Landlord registers: success as Government announce Property Portal

We are delighted to see the Government publish the White Paper ‘A fairer private rented sector’ today, which includes the announcement that there will be a national Property Portal - a compulsory register of landlords. 

We made the case for a national landlord register in our ‘A national landlord register for England - how to make it work’ paper in October 2021, building on work by Generation Rent, Shelter and many others. 

Landlord registers already exist in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - only England lacks one. 

Registers are crucial infrastructure for keeping tenants safe, and helping local authorities crack down on rogue landlords.

They will also give us all much better data about the opaque rental market - great news for researchers, campaigners and companies.

And if implemented well, as our paper makes clear, they don’t add extra work for law-abiding landlords.

The White Paper says the next step will be to test potential solutions for the portal, so we’ll be following up to make sure the published data is useful, safe and usable.

But for now, congratulations to everyone who helped make this happen - a big step forward!