than once every 12 months. The tenant does the same etc, etc etc and tenant facing charities are now telling tenants that is what they should do to reduce everyone’s rents. The Government won’t need rent controls will they, but they possibly knew this when the brought in the most outrageous perverse incentive which exists in the RRA!

As a fellow LL I can only sympathise and completely agree with all that you say.

Almost hot off the press I have a property with a couple and a sharer which has worked well for over 2 years. The couple have had some money issues and I naturally reminded them that maintaining their rent payments on time was their primary obligation. Within a week one of the couple sent me an email giving me 2 months notice to bring the tenancy to an end – at the end of the rental period. Exactly what they are now allowed to do. Except that they did not say anything to the sharer who was very content and did not want to move. So the exact unintended consequence that we all said would happen. Instead of giving that person security of tenure he is now forced out against his will with relatively little time to secure new accommodation which is affordable. It’s a shame but this is what happens when legislation is not properly thought through and even when ministers were warned they refused to listen.

The article refers to the rental reform act proposed by the conservatives, but this became something very different when the Labour Renters Rights Act came along via a majority labour government. And whilst there are bits of the Renters Rights Act that I don’t care about, overall I think that the article is right.

The Labour Renters Rights Act stops you from accepting more than the advertised rent, even if the tenant offers it, and stops you taking rent in advance, which is a negative development for some people, e.g. pensioners, who can afford the property but cannot pass credit referencing. The Labour Renters Rights Act also stops you from discriminating against benefits tenants and stops you from withholding information on a property. With the end of no fault evictions it also leaves you with very limited options to remove a problem tenant; these options all depend, as the article points out, on the courts working correctly. I cannot see any evidence that labour has sorted the courts out and given the state of the public finances I doubt they have the money to do it.

Because there is the requirement not to discriminate against benefits tenants and it is likely to be more difficult to remove problem tenants, this means that all landlords have to be far more careful over who they house, they will have to apply more stringent affordability checks, and because there is a requirement not to discriminate they will have to apply these checks to ALL tenants. The Labour Renters Rights Act will reduce competition, make some tenants too high risk to house, and in imposing additional screening costs to avoid the problem tenants, force all rents up.

And there’s another trend going on at the moment that the article alludes to. I know lots of landlords, not because of being part of any association, but because lots of normal people are landlords. Some of the landlords I know are small portfolio landlords who have one or two properties outside of a company. Some of the landlords I know have large portfolios within a company. Many of these landlords didn’t raise rents for years because they were making enough money and they didn’t care about raising rents annually. But now, since the SNP introduced controls limiting rent increases in Scotland, this was then introduced into the rental reform bill and ultimately into the Labour Renters Rights Act, EVERY landlord that I know, both small portfolio and incorporated, is planning to review and raise rents annually. So whilst I don’t care about the requirement not to raise rents more than annually, previously I wasn’t raising rents annually, now I am raising rents annually, and every landlord I know is doing the same thing. That’s a big change from how things were a decade ago.

And the truth is that every landlord now needs to raise rents to reduce risk because the after tax returns on a landlords funds if invested in residential housing via a BTL mortgage are low. Over the last few days Andy Burnham has suggested a property tax levy to replace either stamp duty, council tax, or possibly both. The proposal is to levy the tax at twice the rate on ‘second properties’. Faced with that kind of possibility on top of ongoing attacks on the private rented sector by the SNP, and both conservative (via George Osbornes changes) and Labour via its Renters Rights Act, EVERY landlord needs to raise rents.

And with the changes in the Labour Renters Rights Act EVERY landlord now also has to be far more careful over which tenants are permitted to reside in a property, because there is no longer the back stop of no fault evictions and if the court process isn’t working it could take you a very long time to get rid of a problem tenant.

Labour has given itself a big pat on the back over the ending of no fault evictions…they had a big celebration. But the truth is that if you interfere in a market, don’t fix the things that do need fixing, and meddle with the aspects of the market that don’t need fixing, you aren’t going to be making things better for the consumer, or for tenants. The likelihood in fact is that by interfering in competition you’ll make things worse; no government ever delivered you a reliable car, or a phone that you could trust.

It isn’t landlords raising rents for tenants: It is government.

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 26/06/2026 – 15:35
Yup. Ive been increasing rents to MR over last 4 years. I have one property an hmo which luckily yields well and luckilly i have working tenants all of whom i have a great relationship with and who themselves understand the changes are not positive, but if Burnham lands tax come in im prob going to sell earlier than I was planning. That’s another 6 lively peops (all long termers cos they are happy) looking for alternative accommodation.

As for benefit claimants, well put, I now insist on references whereas with s 21 I could just judge whether I trusted the new tenant. Full credit check, which I ask them to provide and an affordability test applied equally to any person whether we working or not. If there should be a benefit claimant who passes then I’ll be asking for a cast iron guarantee in writing from the benefit agency that they will not come after ME for any already paid rent should it transpire that the tenant has been paid too much benefit! Stick that in your pipe!

Reply to the comment left by Vanessa Shenton at 26/06/2026 – 15:48
Yes, that’s about where I’m at. Two decades ago I used to take social housing tenants. But without exception I found that they were all moonlighting so the big problem with them was that they might not have been entitled to their benefits, the housing benefits people could come and get the money off me, but I had no powers to check their entitlement to benefits. And so I just stopped taking them.

Nottingham Trent University has put out some research saying that social housing tenants may be associated with a higher risk of antisocial behaviour:

https://www.ntu.ac.uk/media/documents/academic-schools/social-sciences/Should-you-accept-40-more-risk-in-social-housing.pdf

The reasons and associations aren’t entirely clear, but since the abolition of no fault evictions this just makes social housing tenants even higher risk. Years ago as landlords we wanted three things (a) pay the rent on time and in full (b) look after the property (c) get on with the neighbours. But in recent weeks we’ve had a labour MP suggesting that landlords ought to be responsible for antisocial behaviour….but landlords’ rights extend only to a landlords inspection having given 24 hours notice. So this MP clearly didn’t know his a**e from his elbow.

Since the labour Renters Rights Act and their abolition of no fault evictions we now have another requirement to add to (a), (b),(c) and that is “…will I actually be able to get my property back when I need to”. The labour government refused to publish the findings of its justice impact test on the courts and we have no information on how they are working. So what this means is that the high risk tenants just became even higher risk because of the Labour Renters Rights Act.

There is a requirement in the Act not to to discriminate against benefits tenants. But clearly we can do that by requiring from all tenants two forms of photo ID (driving licence and passport), last two years of tax returns or SA302, evidence of all other income including benefits (which should be on the tax return), evidence of recent address e.g. mobile phone contract (not from a burner phone), evidence of savings in a UK financial institution, e.g. bank of building society account, character reference, possibly also a guarantor. I doubt most social housing tenants would pass the affordability criteria but at least if they produce the same information required of all tenants this wouldn’t discriminate against them and I would have some evidence that the money I’d received from rent might not actually be the housing benefit paid to them and I would also have enough evidence to pass the debt to a debt collection agency if they didn’t pay.

The Labour Renters Rights Act didn’t actually make things better for tenants. Labour could have fixed the problem of social housing tenants being too high risk by making the landlord not legally responsible for checking eligibility for benefits; but they didn’t do it. Labour could have made it clear that landlords aren’t responsible for antisocial behaviour, made it clear that the responsibility for that is the council and the police and given these bodies responsibilities to pass the necessary information onto landlords in order that they could evict. But they didn’t do it and one of their number has suggested that landlords might be responsible for antisocial behaviour, even though the only powers that landlords did have to act have just been removed (no fault evictions). And so far, as far as I can tell, labour hasn’t fixed the courts.

So what all that means is that labour didn’t fix the problems in the marketplace that did need fixing and they removed the sticking plaster of no-fault evictions leaving a gaping wound in the private rental sector. Although they haven’t fixed the real problems in the market they’ve made the market worse for everybody by interfering in competition and introducing new costs that must be applied to everybody. And this doesn’t just mean that they will drive rents up, it means that many more people who could previously have been housed are now too high risk. People who I actually used to house two decades ago.

What an excellent article. I agree with almost everything said.

Perhaps landlords should factor in the likely backdated rent-freeze element. When re-letting, they could set a rent that proportionally compensates for the income lost due to the inability to backdate the increase. They should also always charge slightly above the market rate—just enough to give the tenant little reason to challenge it. The government and many tenants are playing ‘the game’, so landlords must be at least as sharp, if not sharper.

Reply to the comment left by Mr Blueberry at 26/06/2026 – 16:59
Yes, and if you remove a tenant to develop, for example to lift your house above band D, then when you relet to a new tenant with an EPC band at C,B or A (assuming you didn’t sell) you should probably be aiming for a 20-50% increase in rent for the new-let. You just need to muddy the waters to ensure that it’s clearly not the exactly the same house you are letting and it might be that you need to add maybe a toilet, bathroom or bedroom via a loft conversion if you can. These add more value than an EPC upgrade if you have to sell.

Whatever you do, you need to look at market rent for any new let and go just above it.

1. Always apply for a CCJ. The cost is minimal, it goes on the tenant’s credit rating and you may even get paid. If not, you are potentially helping other landlords.
2. Always increase to market rent every year. Why would you not? Tenants can be great until they’re not!