Transcription
Hey, my name is Jon, and welcome to my YouTube channel. In this video, I want to talk about the renters' rights bill. There's been a big update this week. There have been more readings in Parliament, and there are new details in here. Some of them are good for tenants, and some of them are good for landlords.
We're going to talk about Section 21—that's a big thing. There are actually some amendments on that which landlords potentially will like. There's a lot in here that landlords really won't like. In fact, the document is 120 pages long. I've got a guide on the renters' rights bill, which you can download in the pinned comment at the top, so do grab your copy of that.
I've gone and looked through it, and I've got it down to 11 pages here—the key points that you need to know in order to know absolutely everything about this. This is probably one of the biggest things in property that I think will happen this year in 2025, and potentially this could mean a lot more landlords quit. Unfortunately, if you're a tenant and you think that's good news, ultimately what that probably means is that rents will get squeezed and increase even more.
Now, a lot of this stuff is important, in my opinion. I do think that tenants should have better protections. I do think that rogue landlords should be dealt with quicker and more efficiently. But I also think, on the flip side, bad tenants should be dealt with as well. I think a landlord should be able to get their property back quicker. Well, that's addressed in this document, so I'm going to talk about that now.
This video probably will be a bit longer than one of our normal videos, so do strap in and make sure that you get all this information and download the guide while you're here. Now, if you're new around here, we bring this information to the market faster than anybody else. No one has done an in-depth video like this one is going to be, so make sure you subscribe to the channel while you're here and hit that bell notification so you get all the updates on this stuff.
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So let's start going through this stuff. First off, they talk about the periodic tenancies. We knew this was coming. What they're basically saying is assured shorthold tenancies (ASTs) that you have currently are abolished—they're gone. We knew that was coming.
So what have they proposed here? This is getting closer to what ultimately will become the law. What they're saying here is that they will be rolling contracts, in a nutshell, and the payment terms will be monthly on those, which is normal, right, on most tenancies here. There will be a monthly tenancy, and there will be no end period on those contracts, so they will just go on indefinitely.
Now, the tenant will have the right to give two months' notice at any point. This is something that we knew was coming. A lot of landlords are unhappy with this because you could take a tenancy on day one that you move in, give notice, and be out of there in 60 days. That means the landlord then has to spend a fortune on maybe repairing any damages if you cause any issues during the property.
Painting and stuff like that might need to be done between tenancies. I often would do that between my tenancies—licker paint and stuff like that. If you have to do that potentially every 60 days, that could be a problem, and there are costs with marketing the property. Estate agents charge landlords hundreds of pounds in order to get them a tenant, and rightly so—there's a lot of work involved in that.
For example, when I get a new tenant in my property, the first month's rent, normally I lose half of that in estate agency fees for marketing, for vetting that tenant, and stuff like that. So periodic tenancies—we were expecting that. That stays; nothing really has changed there.
Next, some people are calling this the rent control part. This part you want to pay attention to, so this is where things start to change. Rent control—remember, if you want to grab a copy of this, I'm going to put it in the comments below.
So rent control—rent increases must adhere to a statutory process. You must do it in writing. I don't manage any of my own tenancies myself; some of you watching this might do that. So you need to make sure that you do it in the formal way, and that will be detailed once the bill passes. It will be in writing. Maybe for your safety and records, you should do it on email and you should do it by recorded post so you can prove that that has happened.
You need to give them formal notice of rental increases—that's fairly common at the moment. Here are the parts that you want to pay attention to: tenants have the right to challenge the proposed increase by applying to a tribunal. That is new, and so that's important to understand.
If you want to increase your tenant's rent, they can challenge that with a tribunal. What will happen at the tribunal is they will assess that the rent is set at a reasonable rate. If the proposed rent exceeds open market rates, they might lower it. The tribunal will have the option to lower your rent. That's something you want to really pay attention to.
This wasn't in the readings that I've seen so far. If they look at the rent that you're charging, and let's just say you're getting £1,000 and you say, "I want to put it up to £1,100," it goes to tribunal. If they determine that that's excessive and the market rate is £900, they can lower your rent. They can lower the rent that you get. This is all about protecting tenants. Remember that this isn't about protecting landlords, so landlords could worry—a few of you for sure.
Rent limits—they're saying the rent for a tenancy period cannot exceed previous periods. You can't, for that tenant, unnecessarily increase their rent on a previous period they had. So in 2024, they paid this much rent. If there's no real reason for you to increase the rent without notice, you can't do that.
This is another part that I've seen a lot of media pick up on, and probably the only part that I've seen the media pick up on. This is the part that the landlords and the estate agents are trying to challenge. Advanced rental payment of excess of two months is now outlawed. You will not be able to do that. That's a consideration here.
So you won't be able to do advanced rental payments of more than two months. Now, the arguments that I've seen online about this is that this does impact some people on lower incomes. You see, you do get people that have got a bad credit score; they can't get references for whatever reason. They might go to a landlord and say, "Look, I'll give you six months' rent upfront or a year upfront."
I've had that. I had someone that gave me six months' rent upfront years ago—about 10 years ago—and ultimately that didn't work out for me, and I wouldn't do it myself anymore anyway. But they're saying you cannot do that now. The argument is here that this gives those people that are at a disadvantage because they have bad credit scores and stuff like that. This was their negotiating carrot in order to get a property when there are 20 people with good references standing there.
So this part's getting challenged, but I don't think it will go far. I think you won't be allowed to take too much rent upfront. Two months is the maximum. Low-cost tenancies—so social housing—rent caps are being looked at in that part. If you do social housing, that will be a consideration.
Now, if you do social housing or you do DSS tenants, there are already rent caps, so I don't think that's particularly different. I've got one tenant that is on housing benefits, and there's a maximum amount that the housing benefit will pay, and the tenant has to top up the rest anyway.
Next, grounds for possession—this is what the landlords want to know: how do I get my property back? So Section 21 is going to be abolished. That is gone, so that worries a lot of landlords.
Here's how you can get your property back. The grounds for possession are: the landlord or their family need to live in the property. So if you want to move back into the property in this scenario, you can give two months' notice. That's the same as Section 21.
They're saying they're getting rid of Section 21. I did say this. If you go back through my videos and you have listened to my channel, you'll have heard me saying this—maybe not enough—but I said they'll get rid of Section 21, but they'll bring back in some parts of it to keep landlords happy. So that is good.
If you need to get your property back because you want to live in it, you can give two months' notice. The landlord intends to sell the property—that's the same as Section 21; you can do that. Redevelopment or major works required during vacant possession—that could be relevant to the EPC stuff, couldn't it?
We're saying in the future you've got to get the property up to an EPC level C, potentially. That's what Labour is saying by 2030. A lot of people have the question on this channel—hundreds of comments on this—how can you do that work if the tenant lives there? You're going to have to pay for them to have hotels? No, you're not. You can give two months' notice, get the property vacant, and then do that stuff and then relet it at a later date.
If the tenant named in the contract passes away, you can get possession of the property. If there's significant arrears—it says significant; it doesn't say how many months—that will be fleshed out and clarified, so that's good. You can give two months' notice for arrears. Two months' notice for arrears or antisocial behavior is another reason.
So look, that is positive. If we're looking for something positive for landlords, we are getting more clarity now as the bill is being moved through Parliament that we can get our properties back. We can get it back for antisocial behavior. We can get it back for rent arrears. We can get it back if you want to live in the property or you want to sell the property or you need to do major works.
So you can get it back. The only thing that's gone is the word "no fault," but you could easily use one of those reasons in order to get your property back if you wanted to sell it. Here's something that you got to consider, though: tenants have new protections in this, and so you got to give two months' notice—that's the same—but you must demonstrate validity to your claim.
So if you're going to sell it, you need to demonstrate that you're going to do that. You'll need to speak to an agent to show that you're going to sell the property, and they give you either a letter or they start listing it. That's a consideration as well, so that's going to be checked up on.
Here's a very bad part of this, though. On grounds for possession, there's a specific part in the bill called compensation for tenants. Just that word "compensation for tenants" I know is going to make so many landlords worried. Reading this bill will make some more quit; I just know that's a fact.
I want to give you both sides, right? There are some positives—Section 21's gone—but nearly all the important parts of Section 21 are staying; it's just under a different name. You can get your property back, but the compensation part I know will worry landlords.
So under certain grounds, landlords may be required to compensate tenants for loss or inconvenience. This goes back to the tribunal stuff. They can take you to a tribunal if you push them out and they don't think it's fair. Antisocial behavior will be talked about as well. It will go to court in that scenario, and the court has to consider the impact on neighbors.
If you're trying to get a bad tenant out, likely the neighbors told you. Likely the neighbors have—I’ve had a bad tenant which has been allowed before, and trust me, the other people living around there will tell you if they know who you are. Now those people are going to be vital to you in order to get everything you need for a court.
Next, so look, possession—I think it's not as bad as we thought. The compensation part is a little worrying, so we've got to look at that. Next, pets. I don't have a big problem with the pets one, but let's have a look at what's being proposed here.
So tenants have the right to request to keep a pet. We knew that was coming already, and that needs to be in writing and include a description of the pet. That's important as well. If you have a Jack Russell or a Great Dane, it's a different story, isn't it? In fact, the Jack Russell might be the one that you don't want in that scenario.
I have a Jack Russell called Denny, and he barks all the time, so yeah, I wouldn't want that dog in my flat. It wouldn't be ideal. Landlord's consent—now, if you're the landlord, you can't unreasonably refuse the tenant's pet, and you need to respond to them within 28 days.
If the consent is delayed, then you can be forced to basically have that pet in the property. You can refuse the pet. This is important because this wasn't clear, and this is another thing that a lot of you commented on. You can refuse the pet if you're a leasehold property and the property is owned by a freeholder. A flat, and that freeholder prohibits pets—a lot do, especially in new build ones—because the walls are so thin and you can hear everything.
So that could mean that you could say, "Look, the whole block can't have pets; you can't have a pet. I'm sorry, that's reasonable." Another reason would be that the pet could cause damage or have health and safety issues for other people in that block. That's another consideration.
Here's another good part for landlords on this, so it's not all bad. Some of this is good. You can require—make it mandatory—that the tenant has pet insurance to cover damage to your property. That's important, and that's good and fair. We're saying, "Hey, look, you want a pet? No problem, but I want to make sure that your pet doesn't make a mess in my property, doesn't ruin it."
That's important to me that you have insurance, so that's important. You can enforce that. If they don't, you could use that as grounds for possession. Here's not a great part. I mean, there's a lot of legal threats in here. If you unfairly refuse a pet, they can legally take you to court. Now, not great—that's not great, is it?
So pet ownership—that's that. The landlord duties—this is important. So what have we got in here? What's this part of the document? You must give written terms—that's a contract. You should do that anyway. Maybe you don't, and you have it on a handshake. I know landlords that have that. It ultimately ends up bad for the landlord.
So that's important that you have a tenancy agreement. It's going to be periodic, though, not a fixed term tenancy. What else? You cannot—this is prohibited—you can't have a fixed term tenancy of six months. We've just said that.
You've got to end the tenancy properly with notice—all court proceedings. You can't just be like, "Look, you're out." That's unfair. What else must you do here? You must give them all of the documents required, like gas safe, EICR documents—that's the electric stuff that you do every five years. Gas safe is every year, potentially EPC on an annual basis. We'll see what happens with that, but you've got to give them all of that stuff.
You've got to be compliant. If you're not compliant with licensing and all this stuff, then they could challenge you and maybe not pay your rent. This also will help with local councils to penalize landlords, so that's very important as well.
Basically, you just got to make sure everything is ticked off. For me, and I would recommend for you, use an agent. I use an agent on every property. I've got properties in Doncaster, in Hastings, and Dorking. I'm in Dorking every day. I work in Dorking, but I always use an estate agent because, look, if someone doesn't pay their rent, I don't like to chase people. It's just not something I'm comfortable with doing.
I make me the good cop, and they're the bad cop. But also, I can be a bit lazy on stuff, and so if it was down to me, my gas safes would probably be a few weeks late and stuff like that. But the agent doesn't do that. They constantly get someone. If the gas safe needs to be done, I've given them approval already to just do that for me, and they get it done prior to it needing to be done, so that's important.
What's next is discrimination. Discrimination is something that they're trying to fight here, and that's important. I think this is good and fair because I think some people are discriminated against, particularly mothers and people with pets, and it really makes it hard for people with children to get properties.
So you can't discriminate now against someone that has children. I've never done that. I didn't really think that that was something that happened too often, but it does, and that's not great. You also can't discriminate against someone that has benefits. That's important. That's been talked about a lot.
You do see this in adverts. I see this in adverts on Rightmove all the time, where there'll be a property for rent, and then it will say "no DSS" or "no benefits" in there. That is now—well, it's not yet, but it will be illegal, so you should stop doing that now.
Will landlords bend the rules on that? Yeah, if they've got 10 applicants in front of them, they're looking at all the applicants equally. No one will know for sure whether they picked the one that had the benefits or didn't and how they got to that process. It will be hard to enforce that, but it will make it a little easier for other people, so that's important.
You cannot stop a tenant inquiring about a property, getting information about the property. Your agent will not be able to stop that, and you cannot stop them viewing the property as well. You have to give them the opportunity.
So if they call you up—let's just say you manage the property yourself, which, as I've said, I don't think you should do—but if you do, let's just say you do, and a tenant calls you up and says, "I want to view the property, but I'm on benefits," you cannot discriminate against them. If you do, you could get taken to court.
I'm going to talk about fines in a minute. So what else is important here? You can't put restrictions on the property, like prohibiting children or people visiting a property. That's rare, but I do know that some people do that. I have seen that.
I remember in my first rental, I moved out at 16 years old. My mom, my dad died when I was basically zero, and my mom became an alcoholic and then got a lot of mental health issues. I couldn't cope with that, and I ended up moving out at 16 years old. I rented a room. I worked in Burger King as a manager so I could afford it. I just rented a room, but there was a clause in the contract that said I couldn't have friends over.
I couldn't have friends over. It was ridiculous, and I couldn't have anyone stay the night, which wasn't great either. Now, I understood that one maybe, but having friends over wasn't great. You got your own property; you want to get them to come around and play on your Nintendo 64 like I did back then, but I couldn't. They lived in the adjacent property, so it made it really difficult.
So you can't put clauses like that. Now, local authorities—if you breach these things, which you got to be careful now—so someone calls you up, you're managing the property yourself, and you say, "Look, you're on benefits; you can't look at the property," you could be fined £7,000. £7,000 before you've even let out your property if someone really took action on this and got the local authorities involved.
So you should be very cautious about what you're saying and just be fair to everyone in the market going forward. So that's that. Next, decent home standards—we've seen talk about this as well. The decent home standards are important.
There's something—I got this wrong, so if I pronounce this name wrong, I do apologize. I think it's "Awa's Law," and that was about mold in a property. In that, it was a housing association or a council that had mold in a property, specifically black mold, and a young child unfortunately died from that.
So now it's more important that we don't have those kinds of issues or risks because that's awful what happened in that scenario. There are going to be stricter regulations, and they'll be more specific. We haven't got these yet on what's required.
In short, the property needs to be safe, warm, and in good repair. Now, that's massively open to interpretation, isn't it? But we will get more details on that as this goes through. What's important is if you're a landlord and someone reports something, for example, mold, that you get someone out immediately to determine if this is something that needs fixing or if this is a tenant issue.
Sometimes tenants just aren't opening windows when they're drying their clothes, and the property gets moldy. That happens. You would need to, in that scenario, get somebody out to look at it and then put in writing, "This is what needs to happen. They need to open the windows more," or "There is a mold problem; we need to fix this."
That would then be in writing. You'd either have to fix it or you'd have to notify the tenant, "This is happening because you're not airing the property out properly." That's important that that's documented because if they then come back to you, you could get fined a hell of a lot here.
This is very important. They're going to make sure that the state of repair is there—that it is safe, secure, and comfortable for the occupants, and it can have a suitable temperature. That would lead more into the EPC stuff when that comes through, but if the property is just freezing and doesn't have good heating, that's not going to help you at all.
Now, this is another concerning one. Well, you kind of have this stuff already, but the local authorities will be able to use this stuff in order to fine landlords, and so that's very, very important as well. You can have financial penalties.
Emergency action—this is new. I haven't seen this happen. Emergency action may be taken if the property poses an imminent risk to health or safety. That could be something that could cost you a lot of money.
So in short, if you've got a problem, fix it or sell your property. Enforcement—what are they going to do to make sure you comply with these things? This is important here. Not much more to go.
So enforcement—local housing authorities will have a general duty to enforce these rules in their area, and they're going to monitor and check your compliance and address any violations. Now, what I think will happen short term is tenants, as they see about this renters' rights bill, will start reporting more to councils.
Any problems you don't deal with will get reported to councils quickly. That's why, for me, I think it's important to use an agent. I have an agent. I've got a new flat that I've just bought. You've seen that if you've watched the channel for a while, and unfortunately, there's an issue with the boiler. It got fixed within 12 hours, though.
The agent said, "This is the problem; this is the cost." They dealt with it; they got it fixed. So there's a trail on that. I know that agent has all the systems in place to log all the maintenance. I wouldn't do that myself, right?
If that tenant contacted me directly, I'll be honest, I would have dealt with it on WhatsApp and said, "Yeah, no problem; I'll get a plumber out." I have called John the plumber; I'd have got him out. He would have fixed it; I would have paid him. But it would have been difficult to go to a court or go to a council and say, "This is when they called me; this is what happened; this is when it was dealt with."
So estate agents are really going to be worth their weight in gold, I feel. So what else is going on? Investigatory powers—if there's a problem with the property, the council will be able to require landlords now to provide documents or information on that stuff.
They'll also be able to enter and inspect the property with or without a warrant. With or without a warrant—that is new. So they could effectively—this is saying you could get someone to complain about your property, say this is dangerous—maybe it's an electrical thing or something like that—and then the council could just turn up at that property, do an inspection. You might not even know that's happening, and that's not great, is it?
So that's why you need to keep on top of all of your maintenance. You could also get sanctions. You could get major severe financial penalties for violations such as operating unlicensed or failing to meet housing standards. Repeat offenders or serious breaches may result in criminal prosecution. That's not great.
Here's another thing: tenants can apply for rent repayment if landlords breach their legal obligations. We knew this was coming as well. So what we're saying here is your tenant pays you £1,000 a month in rent. Then they contact the council because you didn't fix something; it took six months to fix. They could go to the council and apply to get a rebate of that rent—£1,000 a month, £6,000 back—plus you've had to pay for that maintenance.
This means that tenants could get major compensation in various different routes here if you're not on your game. So it's more important than ever before. A little plug here: I've got a program called the Fundamentals of Property Investing, which I'm going to link down below. It's £25 at the moment, and that will help you really understand everything that you need to do to be compliant as a landlord. That's very, very important, so do go and check that.
Next, penalties and compliance—fines can reach £7,000 for specific offenses, and the proceeds will be used to cover enforcement costs. So basically, go to the council.
Here's the rights—the new rights, tenants' rights. Last bit here—remember, I'm going to put all of this in a guide, an ebook, which you can download below. So click on the link and download that now.
Now, here's something that I want to also cover. So going to abolish Section 21—we know that—but the stuff that they brought back here isn't actually that bad. It's basically saying you can't get rid of someone for no fault, but it's giving you a list of different reasons why you can get your property back.
You want to sell it; they ruin the property, and all of these sorts of things. So yeah, I don't think that's too bad. Tenancies are now periodic, meaning if a tenant takes your property, they can give you two months' notice at any time, meaning they're not stuck somewhere for a year if they don't like you or the area or something like that.
That gives them real protection. They can also challenge your rent increases, so they can take you to the ombudsman, the tribunal, and they can challenge your rental increases. The risk you have there is if you increase the rent, and basically at the tribunal they say, "Nah, this isn't right; you're charging way too much," they could actually reduce the amount you're already getting before the rent increase.
That's something to consider. Right to keep pets—we knew that was coming. I think that's fairly reasonable. You can say no on certain grounds. You can say no if the freehold or the leasehold that you've got doesn't permit it, so that's going to protect you there.
Compensation for unlawful eviction—let's just say you removed your tenant, and then because you removed that tenant, you didn't actually sell the property or you didn't move back into it, but that's the reason you gave—they could get compensation from you. So you've got to be careful with what you do here.
Rent repayment orders—this is another thing we just covered. If you don't provide them with a fit and proper home for a period of time, they could get rent reimbursed for that period as well.
And also, the last thing is protection against discrimination. So if you want to stop someone coming into your property because they're on benefits or they've got children, you can't do it. You just can't do it anymore.
So this is a lot. There's a lot that we've gone through here—half an hour now, 35 minutes that we're into this video. But I really like your thoughts, opinions, observations on this. Comment below. Let me know if you're a tenant and you think this is good or bad. Let me know if you're a landlord and if you think this is good or bad, or maybe you're just a homeowner of some sort and you just want to know what's going on in the market.
Even if you got this far in the video, just comment to say thank you for this dissection on this, or hi, whatever it is. That helps with YouTube. I want to get lots of views on this video because I think this is important, and I don't think anyone's going to go into the detail that we've got here.
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