A busier week than mid-July usually manages. The first rental-market data since the Renters’ Rights Act came in and showed supply shrinking, a hard court deadline for landlords is now days away, and the government is about to pay real money towards heat pumps in exactly the kind of oil-fired village housing I survey most weeks. Here’s my read on all of it.
The rental market has stopped replacing its landlords
Rightmove’s Q2 rental tracker landed this week, and the headline number is small but significant: the stock of homes available to rent is 1% lower than a year ago — the first annual fall since 2022. Advertised rents set new records at the same time: £1,397 a month outside London, up 2.3% on the year, and £2,791 in the capital. As Landlord Today notes, these are the first quarterly figures since the Renters’ Rights Act took effect on 1 May.
The detail matters more than the headline. Rightmove says the fall is driven by fewer newly listed rental properties, not by homes letting faster. That is landlords quietly deciding not to re-let, or not to buy — a thinning, not an exodus. Rightmove’s Colleen Babcock reads it calmly, saying “we’re seeing rents return to more familiar seasonal patterns and stable growth”, and on the demand side she has a point: ten enquiries per available home is well down on the 22 of 2022. It is also still double the pre-pandemic norm of five.
My read: this is the arithmetic phase. Landlords are sitting down with the new tenancy regime on one side and the confirmed EPC C standard for rentals on the other — 1 October 2030, with a £10,000 cost cap, as Pinsent Masons sets out — and deciding whether the sums still work. Some will conclude they don’t, and that stock mostly leaves renting for good. If you’re a tenant hoping the Act would loosen the market, this data says the opposite: fewer homes against double the old demand keeps rents underpinned. If you’re a landlord, it says hold your nerve and plan the 2030 compliance early, rather than selling into a soft sales market because of a headline.
Twelve days to use a Section 21 you’ve already served
A deadline worth restating, because it is now genuinely close. Any Section 21 notice served before the Renters’ Rights Act commenced on 1 May dies unless possession proceedings are before a court by Friday 31 July. As Claire Liddy of mfg Solicitors put it in Landlord Today, 31 July “is the critical deadline for private landlords in England to apply for a court possession order” on those notices. Miss it and the notice simply lapses; from then on it’s the Section 8 route, with specific grounds and evidence in front of a judge.
Two traps. First, timing: Wellers Law Group points out that what counts is the court issuing the claim, not you submitting it, and courts in July are not famous for same-day turnaround. Second, compliance: Wellers flags the Court of Appeal’s decision in Muca v El Amrani, which confirmed that a gas safety certificate not given to the tenant before they moved in cannot be fixed later. The old invalidity traps — deposits, prescribed information, the paperwork nobody checked in 2019 — all still bite, and there is no time left to re-serve. Audit the file before you pay a court fee on a claim that was dead on arrival.
From Tuesday, an oil-fired home gets £9,000 towards a heat pump
From Tuesday 21 July, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme pays £9,000 — up from the standard £7,500 — towards an air-to-water or ground source heat pump in eligible off-gas-grid properties, and the uplift runs until 31 March 2027, per Ofgem’s scheme page. The government is posting leaflets to around 200,000 eligible oil-heated homes in England and Wales; energy consumers minister Martin McCluskey says “the war in the Middle East has hit households on heating oil especially hard”, which is the honest subtext — oil customers have no price cap and have been paying for that all year.
This one is squarely my patch. Hartfield and half the villages around the Ashdown Forest run on oil tanks, and I survey these houses weekly: solid walls, suspended timber floors, radiators sized in the 1980s. An extra £1,500 is real money, but a grant does not turn a bad design into a good one. A heat pump in a leaky Wealden cottage works when the fabric and the emitters are dealt with first — a proper room-by-room heat-loss calculation, not a boiler-swap quote with a heat pump drawn on it.
If you’re off-grid and heat-pump-curious, get the building assessed before you sign anything. And since the higher grant is available from Tuesday, if your installer is poised to submit a voucher application this week, that timing deserves a conversation before they press send.
Awaab’s Law grows teeth in November — and damp is still the hardest hazard to close
A few days older than my usual window, but too important to skip. On Monday MHCLG set 30 November 2026 as the date phase two of Awaab’s Law takes effect in social housing. From then, seven more hazard groups — electrical faults, falls, fire, excess cold and heat, structural collapse and hygiene hazards such as pest infestations — join damp and mould inside the statutory clock: emergencies made safe within 24 hours, investigation within ten working days, a written summary to the tenant within three, urgent works within five, longer-term repairs started inside twelve weeks.
The more interesting document is the government’s review of phase one, reported by LandlordZone: social landlords coped with the emergency response, but found damp and mould cases “more difficult to progress from inspection to effective remediation, particularly where works were complex or specialist input was needed”. No surveyor is surprised. Damp is a diagnosis problem before it is a repairs problem — condensation, penetrating moisture and a failed damp-proof course all get the same mould wash and repaint if nobody works out which one is present, and the mould is back by Christmas.
Private landlords should read all of this as a preview, not someone else’s problem. My bet is that these duties reach the private rented sector in some form within a few years, and the lesson from phase one is blunt: the landlords who struggled were the ones who couldn’t diagnose. In most of the cases I see, ventilation is where the answer lives.
What I’d actually do
- Sitting on a Section 21 notice served before 1 May? Solicitor this week, claim issued well ahead of Friday 31 July — and check the gas certificate, deposit and prescribed documents before spending money on a claim that can’t succeed.
- Off the gas grid and considering a heat pump? Commission a heat-loss calculation or retrofit assessment before accepting a quote, and time the voucher application for the 21 July uplift.
- Doing the sell-or-hold sums on a rental? Price in EPC C by October 2030 and the £10,000 cap now; this week’s supply data suggests rents will stay underpinned while you plan rather than panic.
- Recurring mould, any tenure? Diagnose before decorating — establish whether it’s ventilation, insulation or a moisture source before anyone opens a tin of stain block.
- Managing social housing stock? Gap-analyse the repairs process against the phase two hazards before November, starting with electrics and falls.
If any of this lands on your own to-do list — a heat-loss assessment before an installer quote, an EPC strategy for a rental, or a damp problem that keeps coming back — the practice does PAS 2035 retrofit assessments and EPCs 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 19 July 2026.