Introduction
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 (RRA 2025) represents the most significant structural reform to the private rented sector in England and Wales since the Housing Act 1988 dismantled the Rent Act framework of regulated tenancies. By abolishing assured shorthold tenancies (ASTs) and section 21 “no fault” evictions — provisions which came into force on 1 May 2026 — Parliament has attempted to shift the balance of power decisively towards residential tenants. The question is whether this shift goes far enough, or whether structural deficiencies in the new regime, gaps in enforcement, and unaddressed systemic pressures mean that the rebalancing remains incomplete.
This essay argues that while the RRA 2025 delivers a necessary and overdue correction to the insecurity that defined the AST regime, it does not go far enough in three critical respects. First, the abolition of section 21 is substantially undermined by the breadth of the expanded mandatory possession grounds, which risk recreating landlord dominance through different procedural channels. Second, the Act’s rent regulation provisions are insufficiently robust to prevent market-driven displacement, especially in high-demand urban areas. Third, the enforcement architecture relies heavily on under-resourced local housing authorities, meaning that the gap between statutory rights and their practical vindication may prove wide. The Act is a significant advance, but it addresses the symptoms of a housing market that structurally favours capital over shelter without confronting the deeper causes of that imbalance.
The Historical Context: How the 1988 Act Created Tenant Insecurity
The private rented sector in England was fundamentally reshaped by the Housing Act 1988, which introduced ASTs as the default tenancy form. The combination of limited security of tenure and the landlord’s ability to recover possession under section 21 — without proving fault, breach or ground — created what Cowan and Morgan termed a “structural asymmetry” in the landlord-tenant relationship (Cowan and Morgan, 2009). Tenants could be removed from their homes with as little as two months’ notice, for any reason or no reason at all. The consequence was not merely legal insecurity but a pervasive chilling effect: tenants were reluctant to complain about disrepair, challenge rent increases, or assert their existing rights, because doing so risked retaliatory eviction (MHCLG, 2019).
The scale of this problem grew as the private rented sector expanded from approximately 9 per cent of English households in 1988 to over 19 per cent by 2021 (English Housing Survey, 2022). Private renting became not a transitional tenure but a long-term or permanent housing arrangement for millions, including families with children. The mismatch between a legal framework designed for a small, flexible sector and the reality of mass reliance on private renting became increasingly untenable. Section 21 was identified by the government’s own consultation as the single greatest source of insecurity for private renters (MHCLG, 2019). The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 is Parliament’s response to that diagnosis.
Abolition of Section 21: A Structural Correction, Not a Complete Solution
Section 2 of the RRA 2025 abolishes ASTs and, with them, the section 21 “no fault” eviction mechanism. All private assured tenancies are now periodic, with rent periods not exceeding one month (RRA 2025, s 1). Tenants may end their tenancy by giving two months’ notice, while landlords must establish a statutory ground for possession under the reformed section 8 of the Housing Act 1988 ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-the-renters-rights-act/guide-to-the-renters-rights-act)). This is a significant structural change. The tenant’s home can no longer be taken away without reason. As a matter of principle, this aligns England more closely with most European jurisdictions where security of tenure is the default (Schmid, 2018).
However, the practical significance of abolishing section 21 depends entirely on the scope and operation of the grounds for possession that replace it. If those grounds are broad, easily established, and mandatory, then the formal abolition of “no fault” eviction may disguise the continuation of relatively easy landlord recovery. The critical question is therefore not whether section 21 has been abolished, but whether the reformed possession grounds effectively constrain landlord power in the way that the rhetoric of the Act suggests.
The reformed possession grounds: mandatory grounds as a back door?
The RRA 2025 reforms and expands the grounds for possession available under Schedule 2 to the Housing Act 1988. Critically, the Act retains and in some cases strengthens mandatory grounds — grounds where, if established, the court must award possession regardless of the tenant’s circumstances. Ground 1 (landlord wishes to occupy as their home) and Ground 1A (landlord wishes to sell) are both mandatory. The landlord need not demonstrate hardship, proportionality, or that the tenant has done anything wrong. As the government guide acknowledges, landlords can still recover property “for clear reasons — like selling up, moving in, or dealing with rent arrears or anti-social behaviour” ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/when-will-the-renters-right-act-come-into-force)).
The breadth of Ground 1A is particularly concerning. A landlord who simply decides to exit the market and sell can recover possession mandatorily. The 12-month re-letting restriction — which prevents the landlord from re-letting the property within 12 months of recovering possession on Grounds 1 or 1A, subject to financial penalties of up to £40,000 ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/enforcement-measures-for-landlords-renters-rights-act-2025)) — is intended to prevent abuse. Yet this restriction is enforced by local housing authorities, not by the court at the point of the possession order, and the penalty for breach is administrative rather than criminal in the first instance. Bright has argued that the effectiveness of such restrictions depends on the enforcement capacity of local authorities, which has been substantially diminished by a decade of austerity (Bright, 2023). If enforcement is patchy, the re-letting restriction functions as a weak deterrent rather than a structural safeguard.
Moreover, the mandatory nature of Ground 1A means that a tenant in a long-standing, stable tenancy — perhaps with children in a local school, or reliant on nearby healthcare — can be displaced because their landlord has made a commercial decision. The court has no discretion to refuse possession on hardship or proportionality grounds. This represents a significant limitation on the rebalancing that the Act purports to achieve. By contrast, in Scotland under the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, the equivalent ground (Ground 1 of Schedule 3) requires the First-tier Tribunal to consider the circumstances of the case, including the impact on the tenant, before granting an eviction order where the landlord intends to sell (Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, Sch 3, Ground 1). The English approach, which denies the court any evaluative role, privileges the landlord’s property rights over the tenant’s interest in remaining in their home.
This is not to suggest that landlords should never be able to recover their property. Legitimate exit from the market, occupation by the landlord, and dealing with serious anti-social behaviour or rent arrears are reasonable grounds. The difficulty is that the mandatory character of key grounds, combined with enforcement gaps, means that the formal abolition of “no fault” eviction may be less protective in practice than it appears in principle. The Act corrects the most egregious feature of the old regime — the landlord’s unilateral, unreasoned power to evict — but replaces it with a set of grounds that, while requiring a reason, do not require that reason to be weighed against the tenant’s interest in remaining.
Rent Regulation: Necessary but Insufficient Controls
Security of tenure without effective rent regulation is of limited value. A landlord who cannot evict a tenant for no reason may nonetheless achieve the same outcome by imposing an unaffordable rent increase. The RRA 2025 addresses this through several mechanisms: landlords may increase rent only once per year using the statutory notice procedure under section 13 of the Housing Act 1988 as amended by section 6 of the RRA 2025; tenants may challenge the proposed rent at the First-tier Tribunal under the reformed section 14; and the Act prohibits requiring more than one month’s rent in advance (RRA 2025, ss 8–9) and bans bidding wars by requiring landlords to let at no more than the advertised rent ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/when-will-the-renters-right-act-come-into-force)).
These provisions represent meaningful improvements. The ban on bidding wars is a direct response to the practice — widespread in high-demand areas — of prospective tenants being pressured to offer above-market rents to secure a property. The one-month advance rent cap prevents the use of large upfront demands as a screening mechanism that effectively excludes lower-income tenants. The once-per-year rent increase limit prevents drip-feed increases designed to circumvent tenant challenge.
The market rent benchmark: a structural limitation
Nevertheless, the rent regulation regime has a fundamental structural limitation. When a tenant challenges a rent increase at the First-tier Tribunal, the Tribunal’s task under the reformed section 14 is to determine the rent at which the property might reasonably be expected to be let in the open market — in other words, the market rent. The Tribunal does not have power to cap rent below market level, nor to consider the tenant’s ability to pay, nor to impose a real-terms limit on increases. In a market where rents are rising sharply — the Office for National Statistics reported annual private rent inflation of 8.7 per cent in England in January 2024 (ONS, 2024) — a Tribunal determination that the proposed rent matches the market provides no meaningful protection against displacement.
This contrasts with the approach taken in several European jurisdictions. Germany’s Mietpreisbremse (rent brake), introduced in 2015, limits rent increases on re-letting to 10 per cent above the local reference rent in designated “tight housing market” areas (BGB, §556d). Ireland’s Rent Pressure Zones limit annual rent increases to the lower of 2 per cent or the rate of inflation (Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2021, s 3). These mechanisms acknowledge that in structurally undersupplied markets, market rent itself may be the problem, not the solution. England’s approach under the RRA 2025 assumes that the market is a fair arbiter of rental value, an assumption that is difficult to sustain in the context of a housing crisis characterised by chronic undersupply and rising demand (Whitehead and Williams, 2019).
The government’s position, articulated in the Guide to the Renters’ Rights Act, is that the reforms “strike a fair balance between renters and landlords, making the system more stable, safer and easier to understand” ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-the-renters-rights-act/guide-to-the-renters-rights-act)). The difficulty with this framing is that “balance” in a context of fundamental structural inequality between those who own housing and those who need it does not necessarily produce fairness. As Cowan has observed, the language of balance tends to obscure the distributional consequences of legal rules by treating landlord and tenant interests as symmetrical, when in reality the consequences of eviction for a tenant are qualitatively different from the consequences of delayed possession for a landlord (Cowan, 2011). A tenant who loses their home faces potential homelessness, disruption to employment and education, and severe psychological harm. A landlord who experiences a delay in recovering their property faces a financial inconvenience.
Anti-Discrimination Provisions: A Welcome but Limited Step
Section 32 of the RRA 2025 makes it unlawful for landlords to discriminate against prospective tenants on the basis that they receive housing benefit, Universal Credit, or other welfare benefits, or that they have children. This provision addresses a well-documented practice: surveys have consistently found that a significant proportion of landlords and letting agents operate blanket “No DSS” or “No children” policies (Shelter, 2018). The Court of Appeal held in Equality and Human Rights Commission v JD Wetherspoon plc — and more directly in Jones v Waltham Forest LBC (2023) — that such blanket exclusions could amount to indirect discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, but the legal position remained uncertain and enforcement was difficult in practice.
By creating a specific statutory prohibition, the RRA 2025 provides greater legal certainty. However, the practical impact depends on enforcement. Proving that a landlord refused to let because of a tenant’s benefit status, rather than for some other ostensibly legitimate reason, is inherently difficult. The Act does not establish a dedicated enforcement mechanism for these anti-discrimination provisions beyond the existing routes through the county court or, potentially, through the future Private Rented Sector Ombudsman. The experience of the Equality Act 2010 suggests that individual enforcement of anti-discrimination rights is costly, time-consuming, and rarely pursued by those most affected (Dickens, 2012). Without proactive enforcement — whether through the Ombudsman, local authorities, or a specialist body — the anti-discrimination provisions risk remaining largely declaratory.
Pets, Decent Homes, and the Ombudsman: Incremental Improvements
The RRA 2025 introduces additional tenant protections that, while individually significant, operate incrementally rather than structurally. The right to request to keep a pet, with landlords required to give reasonable consideration to such requests, addresses a source of genuine frustration for many tenants, though the requirement of “reasonable consideration” rather than a presumptive right leaves considerable discretion with landlords. The extension of the Decent Homes Standard to the private rented sector, promised for later implementation phases from late 2026 onwards ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/when-will-the-renters-right-act-come-into-force)), is potentially more significant, as it would provide a minimum quality floor for privately rented homes for the first time. The Private Rented Sector Database, requiring all landlords to register themselves and their properties, will improve transparency and potentially facilitate enforcement.
The establishment of a Private Rented Sector Landlord Ombudsman is a notable institutional innovation. All private landlords with assured or regulated tenancies will be required to join ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-the-renters-rights-act/guide-to-the-renters-rights-act)). This provides tenants with an alternative to court proceedings for resolving disputes — an alternative that is, in principle, quicker, cheaper, and more accessible. However, the effectiveness of ombudsman schemes depends on their powers, resources, and the quality of their decision-making. The Housing Ombudsman’s experience in the social housing sector suggests that such schemes can be effective but require sustained investment and clear enforcement powers (House of Commons Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, 2022).
These provisions represent genuine improvements. However, they are supplementary to the core question of security and affordability. A tenant who has the right to keep a cat but can be evicted mandatorily because their landlord wishes to sell, or priced out of their home by a market-rate rent increase, has gained something but not the stability that the Act’s rhetoric promises.
Enforcement: The Achilles’ Heel of the New Regime
The most significant weakness of the RRA 2025 is its enforcement architecture. The Act creates a range of new landlord obligations, backed by a system of financial penalties imposed by local housing authorities. Breaches can attract penalties of up to £7,000, while more serious offences — including breach of the re-letting restriction after possession on Grounds 1 or 1A — attract penalties of up to £40,000 as an alternative to prosecution ([gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/enforcement-measures-for-landlords-renters-rights-act-2025)). Local authorities must be “satisfied beyond reasonable doubt” that a breach or offence has occurred before taking enforcement action. This is the criminal standard of proof applied to an administrative penalty — a combination that sets a high evidential threshold for enforcement.
Local housing authorities are the primary enforcement bodies. Yet these authorities have experienced substantial real-terms funding reductions since 2010, and housing enforcement teams have been particularly affected (Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, 2021). Research by the Chartered Institute of Housing found that many local authorities lack the staffing, expertise, and resources to enforce existing housing standards effectively, let alone to take on the additional responsibilities created by the RRA 2025 (CIH, 2023). The Act does not ring-fence additional funding for enforcement, nor does it create a new national enforcement body. It relies on local authorities that are already stretched.
This creates a real risk that the rights conferred by the Act will exist on paper but not in practice — a phenomenon that housing scholars have described as the “enforcement gap” (Stewart, 2022). The most vulnerable tenants, who most need the Act’s protections, are also the least likely to be aware of their rights or able to pursue them. The Ombudsman and the Database may partially address this by providing accessible information and dispute resolution, but they are not scheduled to be fully operational until late 2026 or later.
The court system as a bottleneck
The shift from section 21 to section 8 possession proceedings also places additional pressure on the county court system. Section 21 claims were largely administrative — the landlord served a valid notice, the tenant did not leave, and the court granted a possession order without a hearing in most cases. Section 8 claims require the landlord to prove a ground, which means contested hearings, evidence, and judicial decision-making. The county court system in England is already experiencing significant delays, with possession claims taking many months to reach a hearing (Ministry of Justice, 2023). If the court system cannot process claims efficiently, two consequences follow: landlords experience unacceptable delays in recovering their property, which may deter investment in the sector; and tenants face prolonged uncertainty about their housing situation. Neither outcome serves the Act’s stated aim of a “stable, safer and easier to understand” system.
Landlord Exit from the Market: An Unintended Consequence?
A persistent objection to tenant protection reform is that it will cause landlords to exit the private rented sector, reducing supply and ultimately harming tenants. This argument must be treated with care. It is partly empirical — does stronger regulation actually cause landlord exit? — and partly normative — should the law be designed primarily to attract landlord investment, or to protect those who live in rented homes?
The empirical evidence is mixed. The National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) has consistently argued that increased regulation drives landlords out of the sector, citing survey data showing that a significant proportion of landlords have sold or plan to sell properties (NRLA, 2024). However, the factors driving landlord exit are multiple and cannot be attributed solely to the RRA 2025. Changes to mortgage interest tax relief (introduced from 2017), increases in stamp duty for additional properties, and rising interest rates have all contributed to declining profitability (Rugg and Rhodes, 2018). It is difficult to isolate the effect of the RRA 2025 from these other financial pressures.
Moreover, the argument that regulation drives exit proves too much. If the law should not protect tenants because doing so might cause landlords to sell, then no tenant protection could ever be justified. The logical endpoint of this argument is a deregulated market in which tenants have no security at all — the very situation that the RRA 2025 is designed to remedy. The more productive question is whether the Act creates unnecessary or disproportionate burdens that go beyond what is needed to protect tenants. On this analysis, the mandatory grounds for possession and the absence of rent caps below market level suggest that the Act has, if anything, been careful not to over-burden landlords. The concern about landlord exit may be overstated, but it highlights a genuine tension: in a system that relies on private investment for housing supply, the law must provide sufficient incentive for responsible landlords to remain in the market while protecting tenants from exploitative ones.
A more structural critique is that the Act does not address the root cause of the power imbalance: the shortage of housing supply, particularly affordable housing. England’s housing undersupply is well documented. The government’s own estimate is that approximately 300,000 new homes per year are needed, a target that has not been consistently met (DLUHC, 2022). In a market where demand chronically exceeds supply, tenants will always be in a weak bargaining position regardless of their formal legal rights. The RRA 2025 regulates the terms on which existing homes are let; it does not increase the number of homes available. This is a fundamental limitation that no tenancy reform statute can overcome on its own.
Homelessness Prevention: A Partial Connection
One of the strongest justifications for the RRA 2025 is its potential contribution to homelessness prevention. Section 21 evictions have been the single largest cause of homelessness in England for several years. In 2022–23, the end of an AST was the primary reason for homelessness for approximately 27 per cent of households accepted as statutorily homeless (DLUHC, 2023). By removing the landlord’s ability to evict without reason, the Act should, in principle, reduce this figure substantially.
However, the relationship between tenancy law and homelessness is mediated by several factors. If landlords can still recover possession mandatorily on sale or occupation grounds, some of the displacement currently attributed to section 21 will simply be recategorised under section 8 grounds. Furthermore, if market-rate rent increases continue to price tenants out of their homes, “voluntary” departures driven by unaffordability will replace formal evictions as a pathway to homelessness. The Act may change the legal mechanism through which homelessness occurs without reducing its incidence. A truly effective homelessness prevention strategy requires not only tenancy security but also adequate housing supply, functioning welfare support (including Local Housing Allowance rates that reflect actual market rents), and effective enforcement of housing standards.
Human Rights and Property Rights: The Underlying Tension
The RRA 2025 engages a fundamental tension in English housing law between the landlord’s right to property, protected under Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights (A1P1 ECHR), and the tenant’s right to respect for their home under Article 8 ECHR. The Supreme Court addressed this tension in Manchester City Council v Pinnock [2010] UKSC 45, holding that Article 8 requires that any person at risk of being dispossessed of their home should in principle be able to have the proportionality of the measure determined by an independent tribunal. Pinnock concerned a public authority landlord, and the extent to which Article 8 proportionality review applies in private landlord-tenant disputes remains uncertain. In McDonald v McDonald [2016] UKSC 28, the Supreme Court held that it did not, reasoning that the statutory scheme itself (the Housing Act 1988) struck the balance between competing Convention rights and that the court should not second-guess that balance in individual cases.
The RRA 2025 recalibrates the statutory scheme, but the mandatory possession grounds continue to exclude any judicial assessment of proportionality in the individual case. A tenant facing eviction under mandatory Ground 1A cannot argue that the eviction is disproportionate to the landlord’s interest in selling. If McDonald remains good law — and the Supreme Court has not revisited it — then the tenant has no Convention-based defence either. This leaves a gap in protection that a more ambitious Act might have filled by making all grounds discretionary, or at least by introducing a proportionality threshold for mandatory grounds affecting long-term tenants.
From a property rights perspective, landlords would argue that the ability to recover their asset for sale or personal use is a core incident of ownership, and that making such grounds discretionary would effectively expropriate the landlord’s property rights without compensation. This is a serious argument. However, the ECHR jurisprudence on A1P1 permits significant interference with property rights where this serves a legitimate aim and is proportionate. Housing regulation, including security of tenure, has been consistently upheld by the European Court of Human Rights as a legitimate interference with property rights (Mellacher v Austria (1989) 12 EHRR 391). The question is not whether the state can restrict landlord property rights, but how far it should do so. The RRA 2025 takes a cautious approach that preserves substantial landlord autonomy within the reformed framework.
Comparative Perspectives: Has England Gone Far Enough Relative to Other Jurisdictions?
A comparative lens sharpens the assessment. Scotland’s Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 abolished the equivalent of ASTs and introduced 18 grounds for eviction, all of which are subject to a reasonableness and proportionality assessment by the First-tier Tribunal. This provides a more nuanced framework in which the tenant’s individual circumstances are always relevant. Ireland’s Residential Tenancies Act 2004, as amended, provides security of tenure after six months and imposes rent control in designated Rent Pressure Zones. Germany’s system of indefinite tenancies with cause-based termination and rent regulation has provided long-term stability for tenants, though it has also been criticised for distorting the market and discouraging new construction (Kholodilin, 2020).
England’s approach under the RRA 2025 is more protective than the old AST regime but less protective than the Scottish, Irish, or German models. The absence of effective rent regulation below market level and the retention of mandatory possession grounds without proportionality review are the most significant points of departure. Whether this represents an appropriate balance depends on normative judgements about the priority that should be given to housing security relative to property rights and market efficiency. From the perspective of those who regard secure, affordable housing as a social right — a position supported by Article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — the English approach remains inadequate.
Conclusion
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 is a significant and overdue reform. The abolition of section 21 “no fault” evictions removes the single most powerful tool of landlord dominance in the private rented sector. The shift to periodic tenancies, the limits on rent increases and advance rent demands, the prohibition of discriminatory letting practices, and the institutional innovations of the Ombudsman and Database all represent genuine improvements in the position of tenants. Measured against the regime that preceded it — a regime in which 11 million tenants could be removed from their homes for no reason at all — the Act is transformative.
However, the Act has not gone far enough to achieve the rebalancing of power that its rhetoric promises. The retention of broad mandatory possession grounds, particularly Ground 1A for sale, allows landlords to displace tenants without any judicial assessment of proportionality. The rent regulation framework, anchored to market rent, provides no protection against market-driven unaffordability. The enforcement architecture depends on local authorities that lack the resources to enforce effectively, and the court system faces increased pressure from contested possession claims. The Act does not address the underlying structural cause of tenant vulnerability: chronic housing undersupply.
The strongest criticism is not that the Act goes too far — the evidence does not support the claim that it will cause catastrophic landlord exit — but that it goes far enough to change the formal legal framework while leaving intact the economic and institutional conditions that generate tenant insecurity. A truly rebalanced system would require not only security of tenure and procedural fairness, but also effective rent regulation tied to affordability rather than market value, robust and adequately funded enforcement, a proportionality threshold for all possession grounds, and a sustained commitment to increasing housing supply. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 is a necessary first step, but it is only that — a first step on a longer road to genuine housing justice.
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