Two-thirds of English councils have not prosecuted a single landlord in past three years
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/nov/16/two-thirds-of-english-councils-have-not-prosecuted-a-single-landlord-in-past-three-years
Posted by Only-Emu-9531
7 Comments
This is why all the new legislation is more or less redundant. Landlords and agencies that have been doing what they’re supposed to will just have more paperwork to do and more hoops to jump through. The rogue landlords who have always flouted the rules will just continue to do so without any form of comeuppance
It’s the god-given right of people who have more money, including a lot of boomers who were mostly just born at the right time, to extract money from working people via their poorly maintained houses. It’s freedom. Deal with it.
Councils have a lot on their plates and presumably this would cost money and resources that they don’t have
This is fairly meaningless without clarity on what is a prosecutable offence and how many landlords are meeting that standard. I’d guess it’s quite difficult to be so shit as a landlord that it’s a prosecutable offense.
Is it not a case of them threatening prosecution and the landlords then fixing the issue?
The whole sector lacks any kind of enforcement whatsoever. Bad landlords ruin the lives of their tenants and face no penalties whatsoever. But if ypu look at any landlord forum, you’ll see that nightmare tenants don’t face proper consequences either. Private sector renting is just a complete shitshow.
Weird headline. The default position should be prosecuting none as nobody does wrong. I lack context to know if this is above or below the baseline for wrongdoing.