Three of today’s four stories are pitches, not policy: the NRLA lobbying on Capital Gains Tax ahead of next month’s Budget, a Generation Rent list of what’s missing from the landlord database that only started its rollout this month, and a Labour housing campaigner calling for mandatory damp and mould inspections in the private rented sector. None of it is law. The one story that’s just data — new figures on how long it actually takes a sale to reach exchange — says more about where the system already fails than any of the proposals aimed at fixing it.
Landlords aren’t fighting the CGT rise everyone expects — they’re fighting how it’s calculated
The National Residential Landlords Association has submitted a proposal to government, reported by Landlord Today yesterday, ahead of the 28 October Budget. It isn’t opposing a rise in Capital Gains Tax outright — it’s opposing the idea, reportedly linked to Andy Burnham’s administration, of aligning CGT with Income Tax bands of 20, 40 and 45 per cent for higher-rate sellers. Instead the NRLA wants gains calculated after stripping out inflation: relief based on purchase price, stamp duty, other acquisition costs and the cost of improvements, scaled by how long the property was held. Its own figures make the case — UK average house prices rose 46.2 per cent between 2015 and 2024 while general inflation ran at 34 per cent, meaning real growth over that period was just 9.1 per cent. On that reading, the NRLA argues, roughly four-fifths of the CGT paid on a sale in that window was tax on inflation, not on any actual gain in value.
This is close to how CGT worked until 2008 — indexation relief existed for decades before it was scrapped in favour of a flat taper. Whether it comes back in this form is a Budget-day question, not a September one, but the submission is doing double duty: buried in the same document is a call to unfreeze Local Housing Allowance and invest in a retrofit workforce. That pairs a tax ask with an energy-efficiency ask, which tells me the NRLA is trying to connect CGT relief to the money landlords will need to spend meeting the 2030 EPC C deadline. If indexation relief returns in any form, the improvement-cost side of the calculation is where retrofit spending — insulation, heat pumps, glazing — would earn its keep against a future tax bill, not just against the EPC certificate.
Whatever happens on 28 October, landlords selling or planning to sell should be keeping purchase-date paperwork, stamp duty receipts and invoices for every capital improvement now. Under current rules those costs already reduce a chargeable gain; if any indexation model is adopted, they become the entire basis of the calculation. A surveyor’s valuation at acquisition and a clear before-and-after record of retrofit work is cheap to keep and expensive to reconstruct five years later.
The landlord database launches with no way to check enforcement — that’s the gap that matters
Generation Rent has published a list of what it says is missing from the new private rental database, in a piece covered by Landlord Today yesterday. The Register Your Rental Property Service starts taking registrations from 15 December, rolling out region by region from the West Midlands through to the South West by autumn 2027, and will hold personal details, property specifications, tenancy information and safety documentation including gas, electrical and EPC certificates. Generation Rent’s complaint is about what it won’t hold: there’s no requirement to log an eviction notice against a property’s entry, and no mechanism to record a prosecution or enforcement action once one happens. The group summed up the gap: “until we can all type in our postcode and check our landlord is legit and our home is up to scratch, the work isn’t over.”
I don’t administer this register, but plenty of my landlord clients are about to have to populate it, and the enforcement-history gap is worth taking seriously for a different reason than Generation Rent’s. A Housing Act 2004 hazard notice, a rent repayment order, a tribunal finding against a landlord — none of it will show up against the property on the database, at least not at launch. That means the register can confirm a landlord exists and is registered, but it can’t tell a tenant or a buyer whether that landlord has a track record of letting a damp property sit unfixed. Given the tribunal caseload I wrote about yesterday is climbing, that’s exactly the information a prospective tenant would want and won’t get from this source.
Landlords should register early rather than waiting for their region’s deadline, and get EPC, gas and electrical paperwork organised now since it’s asked for upfront. Tenants and buyers shouldn’t treat a database entry as a clean bill of health on a property’s history — that still means commissioning an independent condition report where a property’s past isn’t otherwise documented, not relying on a government register that, on current design, won’t show it.
A ‘Decent Home Certificate’ for private rentals is being pitched — and it would need someone like me to sign it
Jacky Peacock, a Labour Party member and founder of Fairer Housing CIC who has advised private renters for 40 years, used a LabourList article this week to call for mandatory damp and mould inspections across the private rented sector. Her proposal: a legal requirement for every property on the new PRS Database to be inspected by a professional trained in the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, with any hazard remedied before a “Decent Home Certificate” can be uploaded as a pre-condition of letting — modelled explicitly on the MOT. She’d fund it from the existing £65 annual database registration fee rather than a new charge, and makes the capacity case bluntly: there are currently only 2.2 council enforcement officers for every 10,000 private rented homes, covering 4.6 million properties, against a comparison she draws to the 41.4 million vehicles the DVLA manages through compulsory annual checks. As Property118 reported, landlords in its comments were sceptical, with one asking bluntly who ends up paying for the checks.
This is one campaigner’s proposal, not government policy, and I’d treat it that way — nothing here is close to legislation. But it’s a serious articulation of an idea that keeps resurfacing since Awaab’s Law, and the mechanics matter to my trade specifically: a mandatory, certificated HHSRS inspection ahead of every letting is exactly the kind of work a chartered surveyor or suitably trained assessor would be doing, running parallel to EPC assessments rather than replacing them. Funding it through the existing registration fee, rather than a new one, also blunts some of the cost objection landlords raised in the comments, even if the enforcement-officer numbers point to the real chokepoint being capacity to act on what inspections find, not the paperwork of running them.
I wouldn’t restructure a business around this yet. What I would do is treat a documented, HHSRS-literate condition survey as worth commissioning now regardless of whether this becomes law — it’s the same evidence a landlord would want on file for the rent-review and hazard disputes already climbing through the tribunal system, and if some version of mandatory inspection does arrive, a property with a recent report is starting from a position of compliance rather than a standing start.
Where you’re selling decides how fast you exchange — and leasehold flats feel it worst
New figures from TwentyEA’s Property & Homemover Report, covered by Property Industry Eye today, show how unevenly transactions move once agreed. In the North East, 58.4 per cent of sales reach exchange within three months; in Yorkshire and the Humber it’s 55.6 per cent. In Outer London it’s 31.1 per cent — the slowest region in England — and Inner London isn’t much quicker at 35.4 per cent. Scotland, at 72 per cent, comfortably outpaces every English region. The report breaks the same data down by price and tenure too: 54.2 per cent of sub-£200,000 sales exchange within three months against 38.2 per cent of £1 million-plus sales, and 46.4 per cent of freehold sales against just 34.9 per cent of leasehold. TwentyEA director Nick Huntley called the regional divide “striking, with sales in the North East and Yorkshire progressing much faster than those in London.”
The report doesn’t break out the South East specifically, but the two variables that do explain the gap — higher price bands and leasehold tenure — describe a large share of what I survey. A £450,000 leasehold flat in a South East town sits in exactly the segment TwentyEA shows taking longest to reach exchange, for reasons that have nothing to do with the survey: management-pack delays, freeholder response times, longer chains at higher price points. That’s useful context for anyone getting frustrated at a slow-moving sale and assuming the hold-up is the building — it might just be the tenure and the price bracket doing what they typically do.
Buyers in this market should commission their survey as early in the process as they can rather than waiting for a mortgage offer to land, because the slack in a slower-moving chain is exactly where a delayed survey costs you the least and helps you the most. Sellers of leasehold flats should get the management information pack requested from the freeholder or managing agent before the property is even marketed — it’s consistently one of the slowest links in the chain, and the government’s own Home Buying and Selling Reform roadmap is heading toward making exactly this kind of information available upfront for good reason.
What I’d actually do
- Selling or planning to sell a rental property? Start collating stamp duty receipts and invoices for every capital improvement now — they reduce a CGT bill under current rules, and would sit at the centre of any indexation relief that follows.
- Registering on the new landlord database? Do it as soon as your region opens rather than waiting for the deadline, and don’t assume a clean entry proves a clean history — it won’t show enforcement action.
- Worried about mandatory damp and mould inspections? Commission an HHSRS-literate condition report now regardless of whether the proposal goes anywhere — it’s the same evidence you’d want for a tribunal dispute.
- Buying or selling a leasehold flat in the South East? Book the survey early and get the management pack requested before marketing — both sit inside the reasons local transactions run slower than the North.
Every story today is really about the gap between a document and the reality it’s meant to reflect — a tax calculation, a register entry, a certificate, a completion date. The practice carries out Building Surveys and EPCs across the South East for clients who’d rather have that evidence in hand before it’s asked for. 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 16 September 2026.