Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before: MPs Discover (Again) That Renting Privately in England Can Be Grim and Nobody's Enforcing the Rules
If you experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu reading the Fourth Report of Session 2026-27 Housing Conditions in the private Rented Sector - MPs warn of a million sub-standard rented homes, a "postcode lottery" of enforcement, councils without the staff or money to police rogue landlords, you can be forgiven. You have, in fact, read this report before. Several times.
In 2013, the Commons housing committee examined the private rented sector and concluded the bottom end of the market needed serious government attention. In 2018, its successor found enforcement was "far too low in the vast majority of local authorities" and that vulnerable tenants were being left without the protection the law supposedly guaranteed them. In 2022, the Public Accounts Committee coined the phrase "postcode lottery" for council enforcement. In 2023, the committee reported again, warning that councils would need many more enforcement officers and repeating, its word, not mine, recommendations from the 2018 report, some of which repeated the 2013 one.
And now, in July 2026, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has published Housing Conditions in the Private Rented Sector, in which it declares itself "disappointed" to find the postcode lottery "has persisted for many years." One admires the optimism required to still be capable of disappointment.
The numbers have a haunting familiarity. In 2018, the committee heard that six in ten councils had not prosecuted a single landlord in 2016. In 2026, Guardian FOI data shows two-thirds of councils prosecuted no landlords between 2022 and 2024. In 2018, Newham was the celebrated outlier, responsible for around half the country's prosecutions. In 2026, Newham is still top of the (very short) list of councils that actually prosecute. In 2018, the committee heard that 105,000 tenant complaints had produced 467 prosecutions. In 2026, fewer than 2 per cent of complaints result in formal enforcement of any kind. Even the headline statistic is a rerun: in 2018 MPs noted that while the rate of non-decent private rentals had fallen dramatically, the actual number had barely moved. The 2026 report makes precisely the same observation, 1.2 million non-decent homes in 2006, almost 1.1 million now. Two decades of progress, minus the progress.
To be fair , and the report is scrupulously fair, in the way select committees are, quite a lot has genuinely changed this time. The Renters' Rights Act 2025 is on the statute book, Section 21 evictions are gone, and a decade of reform is scheduled. The committee's argument is not that nothing is happening. It is that everything now depends on the one thing that has reliably failed to happen since at least 2013: enforcement.
The state of the private rented sector
Some 4.7 million households now live in England's private rented sector, around one in five, making it the second largest tenure after home ownership. It is served by roughly 2.3 million landlords, the overwhelming majority of them small operators: eight in ten own only a handful of properties, and 45 per cent own just one. Yet nearly half of all tenancies are let by landlords with five or more properties.
Crucially, the sector's tenants have changed. The PRS increasingly houses people who need stability and are most vulnerable to poor conditions. Around a quarter of children now live in privately rented homes, up from 8 per cent in 2000. The number of over-65s renting privately is rising and is expected by the Housing and Ageing Alliance to quadruple by 2040. Just over 30 per cent of private renters have a long-term illness or disability, and many households on the lowest incomes spend close to half their income on rent, often in homes that would once have been provided as social housing.
Against that backdrop, the committee's assessment of housing quality makes uncomfortable reading. Although conditions have improved over two decades, the private rented sector consistently performs worse than any other tenure.
Roughly 22 per cent of privately rented homes, over a million properties, failed the Decent Homes Standard in 2024/25, and the ministry itself told MPs there has been no significant improvement since the pandemic. The Fabian Society's evidence suggested much of the long-term fall in the rate of non-decent homes reflects the sector's growth rather than genuine improvement in the homes within it.
An estimated 10 per cent of privately rented dwellings contain a Category 1 hazard, the most serious kind, which landlords are legally obliged to eliminate. Around one in ten homes has a damp and mould problem, though tenants report far higher rates: Citizens Advice told the inquiry that 75 per cent of private renters have lived in a home that was damp, mouldy or excessively cold, and nearly half of those affected had endured it for over a year. Only around half of privately rented homes meet the government's energy efficiency benchmark of EPC Band C, leaving private renters more exposed to fuel poverty than any other group. Overcrowding has risen again, affecting an estimated 286,000 homes.
The human cost runs through the evidence. The committee heard of homes so cold occupants could see their breath indoors; of a mother paying £80 - £90 a week in winter just to keep her eight-year-old warm; of a renter in south London paying £1,250 a month, more than half her salary, who developed eczema and breathing problems from mould and was served an eviction notice after complaining. A case study from Great Yarmouth described a listed HMO housing eight migrant workers with no central heating, black mould, moss growing inside windowpanes and a section of the building left as an open construction site for a decade.
The report is careful to note that most landlords take their responsibilities seriously and most tenants are broadly satisfied. But it identifies a persistent "shadow market" of rogue and criminal landlords, often letting informally, in cash, without tenancy agreements, to highly marginalised tenants, who, researchers warned, "operate with no respect for rights" and will not be touched by reforms that rely on tenants asserting themselves. Poor conditions are concentrated at the bottom end of the market, where fierce competition for scarce affordable homes leaves landlords with little commercial incentive to repair and tenants too fearful of rent rises or eviction to complain.
Regulation and enforcement: the perennial weak link
The clearest message from the inquiry, as it was in 2018, and 2023, is that everything the government is attempting stands or falls on enforcement. The Decent Homes Standard from 2035, minimum energy efficiency standards from 2030, Awaab's Law timescales for fixing hazards, the new ombudsman and the Private Rented Sector Database: all of it depends on someone actually checking. As the National Residential Landlords Association put it in evidence, landlords who bring the sector into disrepute will simply carry on operating under the radar without strong enforcement.
The current picture will be familiar to readers of the last three reports. Freedom of Information data shows that half of all inspections under the Housing Health and Safety Rating System between 2021 and 2023 were carried out by just 20 local authorities. Fewer than 2 per cent of tenant complaints between 2022 and 2024 led to formal enforcement of any kind. Two-thirds of councils did not prosecute a single landlord in that period, while a handful, Newham (again), Enfield, Camden, Liverpool, Sheffield and Rotherham, accounted for the bulk of prosecutions. Nearly half of councils issued no civil penalty notices at all between 2021 and 2023.
Most councils remain reactive, waiting for tenants to complain rather than proactively inspecting, and even then frequently prefer informal, light-touch approaches. The London Renters Union told MPs that councils too often act as "mediators rather than regulators", meaning it can be cheaper for a landlord to break the law than to comply with it. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman described one case where a tenant waited seven months for an inspection against a two-week council target, and another where a family with young children lived with serious hazards for nine months while a landlord slowly complied with an improvement notice.
The committee identifies three structural barriers behind this failure, none of which will surprise anyone who has been paying attention since roughly the coalition government.
Capacity. Councils are severely under-resourced and face a national shortage of environmental health officers, who can take five years to train and are hard to retain against private-sector competition. New Economics Foundation analysis found the average enforcement officer is responsible for 3,319 privately rented properties, with huge variation, from around 3,750 per officer in Birmingham to roughly 687 in Newham, a council that has invested heavily in enforcement. Some councils, such as Rochdale, now operate waiting lists for new cases. The 2023 committee warned councils would need "many more enforcement officers"; the 2022 Public Accounts Committee found the department didn't even know what resources councils required. Three years on, the committee is once again asking the government to find out.
Funding. Enforcement is propped up by unpredictable income. Civil penalty receipts are ring-fenced for the purpose, but as Manchester City Council told MPs, "you cannot sustain a service on them", most cases are resolved informally and penalties are often hard to collect. The government has provided around £60 million in New Burdens funding to cover the Act's new duties, but the committee wants the fees landlords will pay to register on the new PRS Database, due to launch later this year, to become a sustainable, ring-fenced annual funding stream for councils. NEF modelling suggests an annual fee of about £46 per property could expand national enforcement capacity by 233 per cent, enough to cap every officer's caseload at 1,000 properties.
Selective licensing. MPs regard selective licensing as a valuable proactive tool, it lets councils inspect properties in designated areas without waiting for complaints but most councils don't use it because schemes are bureaucratic, expensive to establish, capped at five years, restricted to areas with a high proportion of private renting, and legally barred from including licence conditions requiring physical improvements to properties. The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health called that last restriction a "peculiar disconnect" in the legislation. There has been one genuine win here: the 2023 committee's demand that councils no longer need the Secretary of State's permission for large schemes was finally granted in December 2024, proof that committee recommendations can be implemented, given only a decade or so.
What the committee wants (some of it, again)
On regulation and enforcement specifically, the report recommends that the government:
require councils to publish annual reports on their inspection and enforcement activity, so performance can be scrutinised and the postcode lottery exposed;
conduct and publish a full assessment of the resources and powers councils currently have, and will need to enforce standards proactively under the Renters' Rights Act;
set PRS Database registration fees high enough to fund a substantial expansion of council capacity, with an annual ring-fenced allocation to local authorities, on the principle that the cost of regulating the sector should be borne by all landlords, not just rule-breakers;
extend the maximum duration of selective licensing schemes from five to ten years, drop the requirement that schemes only cover areas with a high concentration of private renting, and allow licence conditions requiring landlords to improve the physical condition of their properties;
place a duty on councils to enforce every breach of the new Decent Homes Standard, not just the most serious "Criterion A" failures; and be far more ambitious with the PRS Database, letting compliant landlords self-certify against the Decent Homes Standard early to encourage adoption, while equipping councils to investigate false declarations and giving tenants an easy route to report suspected ones.
require councils to publish annual reports on their inspection and enforcement activity, so performance can be scrutinised and the postcode lottery exposed;
conduct and publish a full assessment of the resources and powers councils currently have, and will need to enforce standards proactively under the Renters' Rights Act;
set PRS Database registration fees high enough to fund a substantial expansion of council capacity, with an annual ring-fenced allocation to local authorities, on the principle that the cost of regulating the sector should be borne by all landlords, not just rule-breakers;
extend the maximum duration of selective licensing schemes from five to ten years, drop the requirement that schemes only cover areas with a high concentration of private renting, and allow licence conditions requiring landlords to improve the physical condition of their properties;
place a duty on councils to enforce every breach of the new Decent Homes Standard, not just the most serious "Criterion A" failures; and
be far more ambitious with the PRS Database, letting compliant landlords self-certify against the Decent Homes Standard early to encourage adoption, while equipping councils to investigate false declarations and giving tenants an easy route to report suspected ones.
The committee also urges the government to begin rolling out Awaab's Law in the private sector this year so that legal repair timescales are fully in force by the end of 2028/29, and to introduce incentives so landlords upgrade homes well before the 2035 Decent Homes deadline, rather than waiting until the last moment as the government's own impact assessment cheerfully assumes they will.
The bigger picture
The report stops short of endorsing rent controls, judging the evidence does not suggest the reforms will substantially damage supply, but warns that retaliatory rent increases could function as "economic eviction" for struggling tenants. It repeats the committee's long-standing call to unfreeze the Local Housing Allowance and peg it to at least the 30th percentile of market rents. Committee Chair Florence Eshalomi said the reforms are welcome and can make an important contribution, but that "more needs to be done to ensure that the new tenants' rights are enforceable and that landlords play by the rules."
Same time next decade?
There is a real difference this time, and it would be unfair not to say so. The Renters' Rights Act exists. Section 21 is gone. The enforcement funding question has, for the first time, an actual proposed answer in database registration fees. And the government is at least starting to collect the enforcement data its predecessors never bothered to gather, which means the next committee to look at this will not have to rely on journalists filing Freedom of Information requests to find out whether the law is being enforced (possibly).
Whether it is will come down to a handful of decisions the government must make soon, and against which this report can usefully be judged. Will database fees be set high enough to genuinely rebuild council enforcement capacity, and ring-fenced so the money actually reaches it? Will Awaab's Law start rolling out in the private sector this year, as the committee demands? Will councils be given a duty to enforce the whole Decent Homes Standard rather than a fraction of it? And will selective licensing be freed from the restrictions that have kept most councils from using it? None of these requires new primary legislation or heroic sums of money. All of them require the thing that has been in shortest supply since 2013: follow-through.
The stakes are not abstract. The private rented sector now houses a quarter of England's children, a growing population of older renters, and hundreds of thousands of people who cannot advocate for themselves, the very tenants the report warns will never benefit from rights they are too frightened or too marginalised to exercise. For them, the difference between a report that changes things and a report that gets politely filed is measured in winters spent in cold, mouldy homes.
The committee has promised to keep watching, and its benchmark is now on the record (again). The optimistic reading is that in five years' time the follow-up report will finally have something new to say. The realistic reading is that we should all keep this article handy. With a light edit to the dates, it may well do for the next one.
