Four stories today, and the thread connecting them is accountability catching up with rhetoric. Angela Rayner draws a harder line against rent controls than her own Prime Minister has managed, the select committee chair who spent two years publicly criticising the government for stalling on leasehold reform has just joined the department she was criticising, ministers tell landlords to stop treating a hostile reference as the final word on a tenant, and a high street bank quietly becomes one of the Midlands’ biggest rental landlords. None of it forces you to do anything differently by Friday. Together, it’s a decent guide to where the next year of pressure is actually coming from.
Rayner draws the rent-controls line Burnham wouldn’t
Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Friday, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner ruled out rent controls in England in considerably more definite terms than Prime Minister Andy Burnham managed when I covered this on 22 July. “We won’t be looking at rent controls,” she said, as the NRLA reports, pointing to Scotland’s experience: “We’ve seen what’s happened in areas like Scotland, it hasn’t necessarily brought rents down.” Burnham called for rent freezes as Greater Manchester’s mayor in 2023, and Rayner didn’t pretend otherwise: “Three years ago, Andy called for that because there was a significant crisis in the rental market. We implemented between then the Renters’ Rights Act which is giving renters more power and control,” arguing that tribunal challenges to unfair rent rises are “a better way of stabilising the rental market” than a cap.
The reaction over the weekend suggests she’s drawn a line that matters to people. Generation Rent launched a postcard campaign urging supporters to write directly to Rayner, as Landlord Today reports, arguing that “England hasn’t had proper rent controls since 1988,” and that private rents have risen by around 1,200% since. Whatever you make of that comparison, a live postcard campaign is a sign the argument isn’t over just because a minister said no on breakfast television.
My read: this is a political position, not legislation, and it can be reversed by the next reshuffle as easily as this one produced it. But it tells you where the pressure-release valve is meant to sit — not a statutory cap, but the rent-challenge mechanism already built into the Renters’ Rights Act, where a tenant can take a Section 13 notice to tribunal and argue the new rent isn’t the market rent. If you’re a South East landlord raising a rent by more than a token amount, the evidence that used to be optional — comparable local lettings, the property’s condition, work done since the last review — is now what stands between a rent you can justify and one a tribunal cuts for you. Gather it before you serve the notice, not after.
The MP who criticised the leasehold delay just joined the department causing it
Today is the day the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government was due to respond to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s pre-legislative scrutiny report on the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, a two-month statutory clock that started when the committee published its report in May. It won’t. Housing minister Matthew Pennycook told the committee weeks ago the government would “regrettably” miss the deadline, citing the change of Prime Minister and the summer recess running from 17 July to 1 September, as Mortgage Solutions reported on 14 July, promising a response “soon after summer recess, with a substantive bill introduced to Parliament soon after.”
Committee chair Florence Eshalomi wasn’t having it: “Millions of leaseholders have been waiting for too long for successive governments to tackle the unfair leasehold system, cap ground rents, and put homeowners in control of the management of their buildings,” she said, pushing for the bill in autumn 2026 and noting that three successive governments have secured electoral mandates to address ground rents without doing it. Eshalomi was appointed a Minister of State at that same department on 21 July, and Landlord Today’s write-up today draws the irony out explicitly: she’ll now sit alongside Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook rather than writing letters to them.
My read: I flagged Propertymark’s leasehold report two days ago — 93% of leaseholders wouldn’t buy leasehold again, only 10 of 125 sections of the 2024 Act in force — and said reform is moving slower than the problem it was meant to fix. Eshalomi’s move doesn’t change that verdict today, but it’s the most concrete reason yet to think the pace might shift this autumn: the person with the sharpest, most public grievance about the delay now has a desk inside the building rather than a committee outside it. Don’t change how you handle a leasehold purchase on the strength of that alone — keep requesting service charge accounts, reserve fund position and any planned major works before exchange, exactly as I said two days ago.
A bad reference isn’t the last word anymore, and ministers just said so
Responding to a written parliamentary question from Labour MP Beccy Cooper about landlords withholding references from tenants until they’ve served notice to leave, Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook told Parliament, as Property118 reports: “Where a landlord has requested a reference from a previous landlord and is unable to obtain this, we encourage landlords to make use of other available referencing criteria to give them and the tenant the confidence that the tenancy is suitable.” His suggested alternatives include employment verification, credit checks, affordability assessments and local authority guarantee or rent deposit schemes.
The question exists because Section 21 no longer gives a landlord an easy way out of a tenancy that turns sour, so the previous-landlord reference has become one of the few remaining points of leverage in the system — and, per the same report, is increasingly being withheld as a tactic rather than an oversight. Ben Grech, chief executive of deposit-alternative provider Reposit, put the mood plainly: landlords are “becoming increasingly risk-averse, placing greater emphasis on financial security and tenant reliability.”
My read: a minister telling landlords to stop relying on a single call to a previous landlord is a tacit admission that reference-withholding has become a real problem, not a rare grievance. It’s also just good practice regardless of the politics. A previous-landlord reference tells you almost nothing you can act on — it’s unverifiable, sometimes vindictive, sometimes glowing because the outgoing landlord just wants the tenant gone. Payslips, an affordability check against the actual rent, and a guarantor or deposit-replacement scheme where affordability is marginal tell you far more, and they’re evidence you can point to if a tenancy does go wrong.
When the competition for your next tenant is a bank
Lloyds Living, the build-to-rent arm of Lloyds Banking Group, has agreed to buy 104 new homes from housebuilder Gleeson across two Midlands developments, Hollinwell Heath in Kirkby-in-Ashfield and Watermills near Newcastle-under-Lyme, Landlord Today reports. It’s the bank’s second big acquisition within a week, following 980 homes from Barratt Redrow, and takes its total portfolio past 8,850 homes. Gleeson’s regional managing director Allen Marshall called it evidence of “our shared commitment to increasing the supply of high-quality homes in the areas where they are needed most”; Lloyds Living chief executive Matt Burgess framed the model as “professionally-managed, quality single-family homes available to rent across the country.”
My read: I noted three days ago that build-to-rent investment hit £2.2bn in the second quarter, the strongest on record, and this is what that number looks like as an actual building site rather than a statistic — a bank buying whole developments off a housebuilder’s plan before a single tenant has been found. It isn’t South East stock, and it isn’t competing with a landlord letting one or two flats directly on price. What it is doing is setting the standard a tenant now treats as normal — professional management, consistent condition, no surprises — and that standard travels even into markets Lloyds Living hasn’t touched yet. An individual landlord’s realistic edge against that isn’t scale, it’s the things a corporate portfolio structurally can’t match: a repair sorted this week and a phone number that gets answered by a person.
What I’d actually do
- Raising a rent this year? Build your evidence — comparable local lettings, the property’s condition, work you’ve done — before you serve the Section 13 notice, not after a tenant challenges it at tribunal.
- Mid-transaction on a leasehold flat? Nothing changes today. Keep requesting service charge accounts, reserve fund position and any planned major works before exchange, and don’t bank on autumn legislation to protect you.
- Struggling to get a reference on a prospective tenant? Don’t treat a missing or hostile previous-landlord reference as disqualifying on its own — build a package of payslips, an affordability check against the actual rent, and a guarantor or deposit-alternative scheme.
- Benchmarking your own let against the wider market? Look at what build-to-rent operators are normalising for tenants — condition and responsiveness, not price — and compete on the things scale structurally can’t buy.
If any of today’s stories touch your own plans — a leasehold purchase where the paperwork needs checking before exchange, or a rental property whose condition and compliance record needs straightening out before a rent review — the practice offers 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 27 July 2026.