Why the outrageous increases in landlord fines misses the mark?

I think that if a landlord is bad it will often be due to a lack of finance/ poor cash flow in the first place. I also think that most landlords have income probably only slightly above the median, so the fines still appear like life changing, eye watering numbers.
So, one big fine, and you can guarantee that particular landlord will be unable to be much other than a bad landlord from then on, or more likely be forced to close out and take substantial losses for their trouble.
The whole thing seems odd. Why so much stick and no carrot?

The fines are way out of order compared to things most people would consider a crime like £7000 for not having a licence when the next street is exempt and nobody actually told that 80 year old landlord without a computer.

I had to tell a gentleman of a similar age about EPC and EICR requirements, nobody told him and his family have rented out the same properties cheaply for the last 70 years.

Nobody actually cares about the tenants a financial win for the council, perhaps promotion or bonus for their staff. But the cheap (read actually affordable) property cannot exist in this new world order.

It’s all about getting rid of the small landlord and driving the corporate takeover forward. The fines are obviously not sustainable for the average landlord who is just getting by, and are likely to push them to sell up.

Thousands of pounds for missing a bit of paperwork that isn’t likely to make any difference in the short term is perhaps a reasonable response to a corporation that should know how to keep on top of compliance, but potentially ruinous to an individual.

How they can square that with LHA that is often below the level required to cover costs, let alone make a reasonable return, is anybody’s guess.

And good luck getting any personalised help from a faceless corporation rather than a human being that knows and understands your situation!

The RRA is a means by which bankrupt councils can fill up their depleted coffers. The government could not give a f*** about tenant welfare.

Suggestions of selective licensing becoming obsolete once the PRS database is in place (and so it should, as it duplicates the information) means the councils have to look elsewhere to raid.

The fines are completely disproportionate:
using a mobile phone while driving £200 capped at £1,000
Not serving a piece of paper freely available on the internet £7,000 per tenant
Unable to prove for the next 10 years that the useless piece of paper was served £7,000 per tenant
Reletting your own property because you could not sell it (!) £40,000

We now have councils discussing 50% uplift on fines and uncapped fines. This is the new cash cow to replace selective licensing.
Is there a mechanism to contest the proportionality of these fines?

Reply to the comment left by Markella Mikkelsen at 18/08/2026 – 11:15
Per Chat GPT:

Yes. There is a meaningful mechanism to contest these penalties on proportionality grounds, and it is considerably stronger than ordinary judicial review because the First-tier Tribunal can effectively reconsider the council’s decision from scratch.

Under the Renters’ Rights Act regime now operating in England, a landlord who receives a final civil penalty notice can appeal to the First-tier Tribunal within 28 days, challenging either liability itself or the amount of the penalty. The appeal is a re-hearing, not merely a review of whether the council behaved irrationally. The Tribunal can consider evidence the council did not have and can cancel the penalty or increase/reduce it.

That makes proportionality a very real argument. Government statutory guidance expressly requires councils to consider seriousness, culpability, actual/potential harm, deterrence, financial benefit and mitigating/aggravating circumstances. Most importantly, where several penalties are imposed together, the council must consider “totality” and whether the aggregate figure is just and proportionate, reducing the individual penalties proportionately where necessary.

There are also a couple of important corrections to the figures in the passage you quoted. £7,000 is the statutory maximum for most “breaches”; it is not an automatic £7,000 fine. The government’s national starting point for failure to provide the RRA information sheet is currently £4,000, and £4,000 for failure to provide the required written statement of terms. A council can move that figure up or down according to the circumstances, but there is no statutory minimum.

Likewise, re-letting after using Ground 1/1A is not automatically £40,000. The statutory ceiling for the offence is £40,000, but the government’s suggested national starting point for re-letting or remarketing within the 12-month restricted period is £25,000. There are also statutory exceptions, and the offence does not apply where the landlord took all reasonable steps not to re-let or an exception applies.

A particularly strong appeal would therefore look something like this: the landlord accepts that a technical breach occurred but argues that the council’s chosen figure does not properly reflect minimal or zero tenant harm, low culpability, immediate remediation, no previous offending, no financial advantage from the breach, cooperation with the investigation, and the cumulative impact of multiple penalties arising from essentially the same incident. Those aren’t invented mitigation factors; they map directly onto the government’s statutory guidance.

There may be an even stronger argument where a council applies a mechanical uplift. The statutory guidance allows councils in higher-rent areas to make a general adjustment, but says that any rent-level percentage adjustment must not exceed the percentage by which local rents exceed the national average. Councils may also increase penalties where reliable evidence about rental income or asset value indicates that a higher figure is needed for deterrence. So a blanket “50% uplift” would need to be examined very carefully: the council cannot simply invent an uplift detached from its lawful policy, the statutory guidance and the individual facts.

There are effectively three opportunities to attack a penalty:

Representations against the Notice of Intent. The landlord normally has 28 days and can expressly argue that the proposed penalty should not be imposed or is disproportionate. Government guidance specifically identifies disproportionality as something that can be raised at this stage.
First-tier Tribunal appeal against the Final Notice. Again normally within 28 days. This is the important one because the Tribunal conducts a rehearing and can substitute its own figure.
Upper Tribunal appeal. Either party can seek permission to appeal a First-tier Tribunal decision to the Upper Tribunal, ordinarily where there is an arguable error of law.

There is another potentially powerful evidential point. Except for rental discrimination and rental bidding, the guidance says these RRA breaches/offences generally have to be established beyond reasonable doubt. Before imposing one of those civil penalties, the council must satisfy itself that there would be a realistic prospect of conviction if the matter were prosecuted. So a landlord contesting whether an information sheet was actually served is not necessarily in the position of having to prove positively that it was served ten years later; the enforcement authority bears the applicable burden of establishing the contravention. Obviously, keeping evidence of service remains extremely sensible.

The comparison with mobile-phone driving penalties would probably have limited legal force by itself. Parliament is entitled to prescribe very different maximum penalties for different regulatory regimes, so saying “this is seven times a motoring fine” is unlikely to win an appeal. The better proportionality comparison is within the housing penalty scheme itself: what harm occurred, what culpability existed, what the government-prescribed starting point is, how comparable offenders are treated, whether the council followed its published policy, whether mitigating factors were properly considered, and whether the total financial punishment is proportionate.

And the “cash cow” argument needs separating from the legal argument. Councils can retain civil-penalty proceeds for specified private-sector housing enforcement functions; the government guidance itself refers to penalty income being recycled into PRS enforcement. But financial benefit to the council would not allow it lawfully to inflate an individual penalty. A tribunal is concerned with whether the statutory test and penalty-setting framework have been correctly applied to that landlord.

So, yes—I would expect successful appeals against some of the very large penalties, particularly where councils mechanically impose maximum or near-maximum figures for technical breaches with little harm, or stack numerous penalties without properly applying the totality principle. The Act does not mean “breach = £7,000” or “offence = £40,000”.

Reply to the comment left by Ryan Stevens at 12:29
I consider that the comparison between mobile phone usage and HMO licensing is an indication that the government consider that using a phone while driving, a very dangerous occupation, is a far less serious offence than not having an HMO licence.
These new Civil penalties are a radical departure from normal British law. The penalty is applied, then the accused has to prove their innocence. Whatever happened to innocent until proved guilty?

I suspect lots of fines.go uncollected because the CIvil Penalty Notices were not served properly. The recipient may have simply pointed out the flaws, and the councils know there’s no further action they can take, but won’t admit to their mistakes and correct numbers they send to ONS.