The Renters’ Rights Act came into force last Friday (1st May) in England. Thirty-eight years after the Housing Act 1988, the no-fault eviction era is over. What happens next depends entirely on which direction the sector chooses to face.
The private rented sector in England has operated within a legislative framework rooted in the Housing Act 1988 for the best part of four decades. The assured shorthold tenancy, section 21, the basic architecture of how residential lettings work: all of it traces back to legislation that was already a generation old before most of the people now working in this industry started their careers. On Friday the no-fault eviction framework that defined it ended. The Housing Act 1988 remains substantially amended, but the assured short hold tenancy regime and section 21 that shaped an entire generation of lettings practice are gone. What replaces them is not an adjustment or a refinement. It is a structural reset, and the sector would do well to treat it as one.
Now, the first major phase of the Renters’ Rights Act is in force. Assuring private tenancies in England move into a periodic-tenancy regime, rent increases are limited and subject to challenge, tenants have stronger rights around pets, and restrictions on rental bidding and rent in advance are now in place. Further elements, including the PRS Database and the new Landlord Ombudsman, follow in later phases.
A lot has been written about all of this, and most of it has concentrated on the headline changes. What has received rather less attention is what those changes mean at the operational level: for the agents managing tenancies day to day, the landlords whose properties they manage, and the clerks, inspectors, referencing firms, maintenance contractors and compliance providers who make the whole thing work in practice.
That is the part I want to address. Because the risk I see is that the sector is treating Friday 1st May as an arrival point rather than a starting gun.
The comparison that matters
The Tenant Fees Act is the legislation this one gets compared to most often. It was significant. It changed what agents could charge, created compliance obligations, required genuine process adjustment. The sector absorbed it, adapted, and moved on.
There is a version of the RRA conversation that assumes the same thing will happen here. A set of rule changes to note, templates to update, staff briefings to tick off the list. I understand why that framing is tempting. It makes the task feel manageable.
But I think it is the wrong frame, and the reason it is wrong is not really about the headline changes. It is about what the headline changes remove.
Section 21 was a backstop. Not a good one, and I am not arguing it should be mourned. But functionally, it absorbed a lot of process drift that would otherwise have had sharper consequences. An agent on the wrong side of a messy situation had an exit route, provided compliance had been maintained. That exit has gone. What replaces it is a framework in which every significant decision, pursuing possession, justifying a rent increase, responding to a maintenance complaint, requires evidence. Not just evidence that exists somewhere. Evidence that is coherent, connected, and capable of holding up when it is tested.
That is a different operating environment. Not a harder version of the same one.
Where the blind spot is
Most letting agencies carry two core evidential documents: a check-in report and a check-out report. Those documents were never really sufficient. They were always a snapshot at either end of a tenancy with a largely undocumented gap in the middle. But under the old framework, that gap was manageable. Under this one, it is where the exposure sits.
A future redress complaint may concern something that happened eight months into a tenancy. A rent increase challenged at tribunal needs comparable market data to support it, not an approximate sense of what the market was doing. A section 8 possession claim on arrears grounds needs a documented timeline, not a memory of events. A fitness for human habitation issue requires evidence not just of the condition, but of when it was identified, what was communicated, and what action followed.
None of that can be reconstructed from a check-in and a check-out. It requires something continuous: a connected evidential record running from the point a property enters an agent’s portfolio to the point it leaves it. What I have been calling the golden thread of lettings. Five stages. One unbroken record.
It begins with an HHSRS assessment at point of instruction, establishing which hazards are present before a tenant moves in and creating a baseline that distinguishes pre-existing conditions from those arising during the tenancy. The inventory and check-in follows, produced against that baseline rather than as a standalone document. Then interim inspections, documented, consistent and timestamped, that keep the record intact between start and finish rather than leaving a gap that nobody can later account for. Fitness for Human Habitation assessments during the tenancy connect present condition back to that original baseline. And check-out, which in this model is not an ending: it closes one tenancy and carries the record forward into the next.
This is not a new idea I have put together for the occasion. It is a framework I have been developing and writing about for some time, precisely because the direction of travel has been clear. The RRA has not created the need for it. It has removed the mechanism that used to make the absence of it survivable.
The layer nobody is talking about
There is a reason I started working with Inventory Base, created InventoryBase Academy, and have spent the years since trying to raise the standard of practice across this sector. It is not complicated. I believe the private rented sector genuinely works only when every part of it is functioning well. Not just for the landlords. Not just for the tenants. The agents, the inventory clerks, the referencing firms, the compliance providers, the maintenance contractors, the software vendors, the training bodies. All of it.
We are all stakeholders in the same journey. A tenant needs a home that is safe, well managed and fairly priced. A landlord needs their investment protected and their legal obligations met. The agent makes that relationship function, absorbing the complexity, the compliance and the difficult conversations that sit between those two positions. And behind the agent sits an entire layer of professionals whose contribution nobody thinks about until it is absent and whose work nobody scrutinises until something goes wrong. That invisibility is precisely why they matter.
That is not a political position. It is just an accurate description of how this sector functions. And it is why legislation that raises the professional floor matters to me, not as a compliance burden, but as an opportunity. An opportunity for the whole ecosystem to operate at a standard that actually serves everyone in it, not just the parts of it that have the loudest voice in the room. The conversation about the RRA concentrates, understandably, on landlords and tenants. What goes largely unexamined is what it means for the layer in between and the ecosystem behind that layer.
The letting and managing agent sits between landlord and tenant. Behind that agent is an entire professional infrastructure: inventory clerks, referencing firms, deposit schemes, compliance providers, maintenance contractors, software vendors, training bodies. These are the people at the operational layer where legislation becomes practice. They are also the people who tend to be absent from the policy conversation until the consequences of getting it wrong start to surface.
I raised this recently in the context of reports that the Chancellor was considering a temporary rent freeze, a story that has moved quickly – the Housing Minister has since said the Government is not looking at rent controls. Whatever the eventual policy position, the underlying point stands: when income is compressed and costs continue to rise, discretionary spend contracts first, and that discretionary spend is precisely the activity that keeps the evidential record intact.
The RRA, and the HHSRS review which has had its draft statutory guidance presented to Parliament and proposes new Baseline Indicators and simplified banding, with the current framework remaining in force until formally adopted, both assume a professional services base capable of continued investment in tooling, training and infrastructure. That assumption is reasonable. But it only holds if the people at that operational layer understand what is actually being asked of them.
Inventory clerks are in a position of particular consequence right now. An independently produced, detailed, defensible report carries evidential weight that no internally generated document can match. The check-in report produced at the start of a periodic tenancy may need to serve as the evidential baseline not for six months but for years. Its detail, its photography, its independence: these are not procedural formalities. They are the foundation on which everything that follows rests.
I have written separately about the key release question, who hands keys over, on whose authority, and what the clerk’s position is when the agent’s process has not been tightened upstream. That is a very specific operational gap. But it is symptomatic of something broader: a sector that has not yet fully reckoned with what operating without section 21 actually requires, day to day, at the operational level.
What needs to happen now
For letting agents: the question is not whether you are technically compliant with the RRA. It is whether your evidential infrastructure is adequate for the environment you are now in. If you cannot show a continuous, connected record from instruction to check-out, one that would hold up at tribunal or in a future redress process, then understanding that gap now is considerably better than discovering it when a complaint arrives.
For landlords: your agent’s record keeping is your first line of defence. Not just on property condition, but on rent increases, on possession, on maintenance. It is worth asking specifically what their evidential process looks like from point of instruction onwards, and expecting a specific answer.
For inventory professionals: what you do has become more consequential, not less, and it is worth being clear about what that means in practice. The check-in report you produce at the start of a periodic tenancy may serve as the evidential baseline for years, not months. Its detail, its photography, its independence are not procedural formalities. They are the foundation on which disputes will be resolved long after you have moved on to the next job. You cannot control whether the agent upstream has built the right process. You can control the standard of what you produce, and the rigour with which you document your instruction and authority at every stage. In a sector that is finally being asked to operate at a higher evidential standard, that is not a small thing. It is, increasingly, the thing.
The Renters’ Rights Act is not the end of the private rented sector. I have no time for the catastrophising on either side of this debate, not the suggestion that landlords will all exit overnight, and not the idea that the legislation resolves the structural problems in housing at a stroke. What it does is raise the professional floor for everyone operating in this sector in England. It makes the gap between agencies that operate carefully and those that do not considerably more consequential than it was.
The sector has the capacity to meet that. The question the title of this piece asks is not rhetorical. Every agent, every landlord, every professional in this ecosystem will answer it through what they do next. Looking back is comfortable. Moving forward requires something more.
This is the moment to decide which one you choose and your next steps.