In our 17th June article on rental reform we wondered whether the then legislative timetable would be too short to get reform formalised into an act of parliament (scheduled for March 2023) given the domestic and global headwinds the Prime Minister's then administration would be dealing with. Well, as it turns out - if a week is (used to be) a long time in politics then 3 weeks is an aeon and the NRLA seems to agree.

Referencing the current chaos in Govt they ask "what next for rental reform?" and point out that, in DLUHC who are responsible for both levelling up and rental reform (amongst many other things), we have now had 12 housing ministers in 10 years since new minister Marcus Jones MP was appointed following the resignation of Stuart Andrew MP (who had himself been in post for only 5 months after replacing the now somewhat infamous Chris Pincher MP).

Casting her eye over the ruination left by the record number of ministerial departures the country has just experienced, the NRLA's Sally Walmsley says that "This process inevitably takes time, so we are expecting any date for a bill to be tabled to be pushed back." but added, however that there was an upside to this in that it would give more time to lobby any future Govt [in place by September 5th] to make changes that the NRLA believe will be critical to the success of any rental reform programme.

One of the changes the NRLA would like to see is the scrapping of selective licensing schemes once a proposed property portal (included in the reform white paper) comes on line. The question for local authorities, landlords and tenants though is whether any such portal will solve the problems currently being dealt with via licensing. As a case in point - Gedling council have recently approved phase 2 of their selective licensing scheme and, in their supporting evidence pointed out that in their phase 1 scheme, 400 properties were inspected and 78% of those contained HHSRS hazards - which obviously weren't made obvious via the documentation that the licensed landlords submitted in the course of their licence applications. The proposed portal will have to be really good to close that gap in expectations.