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17/12/25 3:30 pm
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Very few corporate landlords are being penalised for housing offences compared to their smaller counterparts, according to a study covering the last 15 years.
Campaigning body Good Jobs First has added housing offences committed by corporate landlords to its Violation Tracker UK to let tenants in England and Wales discover if the company they rent from has faced an enforcement action for breaches of the Housing Act 2004.
Only £11 million has been issued in financial penalties since 2010 to companies for breaches of housing law, according to Good Jobs First, which it says calls into question whether firms are being held to account. It found 144 local authorities in England and Wales have not prosecuted or issued civil penalty notices to companies for offences such as running illegal HMOs, mismanagement of HMOs, and failures to act when served with improvement notices.
London saw just under half of all enforcement actions where more than 400 companies were prosecuted or issued with civil penalty notices. In Wales, enforcement for corporate housing offences was particularly low as only 18 prosecutions were undertaken in the period, and no civil penalties were issued. Of the big cities, Liverpool (pictured) undertook the highest number of prosecutions, and enforcement actions overall.
Only 18 district councils had ever prosecuted a company for housing offences - most of these just a single company since 2010.
Good Jobs First says as corporate landlordism and the property management industry grow, corporate accountability must keep up. It adds: “Violation Tracker UK will enable tenants’ rights advocates to track landlords and enforcement bodies to help ensure that local authorities are doing everything they can to tackle the crisis in housing standards, and that companies breaching regulations face far more public scrutiny.”
According to The Guardian, of the 252 councils which responded to its Freedom of Information request, two-thirds of councils in England haven’t prosecuted any landlords in the past three years, despite receiving 300,000 complaints from tenants living in unfit homes. Local councils still fined landlords at least £26.4 million from 2022 to 2024 for housing offences.
Under the Renters’ Rights Act, councils have new enforcement measures and investigatory powers to gather evidence about suspected breaches and offences, although there are widespread concerns that there will not be enough available funding.
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