Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026

Lord Katz Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

May I follow up on a couple of points that the Minister made? She talked about testing the database, and I appreciate the comments she made about how it was the Conservatives who started looking at a database. My point is to try to understand what testing has been done.

I know that a number of noble Lords on this side, and presumably the Minister herself, will have received a lot of emails from large landlords, various groupings of landlords and so forth, raising these sorts of issues. Clearly, they are not happy if they have been part of the testing system. Has this been testing where an individual person is trying to import a single property? I think that we largely acknowledge that the system could work reasonably well for that. It was different for multiple properties or for where a landlord was not very familiar with all the regulations and so forth and was reliant on their agents. It would be very interesting if the Minister could give a bit more information about whether this involved bulk-inputting of property.

The Minister slightly glossed over the key point here by saying, “You could cut and paste”. I know that we have all filled in forms by cutting and pasting, but that still means having to go individually into each form to cut and paste—and believe me, from past experience, that is where you get more errors.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

For an intervention at the end of a speech, this is getting a bit long now, so perhaps the noble Lord could conclude.