Some of the immediate reactions, from the private rented sector at least, to the release of the recent rental reform white paper have certainly been a little mixed. To be fair though, that’s always the case with below the line commentary, whatever the name on a publication’s masthead. A respondent in one btl thread suggested (or seemed to be suggesting) that the rental reform proposals were effectively part of a creeping Government takeover of the private rented sector and that the Government was “dictating” to landlords how they should rent their properties.

This is worrying because, even if landlords who think in those particular terms are a tiny, tiny minority it still evidences a fundamental misunderstanding of the reform proposals and an almost wilful blindness towards the bigger picture.

Some people have got lost in the long grass of the proposals on pets or people with children or people who are in receipt of some form of benefit - and this is before the legislation has even been put into draft form never mind been debated (and lobbied on) and amended (probably) in both the Commons and the Lords before being enacted. And in any case, the proposals are simply that landlords will not be able to blanket discriminate against whole classes of potential tenants. That’s not so bad - is it? After all, it’s not as if the proposal is that tenants in those classes shouldn’t be bound by the terms of their contract.

A starting point for all concerned with the successful reform of the private rented sector could be the speech of Michael Gove, Secretary of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, given to the Local Government Association’s conference earlier this week. Irrespective of one’s support or enthusiasm (or lack thereof) for a particular politician, political party or government policy it is always, taking into account the seniority of said politician, worth examining such speeches to get a view of the bigger picture.

In his speech, Mr Gove was fairly solicitous of local government and was very thankful for all the hard work put in during the pandemic but he was in no doubt that difficult times were ahead for everyone due to the cost of living crisis and what he called “the percussive” effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Despite these challenges “levelling up” (however you interpret that phrase) remains at the core of national policy and rental reform has its own core place within the levelling up strategy. Putting all the other policy strands to one side there is clearly an understanding of the huge size of the housing issue in England and clearly local authorities will now be expected to be transparently accountable for their performance, good or bad, as compared with each other. This means that housing enforcement teams will need to be properly recording the number of complaints they open, resolve (informally or via fines and prosecutions) and close. Local authority performance tables will likely be made public and new selective licensing schemes will involve more than just taking the fee and issuing a piece of paper.

The job of the local authority in relation to private sector housing will, at the end of the day, be to improve the housing stock within their area. They may look at new ways of doing things (such as proactively supporting the training of landlords) but the parameters set (not dictats from on high) by legislation are to make the market work better for everyone - tenants and landlords both. Those who decide they don’t want to get with the programme are likely to get left behind with a new generation of investor professional landlords entering the market as the old cohort depart. The really good landlords will survive the changes and the challenges ahead… and they can, like any citizen, always lobby their elected representatives about how to improve proposed legislation.