The King’s Speech – what does this mean for the Private Rental Sector?

Richard Pulford, Senior Associate in the Dispute Resolution team, looks at the King’s Speech and what this will mean for the Private Rental Sector with the new Labour Government.  

There has been a lot of discussion as to what the new Labour Government would focus on first after they came into power. The previous government expended a lot of time and resources to get the Renters Reform Bill into the condition it was. Whilst it was certainly not ‘ready to take out the oven’ a lot of the polices had cross-party support and so would there be a continuation of the Bill as is or given the additional power that comes from the majority that the Labour Party achieved, would they use this to start again, implementing their own policies and removing those which may have been begrudgingly accepted behind closed doors. The King’s speech gave us some answers on this. We will follow this with further articles covering the topics in more detail, but for the time being, here is your bite sized version of what was discussed and what this means.

Renters’ Rights Bill

The emphasis of the original Bill as it was, has remained fairly similar. For those of us that have blogged about a lot of these topics in the past, this is welcome news and does not make our previous content immediately redundant. However, there is one striking change which does not affect the bill at all but will be welcome news to those of you (*sheepishly raises hand*) who found the absence of an apostrophe jarring when writing out the name of the bill. The Bill is now the Renters’ Rights Bill. A lot of the rest of the proposals are what Landlords and Managing Agents had been expecting. These have been highlighted by:

• Abolition of no-fault evictions. We knew this was happening and it is no surprise that this is very much still on the radar. We previously wrote about what this may look like on a previous blog.
• Implementation of a Decent Housing Standards requirement and applying Awaab’s Law from just Social Housing to the private rental section as well. We will cover this in more detail in due course, however, briefly this increases the standards required for a property and putting mandatory timeframes for landlords to rectify hazards in a property.
• The housing standards mentioned above will be further strengthened by a national register for landlords, which promises to provide an accountability requirement for Landlords to ensure compliance with their obligations as landlord.
• Measures to protect against landlords and letting agents starting a bidding war between prospective applicants.
• More powers to protect tenants and allow challenge to aggressive rent increases made by landlords.

There is sure to be more to follow, and we will do what we can to keep you all updated as and when we know more. You may recall that the previous government stalled with the implementation of the Bill wanting to focus on the court’s ability to manage these sorts of cases. This investment in the court remains, as it was then, overdue and sensible. It remains to be seen though, whether the necessary court reforms will be the focus of the new government or would any perceived delays of the past government in enacting the proposals, mean that a new found urgency is deemed necessary to suitably protect tenants with immediate effect. If the government does not take into account Landlords’ concerns about this issue, then it seems likely that many more landlords will exit the sector, which of course will put even more strain on supply and demand issues and cause rents to rise even further.

If any Landlords or managing agents find themselves in a difficult situation either as a result of these proposals or just with your tenants generally and advice is required, please contact [email protected] where we can assist you.​​​