The Renters’ Rights Act was supposed to be the moment things finally changed. No-fault evictions abolished. Rent increases brought under control. A fairer deal for the millions of people who rent privately in Britain. That was the pitch, anyway. In practice, speaking to renters up and down the country in 2026, the picture looks considerably less rosy. Rents are still climbing. Landlords are still leaving. And the enforcement mechanisms that were meant to make the legislation mean something? Largely non-existent. The private rental sector UK-wide is, by most honest measures, still broken.
I’ve been following this story for a while now, and what strikes me most is the gap between political announcement and lived reality. The government passed the legislation. Ministers gave speeches. Housing charities cautiously welcomed the bill. And then, on the ground, almost nothing changed for the people it was meant to help.
What the Renters’ Rights Act actually promises
For those who missed the detail, the Renters’ Rights Act, which cleared Parliament in early 2025, abolished Section 21 no-fault evictions in England, meaning landlords can no longer ask tenants to leave simply because they want the property back or fancy a different tenant. It also introduced a requirement that rent increases happen no more than once per year, and gave tenants the right to challenge increases they consider excessive at a tribunal. There’s also new protection against letting agents and landlords refusing to consider tenants with pets, or those on housing benefit.
On paper, it reads like genuine reform. The problem is that legislation without enforcement is just words on paper, and right now enforcement is almost entirely down to local councils, most of which have neither the budget nor the staff to pursue rogue landlords. Shelter has repeatedly pointed out that council housing enforcement teams have been gutted by over a decade of austerity cuts, and that dynamic has not reversed.
Why rents are still going up
The average monthly rent for a new tenancy in England hit £1,341 in early 2026, according to ONS figures, up from around £1,190 two years ago. In London the figures are even more alarming, with one-bed flats in zones two and three regularly listing above £2,000 per month. The Renters’ Rights Act does not cap rents at the point of a new tenancy, only the frequency of increases for existing tenants. So when a landlord finds a new tenant, they can set whatever figure they like. The market, not the law, determines where that number lands.
And the market is not helping. The supply of rental homes has been shrinking steadily since 2022. According to Rightmove data, the number of available rental listings in major UK cities is down roughly 35 per cent compared to five years ago. That’s not an accident. Landlords have been leaving the private rental sector UK-wide in significant numbers, spooked by the combination of higher mortgage rates, the abolition of mortgage interest tax relief under Section 24, the new electrical and energy performance requirements, and now the Renters’ Rights Act itself. When supply falls and demand stays flat or rises, rents go up. Simple economics, deeply uncomfortable consequences.
The landlord exodus and what it means for tenants
Here’s the uncomfortable paradox at the heart of this whole debate. The legislation designed to protect renters is, in part, accelerating the exit of smaller landlords from the market, which reduces supply, which pushes rents higher, which makes things worse for renters. I’m not saying the legislation is wrong, but I am saying the government appears to have introduced it without a coherent plan for what happens to supply when the economics of being a small landlord become increasingly punishing.
Many of the landlords leaving the market are what you might call accidental or reluctant landlords: people who inherited a property, or who moved in with a partner and kept a flat rather than sell during the pandemic. They’re not property empires. They’re single properties, and when they go, they often become owner-occupied homes rather than rentals, shrinking the pool further. Meanwhile, institutional landlords and private equity firms are quietly buying up entire streets, often replacing the departing small landlords at scale. The shift from amateur to corporate landlord brings its own problems.
Tenants also need to be aware of the practical headaches of renting: from understanding what their landlord is actually responsible for (things like TV Aerials, boilers, and structural repairs) to knowing their rights around rent increases and deposit disputes. A lot of people simply don’t know what protections they have, and that ignorance gets exploited.
Section 21 is gone, but evictions haven’t stopped
Abolishing Section 21 was the centrepiece of the reform. It’s gone. But landlords still have grounds to evict tenants under Section 8, and those grounds have been quietly expanded. Landlords can now cite wanting to sell the property, wanting to move a family member in, or persistent rent arrears. Critics, including Generation Rent and the National Residential Landlords Association from very different angles, argue that Section 8 evictions have effectively replaced Section 21 as the mechanism of choice, and that tenants are finding it just as hard to fight them.
The tribunal system, where tenants are supposed to challenge both evictions and rent increases, is already showing strain. Wait times for tribunal hearings have stretched to several months in some regions. For a tenant on a low income who’s already been served notice, waiting six months for a tribunal date while trying to find alternative housing is not a realistic option. The system assumes a level of stability and financial resilience that many renters simply don’t have.
Who’s actually being left behind
The renters struggling hardest are not the young professionals in Manchester city centre who can absorb a rent rise with some discomfort. They’re the families in coastal towns, the single parents in ex-industrial areas, the people on housing benefit who are already struggling to find anyone willing to rent to them. This connects directly to the wider picture of benefit cuts and poverty that’s been reshaping life at the bottom of Britain’s income distribution. When housing benefit rates don’t keep pace with local rents, and when landlords leave the market or refuse benefit tenants, those people have nowhere to go.
Local Housing Allowance rates, frozen for years and only partially updated, still fall short of actual market rents in most areas. The government has acknowledged this. It has not fixed it.
What would actually help
My reading of this situation is that the Renters’ Rights Act was necessary but insufficient. Ending no-fault evictions was the right call. But you cannot fix a broken private rental sector with tenant protections alone if the underlying supply problem goes unaddressed. That means building more social housing at genuine scale, not the thin trickle of affordable units that developers bolt onto new developments to satisfy planning conditions. It means rethinking the tax treatment of small landlords in a way that doesn’t simply hand the market to institutional investors. And it means properly funding local councils to actually enforce the rules that already exist.
Until those things happen, the Renters’ Rights Act will remain what it is right now: a genuine improvement in the legal framework that has made almost no difference to the daily reality of millions of people renting in Britain. The legislation changed. The market didn’t. That’s the rental trap, and right now there’s no obvious way out of it.
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