Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of requiring landlords to register eviction notices at the point of delivery, so that his Department would obtain accurate records of all evictions including those which do not proceed to court.

There are no plans to require landlords to record eviction notices at the point of delivery; this information is not collected centrally by the government and we have made no assessment of the merits of increasing data collection in this way.

To further protect renters, the measures in the Coronavirus Act 2020 mean that landlords must now give 6 months’ notice except in the most serious cases.

To gather data, we work closely with the Ministry of Justice and HM Courts and Tribunal Service to monitor possession proceedings. The Ministry of Justice publishes national statistics on possession actions in county courts by private and social landlords. This includes statistics on claims, orders, warrants and possessions.

The Department also conducts regular surveys such as the annual English Housing Survey and the English Private Landlord Survey to gather data. These include questions regarding ending a tenancy and the reasons for it, and both the English Housing Survey and English Private Landlord survey will be published next year.