Four stories today share an odd thread: the government wants better evidence, a tribunal is punishing landlords who show up without any, and the Treasury wants an honest mistake to start looking deliberate if you sit on it too long. A refreshed safety checklist puts hard numbers on what an inspector will look for, a data firm’s count of landlords leaving the sector doesn’t quite square with the rest of the same week’s figures, a review of two dozen rent-tribunal decisions shows evidence-free rent rises getting shredded, and a House of Lords committee wants to hear from ordinary landlords before it finalises how HMRC treats a genuine error. None of it is dramatic. All of it changes what “being careful” actually means this month.
The government just told you what “safe” looks like — in millimetres and degrees
The gov.uk landlord and agent guide to the Housing Health and Safety Rating System was quietly refreshed on 16 September, and it does something the underlying regulations never quite did: it puts numbers on the page. The HHSRS itself was overhauled back on 23 June, cutting the hazard categories from 29 to 21 and collapsing sixteen likelihood bands into four. What’s new this week is the practical self-assessment checklist sitting underneath that framework — “baseline indicators” the guide says represent a reasonable standard, including hot water no hotter than 45°C at the point of delivery, living rooms heated to 21°C and other habitable rooms to 18°C, a minimum of 250mm of loft insulation, and window restrictors limiting opening to under 100mm. As LandlordZone reports, a council can still fine a landlord up to £7,000 for a Category 1 hazard, and up to £40,000 — up from £30,000 — for failing to comply with an improvement notice on offences committed since 1 May.
Baseline indicators are explicitly not mandatory standards, and the guide says so in as many words. In practice they will function as one anyway, because an inspector scoring a Category 1 or 2 hazard now has a numbered checklist to point to, and a landlord who can’t show they checked against it has nothing to point back with. That’s a genuine simplification of what used to be a fairly opaque professional judgement, but it cuts both ways: HHSRS assessment has always weighed likelihood and spread of harm together against a specific household’s vulnerability, not just whether a tape measure agrees with a number on a page, and a landlord who treats the checklist as the compliance test rather than the starting point is going to be surprised the first time a council disagrees.
Anyone letting property built before the 1990s should get a tape measure on the loft insulation and a thermometer on the hot water this month, before a council inspector does it first. Landlords with HMOs or vulnerable tenants should treat the checklist as the floor for a proper independent HHSRS-competent inspection, not a substitute for one.
Landlords are leaving at the fastest rate in a decade — and the numbers don’t quite agree with each other
Landlord Today reported on Friday that property data firm TwentyCi has clocked 562 rental properties a day leaving the sector so far in the third quarter of 2026, against 495 a day in the same quarter last year and 167 a day at the start of the decade — roughly 44,000 exits by the time the figures were released. TwentyCi chief executive Colin Bradshaw put it down to “regulatory and economic pressures” following the Renters’ Rights Act. In the same release, though, available rental stock was up 1.3 per cent year on year, with cumulative supply through 2026 so far running 13.6 per cent ahead of the same point last year.
Both numbers can be true at once, and that’s the actual story: individual landlords selling up, with portfolio operators or build-to-rent developers replacing that stock, sometimes property by property and sometimes faster than the exits. That matches what I see at instruction — the seller with one flat and the buyer with a spreadsheet of twelve. What it doesn’t match is either the “landlords are fleeing and supply is collapsing” headline or the “nothing to see here, stock is stable” one; a flow figure and a stock figure answer different questions, and neither on its own tells you what’s happening to the tenant looking for a home this month.
If you’re one of the 562-a-day, a buyer pool increasingly made up of professional landlords means faster completions but sharper negotiation on survey findings — get your own condition report done before theirs arrives with a lower number attached.
A rent-tribunal review has bad news for landlords who turn up without evidence
Property118 reported this week on an analysis by David Smith, a property law partner at Bishop & Sewell, of 25 published First-tier Tribunal decisions under the Renters’ Rights Act’s new rent-challenge process. Landlords got their full requested increase in half of the 24 cases where the tribunal actually set a figure, and the median award was 92.4 per cent of what was asked for — but six landlords received a quarter or less of their proposed rise, and two ended up with no increase at all. In one London case, a tenant paying £2,066 a month challenged a proposed rise to £2,475; the tribunal set the rent at £1,950, below what the tenant had been paying already. Ten of the twenty-five landlords produced no comparable rent evidence beyond general assertion; the two who produced actual achieved-rent evidence both got everything they asked for. A separate Sheffield case was struck out entirely for short notice — serving notice on 5 July for a 1 August increase, when two months is required.
The pattern is stark enough to be useful: this isn’t really a story about tribunals being harsh on landlords, it’s a story about landlords asking a tribunal to take their word for it. “Market rate” asserted without evidence is now routinely being read as no evidence at all, and the downside isn’t a flat refusal — it’s a real risk of ending up below your current rent, which a landlord who’d simply not bothered raising it would never have faced.
Anyone serving a Section 13 rent-increase notice should build a short pack of genuinely comparable achieved rents — not asking prices — before serving it, and should count the two-month notice period on a calendar rather than a rough estimate.
Fix your own tax mistakes now, or HMRC may start assuming you didn’t mean to
Property118 flagged on Saturday that the House of Lords Finance Bill Sub-Committee opened an inquiry on 18 September into draft Finance Bill 2026–27 provisions that would modernise how tax return errors get corrected, with written evidence invited by 5pm on 11 October. HMRC’s draft clauses, published for technical consultation back in July, would create an explicit duty to correct a known error once you’re aware of it and still within time limits, give HMRC power to issue a formal “correction notice” with its own deadline, and — this is the sting — create a presumption that an inaccuracy was careless or deliberate, with the higher penalties and longer assessment windows that carries, if a correction notice isn’t properly answered.
This one won’t make a landlord’s pulse race the way a rent tribunal does, but it should. A property business run through self-assessment or a partnership return is exactly the kind of filing where an old error — a mis-claimed expense, a missed disposal, a mortgage-interest calculation still done the old way after Section 24 changed the rules — sits undiscovered for years. Under the draft rules, once HMRC spots it and writes to you, silence or a weak response doesn’t just cost you the tax; it can turn an honest slip into something HMRC treats as deliberate.
Landlords and their accountants are exactly the “real-world operability” evidence a select committee says it wants and rarely gets. A short, anonymised account of how hard it actually is to trace and correct an old error in a property business return is worth more to that committee than another law firm’s submission — and the deadline is 11 October.
What I’d actually do
- Letting property built before the 1990s? Check your loft insulation depth and hot water temperature against the new HHSRS baseline indicators this month, before a council does it for you.
- Selling a tenanted property? Commission your own condition survey before a professional buyer’s does — the buyer pool is shifting toward people who complete fast and negotiate hard on the numbers.
- Serving a Section 13 rent increase? Gather genuine achieved-rent comparables, not asking prices, and check the two-month notice period against a calendar before you serve it.
- Running a property business through self-assessment? Read HMRC’s draft correction-notice clause and consider sending the Lords committee a short account of your own experience before 11 October.
Whether it’s a landlord checking a hot water cylinder against a number on a government website or a tribunal deciding what a fair rent actually looks like, the value is in the evidence, not the assertion. The practice carries out Building Surveys and Buy to Let Surveys across the South East that put a proper inspection behind the number, whichever direction it needs to point. 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 20 September 2026.