Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I suppose we should be used by now to a Government who say one thing and do another, expecting everybody else to play by one set of rules while they do something else. This week, in a move that surprised nobody, we learned that the annual costs of the football regulator were to be twice what the impact assessment suggested, and that there was a £45 million set-up charge to boot. In the same vein, here we are with this licensing database for rental properties. I declare an interest: I am the director of a firm that lets rental properties and I own a rental property in Norwich, in my own name, as appears on the register.

Nothing in what I want to say diminishes from the positive outcome that regulators and tenants should have confidence in landlords and their properties to weed out the rogues. But, when we debated the Renters’ Rights Bill, we took the impact assessment at face value and assumed that it would reflect reality. It was said that, once it was enacted, landlords would pay a modest fee of about £30 every three years to register their properties under the regulations. As we have just heard from the noble Baroness, these regulations contemplate a £65 charge per property every year. That is a material change. Why is there this 900% increase from inception to reality and why was there not more candour at the outset? Could it be that it was not thought through?

We know that the Government are trying to purge the accidental landlord from the system by regulating him out of existence. This of course reduces choice, reduces supply and drives up rents. We are seeing the near extinction of student accommodation, meaning that students are herded into ever more expensive, specialised service accommodation at ruinous cost. Elsewhere, those with the weakest covenant strength have been put to the back of the queue, and everyone is paying more for less, along with the 190,000 fewer homes that the OBR has assumed will be built in this Parliament.

So we are moving to a system where only the largest professional landlords have the scale, expertise and finance to operate rental properties in the market. We know that Grainger, the institutional landlord, has well in excess of 10,000 properties for rent. Lloyds Bank is chasing a number, alongside some pension funds. While not all landlords operate at that scale, a number of large national agents—Chestertons, Hamptons and Foxtons—sit alongside regional and smaller players that manage many hundreds of thousands of properties on behalf of the smaller-fry landlord.

They were promised a bulk upload system to streamline populating the national database, but that is not how it is turned out. Each property must be added one at a time, and paid for with a separate credit card transaction to boot. Although the Government assumed that it would take about 10 minutes per property, the professionals have still not completed an entry in less than 20 minutes. For the largest landlords or the most popular agents, it will take 200 working days—a whole working year, Monday to Friday, without a break, not a moment—just to register their hold. That is before each landlord has confirmed his agent’s draft entry and the rigmarole is repeated. That 28-day extension deadline is a nonsense that invites people to write their own offence, because they just cannot get it done for want of a system that was promised to do bulk uploads. We have seen the Government cobble together a system used by software remnants from other departments, having totally forgotten the specification, as well as the principles of software design, data and security.

There is to be no concept of a validated Government Gateway login to securely authenticate an entry to a real personal business registering a property. The way in which the agent may communicate with the landlord one at a time is by web permalink relating to an individual property, presumably emailed between the parties—a link that never changes from one year to the next. That process breaks every cyber security rule. It is the sort of behaviour by shady operators that we debated on Monday in the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill. That legislation is meant to prevent this sort of practice. This invites cyber criminals to hijack a critical system related to our fundamental national property rights. Can the Minister say which of the cyber experts at DCMS, or any of the other 17 cyber regulators, has certified this obvious non-compliance in an age of AI warfare? Only this Government could press legislation regarding everybody else to follow secure and encrypted data protocols while introducing a system, within a month, that does the opposite. I am surprised there has not been a legal challenge—perhaps there should be.

If that was not bad enough, there is a further aggravation. Some local authorities have decided to introduce selective licensing. Landlords face the prospect of entering the same data twice into two wholly incompatible and separate systems in a further insult to efficiency. I ask the Minister: on inception, why can the appropriate housing standards officers in local authorities not be trusted to access the national database to further their duties? The national scheme should be the death knell for the small schemes. As she knows, some in this sector have considered mining the data from their existing IT systems, formatting it appropriately and sending the printouts to the department in pursuance of their duties. The only person I am going to feel sorry for is the postman carrying those hundreds of thousands of forms into Marsham Street—at least once a year, with repeat visits for gas safety, electrical installation and other regulatory certificates on top of every single tenant change. The Minister might like to reflect on whether she has enough staff in the department to process all these letters, while pretending that a system that is insecure and incomplete, and that creates an extra huge administrative burden and reuses credentials over inherently insecure communication protocols, is good enough.

Put simply, the Government are foisting an unready system with four weeks to go that is simply not ready, documented or to specification. Why are the Government pressing ahead when all the dashboard lights are flashing red? Only a delay at this stage will do to maintain that long-term confidence in, and the integrity of, the database, which has worthy long-term objectives. I invite the Minister to withdraw this regulation and represent it on a later occasion when she can demonstrate that the system is compliant and meets the obligations and promises set out in the Bill. Otherwise, it will be dead on arrival.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as my wife owns rented property. I also note that I have been active for several years promoting the regulation of property agents. I am delighted that the Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook last month announced legislation in the forthcoming parliamentary Session to introduce a regulator of property agents with requirements for licensing, qualifications and adherence to codes of practice.

On the PRS database regulations before us, I welcome the introduction of the database, but the Minister will know that there has been much concern, not least from letting agents who manage privately rented accommodation on behalf of landlords. It seems that there are a large number of outstanding issues around the smooth running of the database, many of which were adumbrated by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller. Some of these matters are of a technical, detailed nature, requiring more debate between the sector and the MHCLG.

I want to pick up on a relatively straightforward point. Agents and representatives of landlords are worried that the onus being placed on the individual landlord to start and end the registration process for the database, and to fill in the necessary forms within the required timescales, will create significant problems. This is a function which agents would expect to take on if the landlord asked them to do so on their behalf, just as they do for all other aspects of managing the property and just as an accountant would handle the tax affairs of a client on their behalf. Indeed, I understand the Government’s own impact assessment assumed that letting agents would be able to register on behalf of landlords, which seems entirely sensible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Best (CB)]

It was in 2019.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Even the sector itself feels that it is overdue.

I supported the principle of a landlord database during the passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill. Looking back at some of my comments, I feel that I was a little messianic about it, because I genuinely believe that this could be a real tool to improve standards, inform tenants and bring rogue landlords to heel. Good enforcement needs good information, tenants deserve transparency, councils need effective tools and rogue landlords should not be able to hide from scrutiny.

So the principle is not the problem; interestingly, many of the briefings that we have received have stated that very clearly up front. That is important. For me, the question is: will this database actually do what it says on the tin and what it sets out to do? As a former elected mayor, I have seen plenty of databases. Creating one is usually the easy bit; keeping it accurate, useful and up to date is the hard bit and can be a real, onerous burden on an institution.

My first question is: are we collecting the right information—that is, the most helpful and informative? There is plenty in here about registration, certificates, licences and compliance documents—all of which is good stuff—but are we creating a genuinely useful tool or simply a very efficient filing cabinet? If I were a tenant looking for somewhere to live, I would want to know whether a landlord had received improvement notices, civil penalties or other enforcement action; frankly, that would tell me a lot more than whether somebody had uploaded a document on time. So my second question is: who is the database really for? Is it mainly a tool for councils and regulators, or is it supposed to help tenants make informed choices? If transparency is one of the objectives, what will the tenants actually be able to see?

My third concern is around compliance. There are worryingly varying estimates of the levels of awareness with regard to this. What assessment have the Government made of awareness in the sector of what has to be done? The landlord most likely to register is the landlord who is already trying to do the right thing. The landlord most likely to pay the fee is the landlord who is already trying to follow the rules. However, the one we all worry about is the one who ignores the system altogether. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, made a pertinent comment: there is a danger of us driving these people even further underground, because the problem is that they are already underground.

Regrettably, my real worry is that, due to the shortage of homes, the desperation of some tenants will always mean that these landlords find themselves suitable tenants. How will this scheme identify the landlord who simply chooses not to register? How will the information on the database be verified, rather than self-declared? As someone who has spent years in local government, like the Minister, I always get nervous when the answer to a problem seems to be another form. The reality is that we need more homes, more investment and, like it or not—as I discovered in my own council group—more larger, professionally managed housing providers that are investing in the sector.

One of the ways in which we are getting these things is through the growth of the build-to-rent sector. These developments often have one owner, one management structure and one set of compliance arrangements across an entire building. So I struggle with the logic here: if the same landlord is being asked, in essence, to submit the same information about the same building, over and over again, through hundreds of separate front doors, what problem is that solving? Does it make tenants safer? Does it give councils better intelligence? Does it improve enforcement? Or are we in danger of confusing more paperwork with better outcomes? Good regulation should be about outcomes, not processes, but this feels very process-driven at the moment. The aim should be better regulation, not simply more regulation.

As the Minister knows, I always approach these matters through the lens of delivery. Who will verify this information? Who will investigate non-compliance? Who will pursue the landlords who never register in the first place? What resources will local authorities receive to do so? How confident are the Government that councils are ready to go and have the capacity to do the job that we hope they will do? A database does not enforce itself, and a database on its own catches nobody.

My final questions are simple. How will the Government measure the success of this? How often will it be re-evaluated? Will it involve more records on the database, or will it lead—as I feel it should—to more rogue landlords being identified, more effective enforcement and, perhaps more importantly, better homes for tenants? Surely that is the test that will matter. Put simply, how will we know it has done the job that we all want it to do?