Draft Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
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The Committee divided: - Ayes: 11 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026.
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Wishart. In our manifesto, we promised to overhaul the regulation of an insecure and unjust private rented sector. Our transformative Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 27 October last year, delivered on that commitment. On 13 November, we published an implementation road map setting out our intention to switch on the provisions of the Act in three distinct phases.
The first phase, which entailed the introduction of the new tenancy regime, was implemented on 1 May this year. We are now progressing with the second phase of our reforms. That entails establishing a landlord ombudsman for the PRS to improve dispute resolution, settling issues between tenants and landlords without costly court proceedings, and introducing our innovative database of PRS properties to bring together key information for landlords, tenants and councils.
The regulations we are considering today concern the latter. They set out the registration framework for the database and are essential to enabling its roll-out, which will commence regionally from 15 December. The database will record information about private landlords and privately let properties in England. It will help landlords understand their obligations, give tenants better information before entering into a tenancy and support local authorities with enforcement. The service will be known publicly as the “Register your rental property” service, but I will refer to it as the database for the purposes of the Committee.
The regulations determine how registering for the database will work in practice. They cover who can make entries, what information must be provided and how the database can be kept accurate over time and up to date. Landlords will be required to make a landlord entry, which will include their name and contact information. Entries for organisational landlords will include information about the organisation and its management. Joint landlords will share the dwelling entry for the property, but each will need their own landlord entry.
Landlords will be required to make a dwelling entry for each property, which will contain information including its address, ownership, property type, rent level and relevant management details. Once occupied, it must include tenancy and health and safety information, including uploaded certificates and information relating to gas, electrical and energy performance information. Landlords will be legally responsible for registration, payment, renewal and compliance. Under regulations, they may, however, delegate the supply of certain information to an agent or property manager to reduce administrative burden.
The regulations also allow entries to be made, updated or renewed by certain third parties in discrete circumstances—for example, where a landlord lacks capacity or where a possession restriction is in place when a mortgage provider requires a court order possession of an unregistered property. Entries will need to be kept up to date for an entry to be deemed active. Recorded information will be treated as out of date where details no longer reflect the landlord, property, tenancy or relevant compliance position. It must generally be updated within 28 days. Regulations give the database operator the ability to correct errors and remove entries that do not meet the requirements for inclusion. We will issue guidance on the operational detail, including on the verification of entries by local authorities.
The regulations require landlords to pay a fee to make or renew a dwelling entry. The instrument does not set the fee, but it does delegate that to the database operator. The operator is required to set the fee by reference to the relevant costs as specified in the Renters’ Rights Act. We have separately announced the fee of £65 per property per year, pro-rated during the initial roll-out to ensure that costs remain fair and that those registering first are not paying more.
This is the first of two statutory instruments needed to implement the database. Following parliamentary approval of this first instrument, roll-out of the database will commence on 15 December. Each region will be rolled out in one-month intervals. When a region’s registration window goes live, landlords will have three months to register properties in the region. We have issued guidance showing the order and timings for that. All relevant entries are required to be made by the end of 14 November 2027.
A second statutory instrument will cover the public-facing side of the database, the addition of specified breaches and offences committed by landlords, and further data sharing. We will commence that as soon as possible following completion of the initial roll-out. It will concern what information is made visible to the public and wider data-sharing arrangements. Those matters are not in the scope of these regulations.
To conclude, these regulations put in place the operational requirements needed to begin the roll-out of the PRS database. They are a critical step toward a more transparent and enforceable PRS system, supporting compliance while giving tenants better information about the homes they rent. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart—in this case, I think it is my first time. I welcome the opportunity to sit opposite the Minister again, and I appreciate the remarks he has made in this debate. I also welcome this opportunity to address the regulations on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition.
A fair, honest and accountable private rented sector is important for landlords, agents and tenants alike—I think there is no dispute on that. Indeed, any system concerning people’s homes and property must be transparent. From what I have heard, providers in the private rented sector are broadly united in agreement on that point. The National Residential Landlords Association said,
“If designed well, the Database should make it easy for landlords to demonstrate compliance with their obligations…whilst empowering tenants to distinguish between the responsible majority and the rogue and criminal minority of landlords.”
The Large Agents Representation Group said:
“With the correct design, it would make compliance easier to demonstrate for landlords and their agents…give tenants greater confidence about the homes they rent and provide local authorities with better information to target enforcement against those who fail to meet the required standards.”
However, the NRLA has described these regulations as “a costly mess”. The idea of a national register is not in itself disagreeable, but the proposed implementation and structure of this database is alien to any common-sense approach. First, and most strikingly, the Government have designed the database with barely a fifth of the providers in mind. Landlords with a single property are responsible for just 21% of tenancies in England, according to the 2024 English private landlord survey. The other roughly four fifths of tenancies are managed by landlords with more than one property, including some with thousands. Indeed, around one in five landlords hold nearly half of all tenancies.
It is 2026. Advanced technology is available, yet the Government’s proposals envisage the manual uploading of each individual property. The regulations as they stand make no provision for bulk uploads, forcing landlords to upload properties one by one—Noah processed more animals on to the ark at a time than that. Each property requires around 70 data points, so that is an awful lot of admin with huge time implications, and much of the information required is already submitted to councils through existing licensing schemes.
The Large Agents Representation Group, which represents some of the largest portfolios in the country through clients such as Chestertons, Hamptons, Knight Frank, Savills and Foxtons, calculates that if it takes 10 minutes to register an individual property, as the Government’s estimate apparently shows, that means over 1,600 staff hours for a 10,000 property portfolio—or about 3,300 hours for the 20 minutes it actually expects it to take.
On that point, larger providers disagree with the Government’s estimate of the time it will take to upload data, so the associated costs of uploading per property could be even higher. Assuming that it takes 30 minutes per property and there are seven productive working hours in a day, that amounts to 214 working days for a 3,000 property portfolio and 714 days for a 10,000 property portfolio.
That is a long way from being the only problem with the proposed database. The regulations stipulate that landlords must start and end the registration themselves, and agents can supply only certain information. That directly contradicts the Government’s impact assessment, which assumed that agents would register on the landlord’s behalf.
Then there is the lack of an audit trail. Because of the system favoured by the Government, landlords have no ability to verify and validate data on a portfolio basis. They have no access controls nor an audit trail for data uploads, changes or deletions. The consequence of that is obvious: a heightened risk of exposure to administrative errors, consequent fines, which can range from £7,000 to £40,000, and a host of compliance and audit risks.
Then we come to the subject of cost. The Renters’ Rights Act included in its impact assessment an estimated data registration fee of £28.85 per property every three years. Now the Government have confirmed a fee of £65 per property every single year, as the regulations require entries to be renewed every 12 months. For the 80% of landlords in the market who care for more than one property, that represents a significant and unplanned recurring cost, and no one in the sector knows where the £65 figure came from nor how it can be justified. Perhaps the Minister can provide a clear explanation in his closing remarks of how that £65 has been calculated.
Although the providers in the private rented sector are in broad agreement with the concept of a database, they are also united in viewing the approach of this Government as a total disaster. None of the concerns that I have outlined should come as news to the Government, because they have all been raised directly with Government officials by industry representatives. Many of those who I have spoken to thought that the Government had heard their concerns and were making adjustments, only to discover later that they had been ignored entirely. How do the Government expect to earn or maintain the trust of the whole sector when they ignore its concerns and blindside it with extra financial and labour costs?
The Large Agents Representation Group has summed up the Government’s proposals:
“Instead of making best use of data already held across Government and other established systems…the proposed approach required landlords and agents to manually and repeatedly input and maintain information that in most cases is already available elsewhere…creating unnecessary duplication, administrative burden and risk of inaccuracy for all stakeholders. The decisions being made now about its underlying architecture risk embedding unnecessary bureaucracy and practical problems from the outset. This is concerning when significant fees are being imposed and non-compliance carries substantial and lasting penalties.”
The significant additional costs and administrative burdens imposed by this approach are likely to have damaging repercussions. Voices in the build-to-rent sector, a sector vital to assisting in the delivery of new homes, have said
“This will inevitably deter much-needed investment in new homes…particularly at this time of ‘viability crisis.’”
These are just a few of the significant issues shared with me by industry. The database, as proposed by the Government, is not fit for purpose. It is not good enough to impose something that everyone knows is not going to work just so that the Government can claim that they are taking action. The regulations represent the very worst of a Government hellbent on regulating first and worrying about the consequences later. Empty promises of continuing improvements do not cut the mustard. The sector, already saddled by over-regulation and tax hikes, needs efficiencies, not even more constraints.
I implore the Minister to pause the impending roll-out of the regulations, which are due for implementation in just a couple of weeks’ time, scrap the current proposals and produce new ones after proper consultation with industry. I say that more in hope than expectation, so the Opposition will seek to divide and vote against the measures.
Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve the Committee with you in the Chair, Mr Wishart. I declare an interest as a registered social landlord.
The Liberal Democrats come at this from a somewhat different starting point than the official Opposition, in that we supported the Renters’ Rights Act and we strongly supported the introduction of a database of landlords as a source of really important basic information that tenants should be able to have. We have been consistent in supporting the concept of what is in front of us.
The system that has been devised, however, is nothing short of a fiasco and will undermine the whole purpose of the database. As well as being harmful—or challenging, to say the very least—to landlords and damaging to their business operations, it will frustrate tenants if landlords need to spend that amount of time updating the register one property at a time. Let us imagine that someone is an institutional landlord with 4,000 dwellings. If only one can be entered at a time, it will take weeks and months, by which time the database will be completely out of date for tenants looking at it. The problems of the database will affect not only landlords, but tenants.
We desperately need more build-to-rent landlords to build more rented accommodation. There is a debate going on about the Renters’ Rights Act and whether landlords have withdrawn from the market. I do not intend to get into that debate in detail—the Joseph Rowntree Foundation takes a different view and says that there is a certain amount of churn—but one thing is absolutely clear: the Act is challenging the sector to a huge degree and causing a great deal of change and churn. The last thing that it needs right now is a database that, for our biggest landlords, is completely impossible to complete in any economic or efficient way.
I am grateful to Real Estate:UK for its briefing, and I make no apologies for reading out parts of what it has told me. For example, it says that
“a single employee working through a 5,000-home portfolio would need 2,500 hours or around 312.5 working days”
to upload. That has to be done every year. It continues:
“Without any fee discount or integrative information provision process, a BTR landlord with a 5,000-unit portfolio can expect to spend c.£378,000 a year on registering their properties.”
Furthermore, it says:
“To comply both with selective licensing and the Service, a BTR landlord can expect to pay over £4,000,000 across a 5,000-home portfolio.”
As the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Orpington, pointed out, the costs are above what was expected at the time of Act’s passage.
It is surely not beyond the wit of Government to produce a database where someone can make multiple uploads and does not need to upload one at a time, and a database that is more efficient than the one we have at the moment where someone cannot even copy data across from one property to the next—even if they have 250 properties that are exactly the same, they have to enter each one individually without copying across any of the data. If the official Opposition press the measure to a Division, which they clearly will, we Liberal Democrats will also vote against it. It is bad for the Renters’ Rights Act, bad for tenants, bad for landlords and bad for the build-to-rent sector that we need to support our housing market.
Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
I will not detain the Committee for long. I just want to say that my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington has made some excellent points drawing on some of the information supplied by the organisations representing landlords with multiple premises, as has the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington. I would like to declare that I am a landlord of a single small one-bedroom flat in Westminster. It already falls within the Westminster city council selective property licensing scheme, which costs in the order of £1,000 and requires me to upload a great deal of information, all of which, as I understand it, is now going to be duplicated in this system. I would like the Minister to explain how that will provide additional information to tenants in areas where it is already available through the local authority.
The Liberal Democrat spokesman referred to the effect of the Renters’ Rights Act, which I think has already increased the disincentives for landlords to go into the private rented sector. I have just listened to the Chancellor explain to us at some length why he is going to bring in better regulation, and at the same time commit to getting rid of homelessness, both of which are admirable objectives that I share, but I am not sure this measure will help deliver either of them.
Matthew Pennycook
I think it is the first time in this Parliament that I have seen the Liberal Democrats and Conservative party in unison. [Interruption.] But if they will let me finish, given that His Majesty’s Opposition opposed the Act outright, I am not surprised by their opposition to this measure, although I am somewhat surprised by the Liberal Democrats’ opposition. I take the challenges on the various points in good faith, however, so let me try and reassure hon. Members about what we are trying to achieve here.
First, on how the data is uploaded, I will make it clear that it is not the case that each landlord needs to log on and upload the same information each year starting from scratch. They need to update the information only if the information they have already entered has changed. Once the initial information has been uploaded, they will not need to change it if it remains unchanged.
We have explored options for enabling bulk uploads—something I have pushed officials on. I started from the same position that Opposition Members did: “Can’t we just allow bulk uploads?” We have concluded, after looking into the issue in some detail, with quite a significant amount of sector engagement, that due to significant challenges with data validation and error handling, traditional solutions such as uploading Excel files—one of the options put to us—would add complexity for the user. We are designing the service to be as straightforward as possible for landlords, including those with larger portfolios. To meet their needs, we will enable organisations to add multiple employees to their accounts, enabling easier administration.
We are looking at how to make it easier for landlords, particularly those managing large portfolios, to connect their existing property management systems directly with the service and to create some efficiencies in that respect. We will look to provide a secure digital connection that landlords and their technology providers can choose to integrate with, reducing the need to enter the information manually to register their properties. We will continue to explore opportunities to improve functionality and reduce burdens as the service develops. I hope that that has answered some of the points about bulk data entry.
Matthew Pennycook
Well, we are going to look to integrate the management systems of large portfolio holders. I was asked, “Does each large portfolio holder have to sit there and add in each entry every year?” That is not the case. I am trying to clarify some of the misconceptions that have been put to me.
On selective licensing, as we debated at length through the passage of the Act, selective licensing and the database have different purposes. The database will not duplicate or replace selective licensing. We recognise the important role that licensing can continue to play where it is used appropriately. The national database will provide consistent information about private landlords and rental properties across England, supporting transparency, compliance and local authority enforcement.
We will, however, continue to review how selective licensing and the national service interact as implementation progresses, with a specific view to reducing duplication. I very much agree that, in terms of the information currently held when a selective licensing scheme is put in place, there are ways to reduce the amount of that required once the database is in place.
The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Orpington, asked why letting agents cannot register on behalf of landlords. One of the key goals of the database is to improve landlord awareness and capability. Responsibility for ensuring that registration requirements are met will remain with the landlord throughout. Letting and property agents will not have a mandatory role in registration and will not be separately registered through the service. Requiring landlords to initiate registration ensures that they engage with their legal responsibilities from the outset.
We do, however, recognise that letting and property agents play an important role in supporting landlords to meet these responsibilities. To reflect that, agents will be able to support landlords by providing certain information once the landlord has started the registration process. Again, I come back to the importance of the initial registration in this first phase of the roll-out. Where an agent agrees, the landlord will be able to delegate the provision of specific tenancy and health and safety information to them.
A series of points were put to me about the fee. The fee is set at £65 to fund a national service. It is fair, sustainable and capable of supporting effective enforcement. I think the shadow Minister has put to me on several occasions, as has the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington, the need to properly fund local authority enforcement in the private rented sector—here we are with the means to do so. Every landlord is required to pay the annual £65 fee for each property they register on the database. As the fee is charged per property, landlords must pay each time they register a different property.
The fee has been set in that way to balance fairness and sustainability for landlords with the cost of operating the service and tackling non-compliance in the private rented sector. The shadow Minister is absolutely right that the NRLA and other organisations support the database in principle, because it will allow us to bear down on the unscrupulous landlords in the market who do much to colour the reputation of the good landlords out there.
Sir Ashley Fox
In my constituency of Bridgwater in Somerset, there is a chronic shortage of rented accommodation. I am concerned that this expensive and cumbersome system will deter further private landlords from renting their properties. If the Minister does not have a system that can process bulk uploads, he should tell his officials to think again—to go out into the private market and get a system that works. He should scrap these regulations and tell his civil servants to think again.
Matthew Pennycook
I do not think we need to think again, because we are already thinking about this issue. I say to the hon. Gentleman again that we are exploring how we can make it easier for landlords, particularly those managing large portfolios, to connect their existing management systems directly with the service and integrate them.
Matthew Pennycook
The hon. Gentleman shakes his head at me, but if landlords have a way of integrating their service and of providing that faster upload, that is precisely what we are trying to look at already.
Gareth Bacon
Would it not, then, be better for the Minister to pause these regulations now, explore that fully and come back once he has adapted the system, so that that can be incorporated? This comes back to the point I was making about regulating now and trying to fiddle with it later. It is not going to work, as large landlords are telling the Minister. Why not pause, work it out and then come back?
Matthew Pennycook
We are not going to pause—I say this to the shadow Minister quite plainly—because we want the database in place. It has benefits for landlords in understanding their legal responsibility, and it has benefits for tenants. This is the first of two statutory instruments, as I have made clear. We think we can do that work, working with the sector to understand how we might integrate their management systems.
Matthew Pennycook
I will give way, and then I am going to make some progress, because the same points continue to be raised.
Sarah Bool
I was formerly a commercial property lawyer, so I want to bring up a practical point about enforcement. The ambition behind the regulations—to make sure that everybody, including tenants, has the information that they need—is positive, but the practical reality is that if they cannot be enforced properly, it will cause problems and delays in the rental sector. I advocate for a pause—that is essential. If information needs to be gathered and uploaded for potentially up to 10,000 properties—an extremely large number—it will probably take a year or more to get that information up. Have we thought through the knock-on impacts? I encourage exercising caution, having seen the practical reality of being on the other side when I was a lawyer back in the day.
Matthew Pennycook
We have thought through the timetable and the implementation, and we are confident that we can proceed as we intend to.
Matthew Pennycook
No, I will make some progress.
Fees will support activity to identify and act on non-compliance with the reforms in the Renters’ Rights Act. The funding will support councils, ensuring that they have the staff and skills required to identify and tackle non-compliance and to drive landlords who persist in breaking the law out of the sector. Fees will be pro-rated during the initial roll-out, ensuring that landlords in regions required to register early are treated fairly. To go back to my opening remarks, we will roll-out the measure on a regional basis from December. I think I have answered all the points put to me.
Gideon Amos
As always, the Minister is being very generous with his time. He has answered a number of the points raised—I will give him that—but if institutional landlords are paying millions of pounds in fees, the least they should expect is to have a database that works. I welcome the Minister saying that he is continuing to look at the issue, but could he go a smidgen further and commit, on the record, that the Government will ensure that bulk uploads can be achieved? That is the huge failure of the system.
Matthew Pennycook
I cannot give the hon. Gentleman that commitment. The Government have looked into the practicality of bulk uploads, and we do not think it is, in the terms he has put it to me, a workable solution. As I have tried to make clear at several points, we are looking at how we can integrate the management systems of larger landlords into the database in a way that does not require them to manually input each of their properties, as has been put to me in this debate. We are looking for those efficiencies—why would we not look for those efficiencies?
On the hon. Gentleman’s point about fees, to be clear, it is not the Government’s intention to use the fees to fund wider costs that are not connected to the private rented sector, but some of the fees will go towards local authority enforcement. As we have debated previously, it is incredibly important that local authorities have the resources to properly enforce the Act.
To conclude, the regulations set out the practical steps required to deliver the PRS database, and set the registration framework that landlords, local authorities and the database operator will follow. In commencing the roll-out of the database, the regulations will support landlord compliance, strengthen local authority enforcement and give tenants better information about the homes that they rent. I therefore commend the regulations to the Committee.
Question put.