Renters’ Rights Act 2025 Now In Force

There are a number of changes made through the legislation, increasing the regulatory burden upon landlords. There are various articles that already deal with the generality of the legalisation; this is focused upon eviction, as that is perhaps most frequently where a landlord will require legal assistance.

Under the current law, landlords can take advantage of Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988, which allows “no-fault” evictions. This means that the landlord does not need to prove anything, save that they have complied with necessary regulatory steps. That includes protecting the deposit in an authorised scheme, having provided a valid Gas Safety Certificate and Energy Performance Certificate, having served the Government Booklet on “How to Rent” and having validly served a correct notice in prescribed form under Section 21 of the Housing Act, within the appropriate timeframes. So long as the landlord has its “ducks in a row”, eviction should be straightforward.

It should be added that under current legislation, a landlord can also evict a tenant under Section 8 of the Housing Act 1988. Presently, this requires “fault”, and the landlord has to prove its ground to obtain possession and may, under some circumstances, have to pay the tenant compensation. Currently, the law divides the grounds for possession into “mandatory” and “discretionary” grounds, and it is generally considered to be risky to rely on a discretionary ground only.


Under the new law, Section 21 is abolished, and all new tenancies will become open-ended assured tenancies. What this means is that a landlord will now have to rely on Section 8 grounds in order to evict a tenant and may sometimes have to wait out minimum periods after serving notice (often twelve months).

Fortunately for landlords, these grounds are going to be extended to include new provisions which will include:

• Repeated rent arrears

• The landlord or a close family member moving into the property.

• An intention to sell the property.

• The landlord intending to carry out major renovation works requiring vacant possession of the property.

The short point here, however, is that the landlord will need to be in a position to prove its case, with evidence, and possession will only follow when it can be justified.

One positive for landlords is that the various regulatory requirements which act as a “technical bar” to possession under Section 21 will largely be stripped away. I.e., a failure, for example, to provide a tenant with a valid Energy Performance Certificate will no longer invalidate a notice given to a tenant for possession.

The only two obligations that will continue to act to invalidate a notice under the new process are deposit protection (the landlord must have complied with all of the deposit requirements) and compliance with the Tenants Fee Act (i.e., the landlord cannot levy prohibited fees upon the tenant and expect to obtain possession of the property).

The broader picture is that it will now be more difficult for landlords to obtain possession of property; although it is obviously still possible to do so, the landlord will need to prove genuine grounds. The regulatory burden, however, shifts now away from the possession procedure and rather onto increased enforcement by local authorities. It remains to be seen whether local authorities will have sufficient resources to take on this additional burden.