The Renters Rights Bill

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The Renters Rights Bill completed its passage through Parliament and received Royal Assent on 22nd October 2025, entering into law. The Act seeks to increase protections for those renting in the private rental sector and marks a comprehensive rebalancing of the rights and requirements for both private tenants and landlords.  

The Northern Housing Consortium has been a longstanding supporter of attempts to reform the private rental sector, improve housing quality within the tenure, and more closely align the renting experience between private and social renting tenures. We have, however, stressed the importance of ensuring that local authorities are appropriately resourced so that they can effectively monitor and enforce compliance with the Act’s requirements.  

Major features of the Act are listed below: 

  • Abolish Section 21 or “no-fault” evictions for private renters.  
  • Replace fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies (ASTs) with rolling periodic tenancies.   
  • Limit in-tenancy rent increases: landlords may increase the rent only once a year, must give notice, and tenants will have rights to challenge above-market increases at Tribunal.  
  • Ban rental “bidding wars”: landlords/letting agents must publish an asking rent and cannot invite or accept offers above that listed rent.  
  • Prohibit discrimination in lettings against people in receipt of benefits or with children. 
  • Grant tenants a statutory right to request keeping a pet, which landlords must consider and cannot reject without reason.  
  • Introduce a “Decent Homes Standard” into the private rented sector for the first time. The government has also committed to extending Awaab’s Law to the private rented sector, so that hazards such as mould, damp, structural issues must be remedied within defined timeframes, at a future point.  
  • Require landlords to make changes to advance-rent demands: for example, limiting how much rent can be asked in advance. This will amend the Tenant Fees Act 2019 so that more than one month’s rent in advance cannot be charged before the tenancy begins.  
  • Strengthen enforcement: expand the use of rent repayment orders (RROs) to more offences, raise penalties and give local authorities stronger investigatory and enforcement powers.  
  • New regulatory infrastructure, including a new database of private rented sector landlords and introduce the ability for private tenants to appeal to an Ombudsman to handle disputes between tenants and landlords.  
  • Reform the grounds for possession (the valid reasons landlords can reclaim the property) so that landlords regain control when genuinely needed (e.g., for sale, moving in) yet with enhanced protections/notice periods for tenants.  

 

The full text of the Act can be found here.