The transitional window for old Section 21 and Section 8 notices did not close on 1 May — it closed at midnight on Friday, and landlords are only finding that out now. Thurrock’s selective licensing scheme survived its last legal challenge while Preston lines up to charge over a thousand pounds for the same idea, and two pieces of paperwork news — one from conveyancing’s regulator, one from a logbook trade body — both come down to the same thing: where there are not enough qualified people to do a job properly, someone will eventually invent a form that says it was done anyway.
Section 21’s real deadline just passed, and most landlords weren’t watching for it
1 May 2026 got all the attention as the day Section 21 “no-fault” evictions were abolished under the Renters’ Rights Act and every assured shorthold tenancy converted to a periodic one. What got far less coverage was the transitional deadline that followed it: landlords who had already served a Section 21 or Section 8 notice before 1 May had until 31 July to actually apply to court for possession. Any notice not converted into a court claim by that date simply expired at midnight on Friday, regardless of how much time was technically left on it — student landlords with a qualifying pre-1 May tenancy had the same cut-off to use the special two-month Ground 4a notice period to clear rooms for the new academic year. As LandlordZone reported on Thursday, eviction specialist Paul Shamplina of Landlord Action described the final week as “carnage,” with call volumes so high the firm was turning away instructions it could not process in time: “I’ve never seen anything like it in my 35 years of acting for landlords.”
My read: this is the deadline that actually bit, more than 1 May did. The abolition date changed the rules for notices served from that point on; the 31 July cut-off retroactively killed notices some landlords had been quietly sitting on for months on the assumption there was no urgency. Anyone who missed it is not simply delayed — they are starting again from nothing, under the new possession grounds, into a court system already facing bailiff waits of up to a year.
If you served a Section 21 or Section 8 notice before 1 May and did not get a possession claim issued by Thursday, that notice is dead. Take advice this week on which of the new grounds actually fits your situation — arrears, sale, or otherwise — before serving again, rather than assuming the old paperwork still has any force.
Selective licensing just passed its toughest legal test — and Preston wants in at £1,050 a property
Thurrock Council’s selective licensing scheme cleared its last hurdle this week. A group of 193 landlords had sought a judicial review to halt the scheme, winning a temporary injunction back in January that delayed its start. As LandlordZone reported on Thursday, the High Court dismissed the challenge as lawful, then refused a further request for an oral hearing on 30 July, closing off any remaining route to appeal. The landlords were ordered to pay £7,500 in costs. The scheme covers every ward in the borough bar four exemptions, charges £1,034 per property, and rises to £1,767 for anyone who leaves a property unlicensed for twelve weeks or more — a scheme that its own consultation found 29% of respondents opposed, with three-quarters of landlords and agents citing the fee as excessive. A similar challenge by Scunthorpe landlords against North Lincolnshire Council failed on the same grounds earlier this year.
Thurrock is not acting in isolation, either. Preston City Council opened its own consultation this week on a three-ward selective licensing scheme that would charge £1,050 per property — £470 on application, £580 once the council is minded to grant it, with no discount or instalment option proposed. As Landlord Today reported on Friday, the council cites its own data showing roughly 16% of privately rented homes in the target wards carry a Category 1 hazard under the Housing Health and Safety Rating System — damp, mould, disrepair and excess cold chief among them.
My read: Thurrock closes off cost as a line of legal attack. A council that consults properly and can point to a genuine hazard problem is now very hard to beat in court on the basis that the fee is simply too high — the challenge has to be about scope or process, not price, and even then the odds are not good. For portfolio landlords, £1,000–£1,750 per property is fast becoming the going rate for selective licensing rather than the outlier, and it belongs in a yield calculation now, not as a surprise when a scheme goes live.
The industry just admitted it doesn’t have enough surveyors — and built a grading system around that gap
The Residential Logbook Association, the MHCLG-recognised trade body behind the Core Logbook Specification, launched a new digital standard on Wednesday for grading upfront home condition assessments. As Today’s Conveyancer reported, the standard defines three routes: Route A, a seller’s own self-completed assessment as the minimum standard; Route B, a seller assessment reviewed by a surveyor; and Route C, a full professionally attended survey — each one recording who carried it out, what evidence they considered, and a verification status attached to the pack. RLBA buying and selling lead Sally Holdway was candid about why: “There are not enough surveyors for the government to mandate a professionally attended condition assessment for every home.” Survey Shack and Geared Partnerships have already confirmed they can produce compliant assessments under the framework.
My read: this is an honest response to a real capacity problem, and grading the routes rather than pretending they are equivalent is the right instinct. But a label is not quality control. A Route A pack is still a seller marking their own homework, however tidy the metadata around it looks, and the gap between Route A and Route C is exactly the gap between “the seller says the roof is fine” and someone who actually got on a ladder — which is where most disputes over misrepresented condition start. A verification status field does not close that gap; a professional inspection does.
If you are selling and want a pack that a buyer’s solicitor will actually rely on rather than discount, commission at least a Route B review rather than relying on a self-completed Route A form. If you are buying, treat any condition pack as a starting point regardless of which route produced it — a homebuyer survey or a full building survey is not made redundant by a seller’s own paperwork, whatever grade it carries.
Conveyancers’ regulator asks for 4% more — and admits its own fees have halved in a decade
The Council for Licensed Conveyancers opened a consultation on 30 July proposing a 4% rise in practice fees and licensing administration fees for the 2026–27 year, alongside a 6% increase in contributions to the compensation fund, all effective from 1 November. As Today’s Conveyancer reported, individual licence fees stay frozen at their 2010 level, and the regulator frames the rise as simply keeping pace with inflation. Buried in the same proposal is a striking admission: if approved, the average practice fee rate will have fallen from 1.25% of turnover in 2015–16 to just 0.6% by 2026–27 — roughly half, over a decade in which the number of firms doing conveyancing work has fallen from around 7,000 to under 5,904. The consultation runs to 7 September.
My read: a 4% headline figure sounds like the regulator reaching for more, but set against a ten-year trend of the CLC quietly cutting its own take, it reads more like the year the trend might finally level off rather than the year it reverses. A regulator funded at half the rate it was a decade ago, still holding individual licence fees at 2010 levels, is not obviously in a position to keep absorbing inflation indefinitely — regardless of what happens to this particular 4%.
If you work with licensed conveyancers on a referral basis, this is a reasonable moment to check how consolidation has reshaped that relationship — the firm you dealt with two years ago may not be the one handling the file today.
What I’d actually do
- Served a Section 21 or Section 8 notice before 1 May and never got to court? Treat it as dead and take advice this week on which of the new possession grounds actually applies before serving again.
- Portfolio landlord in or near a licensing-active authority? Model £1,000–£1,750 per property into your yield calculations now — a legal challenge on cost grounds alone is very unlikely to succeed after Thurrock.
- Selling and relying on an upfront condition pack? Ask which RLBA route produced it, and upgrade to a surveyor-reviewed Route B assessment if you want buyers’ solicitors to actually rely on it.
- Buying with a condition pack in hand? Do not let any self-completed report substitute for your own survey, whatever verification status is attached to it.
If today’s notes have you rethinking a possession strategy, a licensing budget, or whether a seller’s condition pack is worth relying on, the practice offers full building surveys, HomeBuyer surveys and Buy to Let Surveys across the South East. Get in touch.
Small print. General commentary, not advice for your specific circumstances — regulations, schemes and deadlines change, and your property is not the average property. Sources linked were accurate when read on 2 August 2026.