One government release on Friday delivered two consumer-protection measures side by side, and the gap between them tells you more than either headline alone: bailiffs are getting a genuinely mandatory rulebook, while the promised crackdown on cowboy builders is entirely voluntary, meaning the traders actually causing the average £750 loss have no obligation to sign up to anything. Two quieter changes from the same week matter more to my own working week than either. Land Registry has finally attached a stable property identifier to its sale-price data, ending years of clumsy address-matching, and Parliament has worked out how to let someone plug a small solar panel into a wall socket without breaking forty-year-old electrical safety law — though several solar retailers are already telling tenants they have rights under the Renters’ Rights Act that, when I checked the actual text, do not exist.
Bailiffs are getting a mandatory rulebook for the first time
Private bailiffs in England and Wales will be legally required to hold accreditation from the Enforcement Conduct Board, or work for a firm that does, under measures Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and courts minister Sarah Sackman announced on 28 August as part of a wider consumer-protection package. The ECB has operated since 2022 as a voluntary regulator with no legal teeth: a firm could simply decline to join, pay no levy, and carry on as before. Sackman said the change means people facing enforcement action will get access to “an independent complaints process” and will no longer face “intimidating behaviour, unfair treatment or being pushed into excessive repayment arrangements.” What the release does not say is when: the measure is described as forthcoming secondary legislation, with no commencement date attached to Friday’s announcement.
This is real, and it is worth reading against the Ministry of Justice possession figures I covered here yesterday: the median time from a landlord’s possession claim to actual repossession is 27.1 weeks, and the enforcement stage — the bailiff turning up — sits at the very end of that queue. Mandatory conduct standards do nothing to shorten that queue. What they do is give both tenants and landlords a formal complaints route if the firm executing a warrant behaves badly, which has genuinely been a gap: a landlord relying on a rogue enforcement agent has, until now, had no more recourse than the debtor did.
If you are a landlord with a possession claim in progress, or approaching the enforcement stage, ask your solicitor or agent to confirm the enforcement firm’s ECB accreditation before instructing them — it costs nothing to check now and will matter more once the requirement becomes law.
The cowboy-builder crackdown has no legal teeth, and the industry has already said so
The same release launched two builder-facing measures: an Approved Code for home-improvement traders, built by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute and the Furniture and Home Improvement Ombudsman, and Trusted Payments, a milestone-payment app that releases money as work stages complete rather than upfront. Government figures cited in the announcement put the scale of the problem at more than one in four UK adults hit by a home-improvement problem in the past eighteen months, 37 per cent of them facing extra costs averaging £750, inside a wider £10.3 billion of annual home-and-garden consumer detriment. Trusted Payments goes live next week with 100,000-plus traders reachable by the end of September; the Approved Code follows the same September timetable and is meant to be fully operational by December.
Neither scheme is compulsory. A trader can decline to join the Approved Code, ignore Trusted Payments, and keep advertising and working exactly as before — nothing in Friday’s announcement changes that. As Construction Magazine reports, the Federation of Master Builders welcomed the direction of travel but was blunt that “voluntary schemes cannot replace statutory licensing,” while the National Federation of Builders flagged the obvious overlap with TrustMark, the existing government-endorsed quality scheme, with no indication yet of whether the two will merge, run in parallel, or leave traders juggling two logos.
This is the story of the day that sits most squarely in my own work. I see the aftermath of cowboy building work routinely in condition surveys — the non-compliant loft conversion, the render hiding damp behind it, the extension nobody checked against Building Regs — and a voluntary code changes nothing for the operator who caused it, because that operator was never going to sign up. What it does give a homeowner is a genuine way to vet a trader in advance, and a payment discipline worth insisting on regardless of whether the trader has heard of Trusted Payments: never release the bulk of a payment before a stage of work is actually complete and, ideally, inspected.
Land Registry has finally given Price Paid Data a property ID it can be trusted to match
From 28 August, HM Land Registry is publishing Unique Property Reference Numbers and INSPIRE IDs in lookup tables alongside its monthly Price Paid Data release, the organisation announced on 26 August. Price Paid Data has always recorded a sale price against an address string; it has never carried a stable identifier that lets you reliably join that sale to any other property dataset without manual address-matching, which flats and subdivided properties in particular make a genuinely error-prone job. Lynne Nicholson, HM Land Registry’s deputy director for data, framed it as part of a “strategic plan to unlock the value of our data,” while GeoPlace managing director Nick Chapallaz called the UPRN a way of ensuring “different organisations are working with the same property.”
This will not make headlines and it should not need to: it is plumbing, not policy. But it is the kind of plumbing that changes how I do desk-based due diligence before a survey or a comparable-evidence exercise — cross-referencing a sale price against the EPC register, planning history or flood-risk data for the same address has always meant trusting that two different organisations described the same property the same way. A shared key removes that trust exercise entirely.
If you do any comparable-evidence work — valuation, market appraisal, portfolio due diligence — start treating the UPRN as your primary reference when cross-referencing Price Paid Data against other property datasets, rather than matching on address text. It is a more reliable join and it is available now.
Plug-in solar is legal from this week — and the Renters’ Rights Act doesn’t force your landlord to say yes
SI 2026/848 came into force on 27 August, amending forty-year-old plug safety law to create a new legal category, the “plug-in microgenerator”: a solar panel rated up to 800W AC that connects through a standard 13A socket, generates in parallel with the network, and — critically — cannot store any electricity under this category. Before connecting, the product must appear on the Energy Networks Association’s G98 Type Test Register and the installer must submit a free G98 notification to their Distribution Network Operator; current G98 rules limit a household to one certified system.
For a typical central England installation this generates roughly 580–650 kWh a year, worth in the region of £53–£59 in avoided electricity costs at current unit rates, self-consumption permitting — genuinely modest, and there is no Smart Export Guarantee income because a plug-in system cannot achieve the MCS certification the scheme requires.
The claim I’d push back on hardest is what several solar retailers are currently telling renters: that the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 prevents a landlord from unreasonably refusing consent for a plug-in solar kit. I checked the Act itself. Its unreasonable-refusal duties cover pet requests and disability-related adaptations — nothing in the legislation extends that duty to energy improvements or solar panels of any kind. A tenant still needs ordinary landlord consent under the tenancy agreement, exactly as before this SI existed, and a landlord who says no is not breaching the Act by doing so.
Landlords fielding a plug-in solar request should judge it on the actual proposal — a genuinely portable, socket-connected kit with no drilling or fixings is a very different ask from brackets on an external wall or balcony, which need separate consent regardless — rather than on a legal obligation that does not exist. Homeowners and leaseholders installing one themselves should check the product against the G98 register and file the DNO notification before connecting; both take minutes, and skipping them is the only way to fall foul of this law.
What I’d actually do
- Mid-possession claim or approaching enforcement? Confirm your instructed bailiff firm’s ECB accreditation now, before it becomes a legal requirement.
- Commissioning building or repair work? Look for Approved Code-registered traders once the scheme opens in September, and insist on milestone-based payment regardless — never release most of the money before a stage is complete.
- Doing valuation, comparable-evidence or due-diligence work? Start cross-referencing Price Paid Data by UPRN rather than address text now that Land Registry supports it.
- Landlord asked to approve plug-in solar? You are not compelled by the Renters’ Rights Act — that duty covers pets and disability adaptations, not energy improvements — so judge the actual proposal on its merits.
Today’s notes touch building work gone wrong, valuation due diligence and landlord consent for retrofit measures alike — the practice covers full building surveys and PAS 2035 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 31 August 2026.