Landlords and tenants are not opponents

Thought Leadership by Adam Pigott

Landlords and tenants are not opponents. It is a surprisingly important point to make at a time when the private rented sector is becoming increasingly polarised. Any policy that treats landlords as a risk to manage and tenants as a problem to fix risks misunderstanding how the market actually works.

Tenants need good homes, fair treatment, and greater transparency. Good landlords need a regulatory environment in which they can operate professionally and still make a reasonable return. Those interests are not contradictory. In a functioning rental market, they are dependent on one another.

That is why I think the Government’s new national landlord registration service deserves a more nuanced debate than simply asking whether registration is good or bad.

The service will launch on 15 December 2026, beginning in the West Midlands, before rolling out across England. All landlords actively letting property will eventually be required to register, with the final deadline in November 2027.

The principle of knowing more about the private rented sector is difficult to argue against. The question is what we do with that information — and how much friction we create in collecting it.

This is where Ben Beadle CEO and the National Residential Landlords Association have made a crucial point. NRLA has welcomed the opportunity for better information but warned that the database risks becoming little more than a national directory unless it makes intelligent use of existing data.

That distinction matters

I run one of the UK’s largest tenant platforms, tlyfe so I see the market from the demand side. Ben sees it from the supply side. And yet we keep arriving at a similar conclusion.

If responsible landlords decide that the cost, complexity, and risk of remaining in the private rented sector has become too great, tenants do not benefit from their departure. They have fewer homes to choose from.

And when supply falls, the pressure on rents does not disappear. This is the part of being “cautious” that can easily get missed. Caution does not necessarily mean opposition to better regulation. Sometimes it means asking whether regulation is going to produce the outcome it was designed to achieve.

New Government led national database of Landlords

That is particularly important when technology is involved. The Government is creating a national digital database containing information about landlords and properties. It has the potential to become much more than a register.

The PRS already generates enormous amounts of digital information: property details, ownership information, certificates, licensing records, tenancy information, and compliance data. Much of that information already exists. The opportunity is to connect it.

A good digital system should allow information to be entered once, verified, and then reused where appropriate. A bad one creates another portal, another login, another form, and another administrative task. For a landlord with one property, the difference may appear relatively small.

For an agent managing hundreds or thousands of properties, repeated compliance processes can quickly become a significant operational cost. And those costs do not exist in isolation. Eventually, they feed into the economics of providing rental property.

This is why I do not think the debate should be framed as landlords versus tenants. The better question is whether we can build a private rented sector in which good landlords find it easier to comply and tenants find it easier to understand what they are renting.

Technology should make that possible. The new database could potentially become a common digital layer for the PRS, connecting landlords, agents, councils, and tenants to reliable information. It could help councils identify properties requiring attention.

It could allow responsible landlords to demonstrate compliance more easily. It could reduce duplication between national and local schemes. And, ultimately, it could give tenants greater confidence in the property they are choosing. But that requires the database to be designed as infrastructure rather than simply as a register.

The Government should therefore listen carefully to the concerns being raised by the industry. Not because every objection to regulation is justified. But because the people operating within the system understand where administrative friction occurs — and because tenants ultimately experience the consequences of how that system works.

The best regulation is not necessarily the regulation with the most requirements. It is regulation that achieves its objective with the least unnecessary friction. Landlords and tenants do not need to be placed on opposite sides of the argument. The truth is they need the same thing.

A private rented sector with enough good homes, better information, effective compliance, and sensible use of technology.

That should be the test of the new database. Not simply whether Government can build it. But whether it makes the private rented sector work better for the people who provide the homes and the people who live in them.’

Adam Pigott (Pictured above) is CEO of tlyfe the tenancy lifecycle app, which has the following benefits for tenants (and landlords).