Four stories today, and they all trace back to the same six weeks: the Renters’ Rights Act’s first real compliance season. A Goodlord poll finds landlord fees rising as agents absorb the extra referencing and paperwork Section 21’s abolition now demands, a BBC investigation into a Midlands letting agent shows what happens when deposit protection is skipped rather than skimped on, and two more stories — a pet-clause mistake still doing the rounds and a tenant-group push for a more transparent PRS Database — both point the same direction: information that used to sit quietly in a filing cabinet is either a legal liability now or about to go public. Nothing structurally new arrived this week; the theme is enforcement catching up with the paperwork.
A fifth of landlords are now paying more for the same letting agent
Property Industry Eye reports on a Goodlord poll of almost 250 UK landlords, in which 23 per cent said their agent’s fees have risen since the Renters’ Rights Act came into force in May. Half of those surveyed pointed to a heavier compliance burden generally, and 39 per cent said they, or their agent, had introduced more cautious tenant vetting since Section 21 disappeared. With rent-arrears notice periods doubling from two weeks to four, and every possession now needing a specific Section 8 ground rather than a blanket “no fault” notice, Goodlord frames the fee rises as the market pricing in genuinely more work. The same research puts tenancy fraud at an estimated £4.1 billion a year across the sector, with 41 suspected fraudulent applications per 1,000 tenancies referenced between July 2025 and June 2026.
My read is that a fee increase on its own tells you nothing — the question worth asking your agent is what specifically changed. Proper referencing, identity and fraud checks, and a correctly drafted Section 8 notice with the right ground and the right paperwork behind it are not the same service as the pre-May 2026 tenant-find package, and they carry real legal exposure if done sloppily: get a notice wrong and you are back at the start of a possession claim, months later. A landlord being quoted a higher fee with no explanation of what it now covers is being asked to pay for someone else’s due diligence, not their own.
If your agent has raised fees this year, ask them to itemise it — referencing depth, fraud checks, notice drafting — and treat a vague answer as a reason to shop around, not a reason to assume it is all overhead.
Three councils, one rogue agent, and no one enforcing deposit protection
A BBC investigation reported by Property Industry Eye looked at Morgan, Payne & Knightly, a letting agency run by Tony Singh — also known as Amun Singh Judge — operating across Birmingham, Telford and Wolverhampton, and found more than 100 tenants whose deposits appear never to have been protected in a government-backed scheme, despite that being a straightforward legal requirement. Wolverhampton Trading Standards confirmed cases where the agency had not protected deposits but took no action because the properties advertised were in neighbouring council areas; Telford & Wrekin found no evidence of a breach; Birmingham City Council declined to comment. Six former employees told the BBC they never once saw a deposit placed into a protection scheme, and county court judgments have separately been made against Singh and the company over unpaid sums.
What strikes me here is not that an agent cut this corner — it is that the accountability sits in a gap between three separate councils, each concluding it is not quite their problem because the postcode falls just the wrong side of a boundary, while the same agent operated across all three. Deposit protection is not a professional-judgement question the way a repair priority might be; it is a binary legal requirement with a 30-day deadline and financial penalties attached, and it should not be enough for either the agent or the regulator to simply assume someone else was checking.
If you use a letting agent, ask for the deposit protection certificate and scheme reference for your specific tenancy directly from the scheme — DPS, mydeposits or TDS — rather than taking the agent’s word that it is “sorted”. It takes two minutes and it protects you as much as your tenant if the agent turns out to be unreliable.
Some landlords are still charging for pet insurance the Act scrapped
LandlordZone reports on warnings from AdvoCATS East Mids, a voluntary group specialising in pet-related tenancy disputes, that its casework has “shot up” since the Renters’ Rights Act’s pet provisions took effect in May, with two mistakes recurring constantly: tenancy clauses requiring tenants to pay for professional end-of-tenancy cleaning specifically because they have a pet — unlawful under the Tenant Fees Act 2019, which predates the Renters’ Rights Act by six years — and clauses requiring tenants to hold pet damage insurance, a requirement that was explicitly stripped out of the Bill during its passage through Parliament, meaning any agreement still demanding it is enforcing a provision that no longer exists in law.
The pet damage insurance point is the one worth flagging to every landlord, because it is not obscure non-compliance — it is a clause that used to be reasonable and was deliberately removed by Parliament, which means a lot of tenancy agreement templates still in circulation are simply out of date rather than wrong on principle. As AdvoCATS puts it: “No-one should have a God-given right to own a pet, but every pet surely has the right to a safe, loving and responsible home.” Landlords can still assess a request properly — a pet CV, a vet reference, a sensible conversation about the property — they just cannot insure or clean their way around it with fees the Act closed off.
Pull your current tenancy agreement template and check the pet clause specifically for a professional-cleaning-on-departure requirement and a pet damage insurance mandate. If either survives from a pre-May 2026 version, it needs rewriting before your next tenancy starts, not retrospectively enforcing on your current one.
Tenant groups want your eviction reasons on the public record
LandlordZone reports that more than thirty organisations — including Acorn, Generation Rent, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, London Renters Union and UNISON — have written to Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook asking for the forthcoming Private Rented Sector Database to publish rent-level data, the timing and stated reasons for evictions, and records of formal enforcement action against landlords, all publicly accessible rather than held privately by councils. The letter states: “In order to prove that a landlord evicting tenants to sell the property or move in has actually done so, it is essential the database records when and why landlords have evicted tenants.” The groups have also proposed funding council enforcement through an annual £46-per-property database fee. No government response had been published as of writing, and the database itself remains due to launch later this year.
Whatever survives the drafting process, the direction here is consistent with everything else the Renters’ Rights Act has done: information that used to sit privately with a landlord is moving into a searchable public register, and the specific ask — timestamping why and when a tenant was evicted — is a direct answer to a genuine enforcement gap around Ground 1A, where nothing currently checks whether a landlord who evicted to sell actually sold. I would not assume this exact proposal lands intact, but I would assume some version of eviction-reason transparency arrives with the database, because the alternative is a possession ground regulators have no practical way to audit.
Start keeping your own file now for any Section 8 possession you rely on — the notice, the ground used, and evidence of what actually followed it, whether that is a completed sale or a family member moving in — so you are not searching for proof retrospectively if the database, or a tenant’s solicitor, comes asking.
What I’d actually do
- Agent raised its fees this year? Ask what specifically changed — referencing depth, fraud checks, notice drafting — before assuming it is just margin.
- Using a letting agent for a tenancy? Get the deposit protection certificate and scheme reference directly from the scheme, not just the agent’s word that it is sorted.
- Got a pet clause in your tenancy agreement? Strip out any pet damage insurance requirement and pet-triggered cleaning fee — both are unlawful now.
- Relying on Ground 1A to sell or move in? Keep a dated file of the notice, the ground, and what actually happened afterward.
If today’s notes have you rewriting a tenancy agreement, vetting a letting agent’s compliance, or wanting a proper paper trail before a possession claim, a professional schedule of condition and photographic record at the start of a tenancy is still the best evidence you can put in that file — the practice covers full building 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 26 August 2026.