Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Grand Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government committed to reforming a private rented sector that has too often left renters facing insecurity and unfairness. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 delivers that commitment, and the regulations before the Committee are an important step in implementing it.

This phase of reform includes the private rented sector database, which will begin to be rolled out regionally from 15 December 2026. The service will be publicly known as the Register Your Rental Property Service, but I will refer to it as “the database” for the purposes of this debate. The database will record information about private landlords and privately let properties in England. It will help landlords to understand their obligations, give tenants better information before entering into a tenancy and support local authorities in enforcement. The regulations before us are essential to enable the rollout of the database; they set out the registration framework for the database.

Primary legislation establishes the purpose of what the database is intended to do. These regulations provide the practical framework needed for registration: who can make entries, what information must be provided and how the database can be kept accurate over time and up to date. A landlord entry will contain information about the landlord, including their name and contact information. Where the landlord is not an individual, it will include information about the organisation and its management. Joint landlords will each need their own landlord entry, while sharing the dwelling entry for the property.

A dwelling entry will contain information about the rental property, including its address, ownership, property type, rent level and relevant management details. Once occupied, it will also include tenancy and health and safety information, including uploaded certificates and information relating to gas, electrical and energy performance.

The regulations also allow entries to be made or updated by others in specified circumstances. This primarily concerns letting agents, as well as, for example, those acting under a power of attorney, a deceased landlord’s estate or a mortgage company in repossession cases. Landlords may delegate the supply of certain information to an agent or property manager, reducing administrative burden. They will, however, remain legally responsible for registration, payment, renewal and compliance.

Entries will need to be kept up to date. Recorded information will be treated as out of date where the details no longer reflect the landlord, property, tenancy or relevant compliance position, and generally must be updated within 28 days. The database operator will be able to correct errors and remove entries that do not meet the requirements for inclusion. Further operational detail, including on verification of entries by local authorities, will be addressed through guidance.

The regulations require a fee to be paid to make or renew a dwelling entry. The fee is not set in this instrument but delegates the setting of the fee to the database operator, who is required to set it by reference to the relevant costs as specified in the Act. We have separately announced the fee as £65 per property per year, on a pro rata basis during initial rollout, to ensure that those registering first do not unfairly have to pay more.

Subject to parliamentary approval, these regulations put into motion the regional rollout that will begin on 15 December 2026. Landlords in each region will then have three months to register, in turn, with all relevant entries required to be made by 14 November 2027.

This is the first of two statutory instruments needed to implement this database. The second, to be commenced as soon as possible following completion of the initial rollout, will cover the public-facing side of the database, the addition of specified breaches and offences committed by landlords, and further data sharing. This will concern what information is made visible to the public and wider data-sharing arrangements. Those matters are therefore not in scope of this legislation.

To conclude, these regulations provide the operational framework needed to begin rolling out the PRS database and to make the registration duties in the Act take practical effect. They are the next necessary step towards a more transparent and enforceable system, supporting compliance while giving tenants better information about the homes they rent. I beg to move that the Committee do now consider the Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I suppose we should be used by now to a Government who say one thing and do another, expecting everybody else to play by one set of rules while they do something else. This week, in a move that surprised nobody, we learned that the annual costs of the football regulator were to be twice what the impact assessment suggested, and that there was a £45 million set-up charge to boot. In the same vein, here we are with this licensing database for rental properties. I declare an interest: I am the director of a firm that lets rental properties and I own a rental property in Norwich, in my own name, as appears on the register.

Nothing in what I want to say diminishes from the positive outcome that regulators and tenants should have confidence in landlords and their properties to weed out the rogues. But, when we debated the Renters’ Rights Bill, we took the impact assessment at face value and assumed that it would reflect reality. It was said that, once it was enacted, landlords would pay a modest fee of about £30 every three years to register their properties under the regulations. As we have just heard from the noble Baroness, these regulations contemplate a £65 charge per property every year. That is a material change. Why is there this 900% increase from inception to reality and why was there not more candour at the outset? Could it be that it was not thought through?

We know that the Government are trying to purge the accidental landlord from the system by regulating him out of existence. This of course reduces choice, reduces supply and drives up rents. We are seeing the near extinction of student accommodation, meaning that students are herded into ever more expensive, specialised service accommodation at ruinous cost. Elsewhere, those with the weakest covenant strength have been put to the back of the queue, and everyone is paying more for less, along with the 190,000 fewer homes that the OBR has assumed will be built in this Parliament.

So we are moving to a system where only the largest professional landlords have the scale, expertise and finance to operate rental properties in the market. We know that Grainger, the institutional landlord, has well in excess of 10,000 properties for rent. Lloyds Bank is chasing a number, alongside some pension funds. While not all landlords operate at that scale, a number of large national agents—Chestertons, Hamptons and Foxtons—sit alongside regional and smaller players that manage many hundreds of thousands of properties on behalf of the smaller-fry landlord.

They were promised a bulk upload system to streamline populating the national database, but that is not how it is turned out. Each property must be added one at a time, and paid for with a separate credit card transaction to boot. Although the Government assumed that it would take about 10 minutes per property, the professionals have still not completed an entry in less than 20 minutes. For the largest landlords or the most popular agents, it will take 200 working days—a whole working year, Monday to Friday, without a break, not a moment—just to register their hold. That is before each landlord has confirmed his agent’s draft entry and the rigmarole is repeated. That 28-day extension deadline is a nonsense that invites people to write their own offence, because they just cannot get it done for want of a system that was promised to do bulk uploads. We have seen the Government cobble together a system used by software remnants from other departments, having totally forgotten the specification, as well as the principles of software design, data and security.

There is to be no concept of a validated Government Gateway login to securely authenticate an entry to a real personal business registering a property. The way in which the agent may communicate with the landlord one at a time is by web permalink relating to an individual property, presumably emailed between the parties—a link that never changes from one year to the next. That process breaks every cyber security rule. It is the sort of behaviour by shady operators that we debated on Monday in the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill. That legislation is meant to prevent this sort of practice. This invites cyber criminals to hijack a critical system related to our fundamental national property rights. Can the Minister say which of the cyber experts at DCMS, or any of the other 17 cyber regulators, has certified this obvious non-compliance in an age of AI warfare? Only this Government could press legislation regarding everybody else to follow secure and encrypted data protocols while introducing a system, within a month, that does the opposite. I am surprised there has not been a legal challenge—perhaps there should be.

If that was not bad enough, there is a further aggravation. Some local authorities have decided to introduce selective licensing. Landlords face the prospect of entering the same data twice into two wholly incompatible and separate systems in a further insult to efficiency. I ask the Minister: on inception, why can the appropriate housing standards officers in local authorities not be trusted to access the national database to further their duties? The national scheme should be the death knell for the small schemes. As she knows, some in this sector have considered mining the data from their existing IT systems, formatting it appropriately and sending the printouts to the department in pursuance of their duties. The only person I am going to feel sorry for is the postman carrying those hundreds of thousands of forms into Marsham Street—at least once a year, with repeat visits for gas safety, electrical installation and other regulatory certificates on top of every single tenant change. The Minister might like to reflect on whether she has enough staff in the department to process all these letters, while pretending that a system that is insecure and incomplete, and that creates an extra huge administrative burden and reuses credentials over inherently insecure communication protocols, is good enough.

Put simply, the Government are foisting an unready system with four weeks to go that is simply not ready, documented or to specification. Why are the Government pressing ahead when all the dashboard lights are flashing red? Only a delay at this stage will do to maintain that long-term confidence in, and the integrity of, the database, which has worthy long-term objectives. I invite the Minister to withdraw this regulation and represent it on a later occasion when she can demonstrate that the system is compliant and meets the obligations and promises set out in the Bill. Otherwise, it will be dead on arrival.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as my wife owns rented property. I also note that I have been active for several years promoting the regulation of property agents. I am delighted that the Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook last month announced legislation in the forthcoming parliamentary Session to introduce a regulator of property agents with requirements for licensing, qualifications and adherence to codes of practice.

On the PRS database regulations before us, I welcome the introduction of the database, but the Minister will know that there has been much concern, not least from letting agents who manage privately rented accommodation on behalf of landlords. It seems that there are a large number of outstanding issues around the smooth running of the database, many of which were adumbrated by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller. Some of these matters are of a technical, detailed nature, requiring more debate between the sector and the MHCLG.

I want to pick up on a relatively straightforward point. Agents and representatives of landlords are worried that the onus being placed on the individual landlord to start and end the registration process for the database, and to fill in the necessary forms within the required timescales, will create significant problems. This is a function which agents would expect to take on if the landlord asked them to do so on their behalf, just as they do for all other aspects of managing the property and just as an accountant would handle the tax affairs of a client on their behalf. Indeed, I understand the Government’s own impact assessment assumed that letting agents would be able to register on behalf of landlords, which seems entirely sensible.

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The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, mentioned the Grainger input that we received. We have sent a detailed response to Grainger. Our point back to it was that dwelling-level registration is essential for key aims of the service. The core information required for local authority enforcement, as well as for tenants and other public bodies, is at a dwelling level, rather than at a block level. I have listened to all the arguments put forward but, for organisational landlords, this is a digital system. It is not hard to cut and paste data between different systems—we all do that.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

Perhaps the Minister might allow me to intervene briefly. I do not speak for Grainger, but I have spoken to a large number of institutional landlords, and they have no objection to providing information one property at a time. They understand the point the Minister is making. It is just that they want to bulk upload them all at once so that they can upload a large number in one go and, just as importantly, pay for them in one transaction. That is the point these institutional people are making. We are talking at cross purposes. We understand what the Minister is saying; it is just that the software is not delivering on that simple outcome.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am happy to take back that feedback. The point about paying in one go is fair. It was my understanding that that could happen, but I will take that back and respond to the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, in writing, if that is okay.

The noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Jamieson, raised the security of the database. That is important. We are all concerned about cyber security. The database has been developed with security and privacy at its core, using established government and cyber security standards. The department is assessing the database against the National Cyber Security Centre’s cyber assessment framework, and the database will also be subject to penetration testing to identify and address vulnerabilities before and during operation. We are working with the department’s data protection officer on the necessary data protection work, including an impact assessment, data-sharing arrangements and privacy arrangements for landlords, local councils and agent users. The database will also use monitoring tools to help identify potential vulnerabilities and support ongoing security assurance.

The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, talked about the potential duplication with selective licensing. The database will not duplicate or replace selective licences, because the two systems have entirely different purposes. The national database will provide consistent information about private landlords and rental properties across England, supporting transparency, compliance and local authority enforcement.

Selective licensing remains a targeted local tool used by councils to address specific local issues through more intensive proactive enforcement—for example, anti-social behaviour and those types of issues. We recognise the important role that licensing can continue to play where it is used appropriately, and we will continue to review how licensing and the national service interact as implementation progresses. Organisational landlords will use the GOV.UK One Login service to log in and authenticate. This is a service widely used across government and is built in accordance with government technology standards.

The noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Howard and Lord Jamieson, all asked why letting agents cannot register on behalf of landlords. One of the key goals of the database is to improve landlord awareness and capability, and requiring landlords to initiate registration directly supports that by ensuring that they engage with their legal responsibilities from the outset. Letting and property agents will still be able to support landlords by providing certain information once the landlord has started the registration process. Where an agent agrees, the landlord will be able to delegate the provision of specific tenancy health and safety information to them.

Responsibility for ensuring that the registration requirements are met will remain with the landlord throughout. Letting and property agents will not have a mandatory role in registration and will not be separately registered through this database. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Best, for his response on the regulation of property agents and I will feed that back to my right honourable colleague in the other House.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, asked about what data will be published. This instrument does not decide what information will be published; the public-facing database will be brought forward through secondary legislation once the initial rollout period is complete. At that point, tenants will be able to access necessary and proportionate information about landlords and rental properties, including some of the issues that the noble Baroness referred to about landlord enforcement actions that have been taken. We will carefully balance the benefits of transparency with landlords’ privacy rights, safety concerns and data protection requirements.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, also asked how to identify landlords who do not register. When the public-facing database is available, tenants and others will be able to tell the database that their rental property is not registered, as they will be able to check. That can be passed on to the local housing authority.

To conclude, this instrument is the practical next step in delivering the PRS database. It sets the registration framework that landlords, local authorities and the database operator will need as regional rollout begins. By doing so, these regulations will support landlord compliance, strengthen local authority enforcement and give tenants better information about the homes they rent. I beg to move.