Welcome to our last Newsround of this year, we will be back again in the new year, but what has happened in the housing news this week?
Government releases new civil penalty charges
The new civil penalties under the Renters’ Right Act have now been published by the government. The fines start at £3,000 and go as high as £35,000 or more where a breach of a banning order can cost you anything starting from £35,000, or not having a selective license will be a fine of £12,000.
Local authorities will be able to keep and use the revenue from fines to support their enforcement teams. This means that their is more financial gain for them and may focus on ‘easy wins’ such as advertising, documentation or licensing failures. Tenants could see that their complaints are dealt with quicker.
Letting agents will no doubt be stricter and their fees will probably increase due to the new compliance laws. Checking all documentation is in place will become critical as the guidance implies that some responsibilities will be shared.
Landlords can no longer afford to ignore compliance. Governance is now a major role of a landlords daily work. Even genuine mistakes will carry very serious consequences capable of bankrupting any decent landlord.
You can read the government’s statutory guidance on civil penalties here.
Court delays need reform before Renters’ Right Act
London is seeing the longest court delays with a country wide average loss at £8,700. Some London courts, Willesden, Edmonton and Shoreditch now have an average of 11 months delay whilst Teesside, Leeds and Sheffield sees an average of 8 months. The country average now sits at 5 months delay.
Will Eastman, director of Legal for Lettings said
Every extra month a case spends in the system is another month of rent that may never be recovered. Without meaningful court reform, the Renters’ Rights Act risks driving these numbers even higher.
He added that this puts huge pressure on landlords especially where there are longer court delays.
Record tenant complaints to social housing landlords
Many of the UK’s social housing landlords are still failing their tenants as records out this week show complaints on damp and mould and unsafe living conditions have increased year on year and by 560% since 2020.
Veritas Solicitors found that Cardiff council had the highest record of complaints at 2,298 since 2020 with Manchester at 2,092, Leicester with 1,648 and the City of Westminster at 1,615.
Furthermore complaints have increased more in recent years with Newcastle having the steepest rise with 587 complaints by September 2025 as opposed to 51 complaints in 2020. Hundreds of complaints are received by each council year on year for damp and mould, disrepair issues, infestations, heating system failures, leaks and health and safety many tenants waiting months for repairs to be carried out.
Veritas Solicitors is calling for stronger national and improved transparency in repair response times. They say ‘without meaningful change, this crisis will continue to grow, and more families will suffer the consequences’.
Rise in older generation renting
The English Housing Survey claim that there has been a 18% rise of those aged between 45-54 now renting. This is up from 15% last year.
Sarah Coles from Hargreaves Lansdown said
Renting later in life is becoming far more common – including huge numbers of people stuck in rental properties after they have had children, and some still handing over a huge chunk of their income to a landlord in retirement.
She added that it canbe a ‘real struggle to make ends meet’ where their budgets are pushed to the maximum.
You can read more here.
Snippets
Government has no plans to introduce additional protections before 1 May 2026
Welsh experience shows regulation alone doesn’t fix housing
Careless tenants could cause landlords to flout new HMO bin rules
People on lowest incomes being denied access to social housing, research finds
Case study: The big Gas Safety Certificate risk you might have missed
See also our Quick News Updates on Landlord Law
Newsround will be back again in January 2026
Akiva Goldfinch missed out part of Regulation 36(3)(c)(iii) of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 in his article on gas safety certs, (see snippets sbove). He stated that the crrtificate requires the “…name and address of the landlord (or their agent)” it actually says “… name and address of the landlord (or, where appropriate, his agent). It strikes me that the term where appropriate might be quite important, given that an agent is substituting for the landlord, and a landlords duties in relation to the gas installation are spelled out. I wonder if anyone is aware of any test cases on exactly who might qualify as an agent for the purposes of the clause? for example, what about a letting agent offering tenant find and tenancy creation, but crucially no management of the property or its gas installation?