Ministers have revealed the detailed landlord enforcement data that councils will be expected to hand over from next year, providing a clearer picture of how local authority performance will be monitored.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government plans to collect enough information to compare councils on how active they are in enforcing against landlords, how much they raise from civil penalties, the number of staff they employ, and how much they spend on enforcement. This aims to make future benchmarking - and scrutiny of council enforcement performance - easier.

However, the Voice of Landlords Associations (VOLA) warns that any comparisons between local authorities need to take account of local priorities, housing conditions, resources, enforcement policies and evidential thresholds, rather than relying solely on headline enforcement figures.

Chair Charlie Baker tells LandlordZONE: “VOLA believes it’s important to recognise that enforcement activity shouldn’t be assessed simply by the volume of penalties or notices issued. We also urge councils to carefully consider how personal data regarding penalties is shared with private companies.”

Question

In answer to a written Parliamentary question, Housing Minister Baroness Taylor (pictured below) said that it intends to require councils to provide MHCLG with a “suite of data on the private rented sector in their local area” from April 2027. She added: “We expect that data to include, for example, the number of formal enforcement notices issued; the number of civil penalties issued by category of offence; revenue received from civil penalties; total number of staff in private rented sector enforcement teams; and total spend on private rented sector enforcement.”

Baroness Taylor reiterated that it would use fees from the PRS Database to help fund councils’ work to improve compliance – but VOLA points to a potential policy contradiction. “The response states that the enhanced enforcement regime supports a ‘polluter pays’ model through the use of civil penalties against those who breach the law,” says Baker.

Fees

“At the same time, the government has indicated that its intention is to use fees from the proposed Private Rented Sector Database to provide long-term funding for local authority compliance and enforcement activity. VOLA has consistently argued that enforcement costs should, wherever possible, be borne by those who fail to comply with their legal obligations.”

Baker says VOLA fears that the long-term use of database fee income to fund enforcement could place an unfair financial burden on responsible landlords.

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