In a criminal case currently (June 2022) being heard before Canterbury Crown Court a Thanet based letting agency and its staff are accused of an orchestrated campaign of violence and vandalism directed at tenants. The behaviour of the accused allegedly includes arranging for a gang to douse a tenant in petrol and beat him up, smashing tenants’ toilets, arranging for tenants’ flats to be burgled and cutting power to tenants’ homes.

If the accused in the above case are found guilty then these will be, perhaps, some of the most egregious housing offences that have been publicised for some time - for those with long memories - more reminiscent of 1960s Notting Hill and the behaviour of the notorious Peter Rackman towards tenants than the sort of behaviour that could be practised in the private rented sector (PRS) in England in 2022. And yet …. anyone who thinks poor practice in the PRS is largely a thing of the past would do well to not only read housing journalist Vicky Spatt’s excellent book Tenants but could also spend 5 enlightening minutes putting the right combination of keywords into their search engine of choice where even the Salvation Army (as a landlord) emerged with their armour less than shining earlier this year.

Exploitation is a word worth remembering when questioning whether the PRS is over regulated. The word goes beyond the recent “sex for rent” scandals reported in the press recently, it goes beyond the vagaries of the social media matching system whereby sinister and sleazy offers of UK accommodation were made to young women fleeing the war in Ukraine. It goes to the behaviour of the landlords and agents named on local authority news pages after a successful prosecution - the landlords who don’t register their HMOs, who ignore planning rules or licence conditions by packing tenants into accommodation that is too small. It goes to the landlords and agents that, knowingly or negligently, don’t bother to install smoke alarms or fire doors.

These bad actors, the heirs to Peter Rackman, continue his, very public, legacy of damaging the reputation of the private rented sector. The only way for that reputation to improve - despite good landlords way outnumbering the bad - is by changing the perception of the consumers and potential consumers of the service provided by the PRS. Good regulation and more robust enforcement of that regulation is and always has been the only way to root out exploitation and bad practice in the private rented sector. Any successful industry needs to build trust with its customer base and private landlords need to be more proactive, as a sector, in that process - a process that the professional letting agent community has grasped (through training, education and increasing digitalisation) but regulation will always be the backstop where public and consumer protection is concerned.