Four stories today, and the thread running through them is paperwork. A new civil penalty regime confirms that what gets a landlord in trouble is as much the state of his records as the state of his roof, a Durham prosecution tests how far that principle should stretch when a tenant is the one creating the mess, London’s Mayor puts fresh money behind social housing retrofit while the private sector waits its turn, and a fresh leasehold report confirms what anyone surveying flats already knows: reform is moving slower than the problem it was meant to fix.
The new £7,000 penalty is decided by your file, not your inspection day
Since 22 June, Section 6A of the Housing Act 2004, inserted by the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, has let councils issue a civil penalty of up to £7,000 for a Category 1 hazard in a privately rented home — on top of, not instead of, an improvement notice, and without a mandatory warning stage first. It arrived alongside a reformed Housing Health and Safety Rating System, in force from 23 June, which cuts the old 29-hazard list to 21 and replaces the A-to-J bands with High, Medium and Low. The government’s own landlord and agent guide, published the same day, sets out the trigger: a council can only issue the penalty if it believes it would have been “reasonably practicable” for the landlord to have removed the hazard.
As Property118’s Tauhid Islam sets out, those two words are where cases will actually be won and lost. “Reasonable practicability is a judgment about conduct over time,” he writes, and because a penalty is contested through written representations and a tribunal appeal, both paper exercises, “the landlord who can produce a dated sequence showing the tenant’s report, the reply, the contractor instruction, the completion of works and any follow-up is arguing from strength at every stage.”
My read: this changes what a survey report is for. For a landlord facing this regime, a dated, specific report is evidence he took the problem seriously on the day it was raised. A mould wash and a repaint with no record of when the tenant reported it, or what was tried and why, is exactly the fact pattern a council will read as reasonably practicable and unactioned. Log everything, date everything, and keep the contractor correspondence, even for jobs that feel too minor to bother with.
When a tenant wrecks the property, the landlord still needed to have looked
Durham County Council secured a £42,500 fine against Carter Property Services, a roughly 300-property portfolio run by Glyn Carter, after Peterlee Magistrates’ Court found 13 breaches of selective licence conditions across eight homes. The worst was a Peterlee property paramedics were called to, where three adults were found sleeping on the floor amid dead rats and mice, faeces and urine on surfaces, and a strong smell of ammonia. That property hadn’t been inspected in two years; its gas safety certificate was nearly four years overdue. A separate Shotton property, meant to be inspected every six months under the licence, hadn’t been looked at in four. Council director Tony Hanson said the case “demonstrates how we will use our powers within the Selective Licensing scheme to take effective enforcement.”
Property118’s Mark Alexander pushes back on the framing, and he’s not wrong to. “Tenants do not lose all personal responsibility when they rent a home,” he writes. “Government guidance says tenants should give landlords reasonable access for inspections and repairs, take good care of the property and repair or pay for damage caused by themselves, their family or their visitors.” Nobody sensible thinks a landlord conjured dead rats into being.
My read: the argument is right in general and beside the point here. The prosecution wasn’t for the mess, it was for two and four-year gaps against a licence condition requiring inspection every six months, and for gas certificates years overdue. Whatever a tenant does between visits, a landlord who hasn’t been through the door in two years has no dated sequence to point to, nothing to show he tried — the same paperwork gap the story above says will decide the next round of Category 1 cases. If you hold a selective licence, check your actual inspection dates against what the licence requires, not what you intended.
£58.7m goes into London’s coldest social homes — nowhere near a private rental yet
The Mayor of London announced a £58.7m Home Energy Saving Fund this week, London’s share of a £295m package under the national Warm Homes Plan, aimed at up to 5,000 of the capital’s least energy-efficient social homes. City Hall says the work, insulation, solar panels and heat pumps, could save residents up to £500 a year and cut 107 kilotonnes of carbon. Sadiq Khan put the problem plainly: “Thousands of Londoners are living in inadequate homes that are freezing and damp in winter and unbearably hot during summer heatwaves.” Deputy Mayor Mete Coban added that “10 per cent of Londoners are currently living in fuel poverty.” It builds on the Mayor’s existing £10m Warmer Homes London programme, which has upgraded over 1,000 homes since 2025.
My read: none of this money reaches a privately rented or owner-occupied home, in London or the South East, and that’s worth being honest about rather than reading it as a signal your own retrofit is about to get easier. What it does do is put more work through the same pool of PAS 2035 coordinators and MCS installers that private landlords and homeowners already compete for, just as ECO4 is due to close on 31 December with no confirmed successor. If you’re planning retrofit work, privately or through the Warm Homes: Local Grant, book it now rather than after the social housing programme has absorbed the capacity — the supply chain doesn’t distinguish between a council contract and a private one when deciding which job to take first.
Nine in ten leaseholders regret buying — and reform has barely started
Propertymark, working with the National Leasehold Campaign and the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, has published Leasehold: Still a Life Sentence?, a follow-up to a 2018 report of the same name. The headline figures are stark: 93% of leaseholders say they wouldn’t buy another leasehold property, 86% have seen service charges rise in the last two years, and 89% say it’s difficult to challenge unfair costs. On the sales side, 78% of estate agents have pulled a leasehold flat from the market as unsellable in the last two years, and 74% name service charges as the main barrier. Most strikingly, only 10 of the 125 sections of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 have actually been brought into force, with no new commencement since February 2025. Propertymark chief executive Nathan Emerson didn’t soften it: “A status quo where 90% of buyers regret their purchase cannot continue to exist,” adding that “relying solely on commonhold could leave thousands of existing leaseholders without meaningful change for decades.”
My read: this is worth flagging even though it’s a few days outside my usual window, because nothing in it will surprise anyone who surveys flats for a living, and the 10-of-125 figure is the one I’d put in front of a client banking on reform arriving before their transaction does. Commonhold is the eventual answer, but eventual is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For a purchase happening this year, the only real protection is due diligence on the specific building: request the service charge accounts, reserve fund position, arrears history and any planned major works before exchange, because most unsellable leasehold flats fail on exactly this, not on the flat itself.
What I’d actually do
- Letting a property with an open repair, complaint or improvement notice? Start a dated file today — the tenant’s report, your reply, the contractor instruction, completion, and any follow-up. Under Section 6A, that sequence is your defence.
- Holding a selective licence anywhere in the South East? Check your actual inspection dates against the interval the licence requires, not the interval you intended to keep to. A documented gap of years is what a court will look at first, whatever state the tenant left the property in.
- Planning retrofit work this year, privately or through the Warm Homes: Local Grant? Book your assessment and installer now. ECO4 closes in December with no confirmed replacement, and social housing programmes like London’s new fund are drawing on the same limited pool of PAS 2035 assessors and MCS installers.
- Buying or selling a leasehold flat this year? Don’t wait for commonhold. Get the service charge accounts, reserve fund and any planned major works checked before exchange — reform of the existing system has barely moved since early 2025.
If any of today’s stories touch your own plans — a building survey with a clear, dated record of condition, or a retrofit assessment ahead of a compliance deadline — the practice offers building surveys and retrofit assessments 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 25 July 2026.