Once the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 takes effect on the 1st May 2026, private residential landlords in England will have only 1 month to get tenancies correctly documented or face fines of up to £7,000. This means serving existing tenants with a tenant information sheet explaining their new rights under the 2025 Act. These new rights can include lifetime security of tenure, protection against unfair rent increases, the ability to vacate on as little as 2 months prior written notice, and the outlawing of discrimination against tenants who are on welfare or who have children living with them. For landlords who get it wrong, there may be no second chances. Just a financial penalty.
For new tenancies, or those which were previously undocumented, landlords must issue tenants (as well as prospective tenants) with a written statement of terms containing all the information required by the Assured Tenancies (Private Rented Sector) (Written Satement of Terms etc and Information Sheet) (England) Regulations 2026. The content of that written statement of terms must conform exactly to the requirements of the schedule to the 2026 Regulations. That statement can either be standalone or incorporated in a formal tenancy agreement. The Information Sheet to be served on existing tenants must be downloaded as a PDF and must be issued to tenants either as hard copy or by email but exactly in the prescribed format. To help landlords with this, the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government has issued guidance published 20th March 2026 titled, ‘The Renters’s Rights Act Information Sheet 2026: The information sheet about the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 that landlords and their agents must give to tenants’.
Whilst there is no prescribed template for the statement of terms, it is important that particular care is taken to include within these statements of terms any legitimate non-fault grounds of possession to which the tenancy may be subject. Landlords who fail to do this may later have difficulty in recovering possession even when they might otherwise have had legitimate grounds to do so.
The MHCLG Guidance includes the following advice:
the information sheet does not have to be given to lodgers but must be given to every tenant named on the tenancy agreement
the tenant information sheet is only valid when downloaded from the Government website;
the information sheet must be given to tenants either by printing a hard copy and posting or hand delivering to tenants or alternatively sending a PDF electronically as an attachment to an email or text message where it is appropriate to do so. However it is not sufficient just to email or text a link to a tenant;
the legislation does not require landlords to change or reissue an existing written tenancy agreement;
where a tenancy was informally entered into before 1st May 2026 without a written agreement, the landlord must provide a statements of tenancy terms (see above);
Social landlords do not need to provide this information sheet.
It always disappoints me how easily intelligent people can be convinced to surrender ancient liberties to the State.
We saw it several years back in the ‘Simon Says’ world of the Covid lockdowns, when everyone had to jump to every Matt Hancock command.
“Put a mask on your face. Now clap your hands. And stand 6 ft apart. Do it when the Simon says and you will never be out.”
We’re seeing it again with David Lammy’s published proposals for the scrapping of jury trials save for the most serious charges of murder, manslaughter, rape and other public interest cases. But what is more worrying for me, from listening to phone-in programs, is the way people are beginning to buy into it. Not just retired police officers and prosecution barristers, who would be expected to support any proposal which would make their job easier because a prosecution would no longer have to explain it’s case and convince a panel of ordinary people. It also seems to rest on the premise that anyone who steals a mobile phone from a supermarket is already guilty and just playing the system by electing jury trial. The proposals also belittle the damage which any conviction involving dishonesty or violence can have on someone who’s trying to hold down a responsible job or career. It’s something which will stay with you for life.
When mention is made of the fact that more than 90% of criminal cases already start and end in the magistrate court, it must also be remembered that almost all of those cases involve guilty pleas, in which the magistrates’ only role is to assess the seriousness of the offence and an mitigating factors before determining sentence. Remember also that, unlike jurors, magistrates are not picked at random from amongst our communities but are people who put themselves forward for selection. They are not like you and I. It attracts a certain type of person.
One thing which I’ve always regretted is the whittling away of public involvement in our justice system, first in civil cases leading to the last defamation jury trials and now extending to judge only criminal trials. I don’t trust them. Nor should you.
I’ve just managed to renew my solicitor’s practising certificate for 2025/2926. For a non-techno like me, it was so much more difficult just to log on to the SRA website to make the application. In previous years I would just put in my log in details and password and then receive a one-time password, which I would then type in. Bingo! I’d only need another 10 minutes to complete the online application, make the payment, and my practising certificate would be on its way. Not this year.
Faced with the dreaded QR code, I spent many hours trying to suss out my cell phone to generate the six digits which would get me into the website. Up to then, my phone’s primary use had been – well – phoning! And perhaps the occasional text message. Whatsapp? Forget it! I watched the ‘ how to log on’ video on the SRA website. Then struggled again.
It’s pure luck that at the end of my road there is a small computer shop where I was able to get help to navigate through the technical barriers and complete my application. Well worth the £20 I paid the guy for his trouble. But it means that I won’t have to worry about that for another year.
As someone who has spent more than 30 years of a legal career working with local authority in-house teams, the statistics contained in this report ring true for me. But behind every statistic, there is a story, which I now attempt to explain from my own experience and discussions with others.
It is not about being cheap and cheerful.
Providing ‘more for less’ requires an understanding of what a corporate client really wants from an in-house legal service. It is not about being cheap and cheerful. If that were the case, no legal work would ever be outsourced. A corporate client wants value for money. But not only value for money. They also want a quality service which lifts the burden from their own shoulders and provides a timely turnaround. And a corporate client is prepared to pay more for that type of service. For me, the benchmark comparison for a good in-house team should be that which the client could obtain from a private sector firm of equivalent size, expertise and resource. What is also important to a corporate client is the added value which only an in-house legal team can provide. An on-site presence. An understanding of the client’s ‘business’. Making yourself part of the client ‘team’. Presenting to elected members. Navigating the council’s constitution. Dealing with those tiresome freedom of Information requests and registration of assets of community value.
It’s about the technology
For me, having the right technology and systems in place are key to providing a client with more for less. Because it is that technology and the systems which go with it, which creates the environment in which fee earners are able to work quickly and efficiently and which, in turn, produces lower unit cost. A problem for legal services managers is that many of these systems are not under their direct control. All they can do is report a failure and wait for someone else to come and fix it. Walking up and down looking for a printer that works and then lining up behind two other fee earners, is hardly an efficient use of lawyer time. Some of that technology is already free to download and use on any modern computer, such as voice dictation.
I’ve noticed that local authority legal teams always appear several years behind their private sector counterparts when it comes to adopting new technology. Whilst there may be exceptions, I would think it safe to assume that most local authorities have not yet adopted the electronic signing and attestation of documents which is now the standard in most private practice. The adoption of such systems is not expensive and saves money as well as time. Using DocuSign not only avoids the need for a corporate seal and a wet ink signature, it also avoids the need to prepare and circulate hard copy engrossments and can bring forward a completion by more than a week.
Staff Recruitment and Retention
Whilst salary levels for local authority lawyers are significantly lower than those working in private practice, what must be factored in is the Local Government Pension Scheme. Whilst this final salary scheme may no longer be as generous as it once was, it is still better than anything you are likely to get elsewhere.
Headline locum hourly pay rates may be higher than the equivalent salaries paid to permanent staff but remember that from that hourly headline rate, anyone working off payroll has to fund the costs of their own employment,before any money can go into their pocket. This will include employers’ National Insurance, rolled up holiday pay, and making their own pension arrangements. Any tax advantages which staff might once have enjoyed from working off-payroll disappeared with IR35. So maybe the pay difference is not as significant as it first appears. Even the 15% commission paid to the locum agency is not money for nothing, as it covers the administration and due diligence which would otherwise have to be carried out by the council’s own HR and payroll teams
By contrast, the locum market enables legal services managers to quickly upsize or downsize to meet day-to-day operational requirements without the paraphernalia of a long-winded recruitment or redundancy process. For a good locum, the issue is not how long a particular assignment lasts but whether there will be something to move on to after it has ended. It is about personal marketability. The ability to quickly adapt to a team’s requirements and make a real contribution to getting the work done. The first thing I notice when looking at a locum CV is the length of previous assignments and, more importantly, whether any of those previous assignments have been repeated or extended. If the answer is, ‘none’, that for me sends its own message. When it comes to ‘diva tendencies’, the worst locums I have come across are the semi-retired grandees. The former chief executives coming new to transactional work but who refuse to be told.
Retention of good staff has always been a problem for me, much more than the permanent recruitment of new staff. I believe it’s because of the limited opportunities which local authorities provide for internal promotion, where every opportunity has to be advertised to the World and where even the best candidate can be pipped at the post by someone who may be less able but whose answers score better in a structured interview. Then, the only way for that internal candidate to achieve promotion is to adopt a scatter gun approach, by sending multiple applications to other local authorities until someone bites. A system which is hardly conducive to corporate loyalty.
Getting into management.
I found it disappointing that only 38% of local government lawyers aspire to management, even though leadership is a valuable life-skill which can only be learned by doing. Management is your chance to make a difference. To put in place the changes you always wanted to make but never had the seniority to make. A chance to experiment with your own ideas instead of implementing someone else’s. Taking credit when something goes well and responsibility when it does not. Something I have always tried to do when taking up a new management’s role is to repair some of those client relationships which had previously become soured.
Third party income
Something not mentioned at all during the survey is the opportunities for a legal team to help meet its budget by maximizing third party income. The costs of many transactions can be loaded onto the party receiving the benefit of that transaction. Examples include section 106 planning agreements; highway agreements; statutory lease extensions; leasehold sub-dealings, such as licences to assign or underlet. Licences for alteration or change of use. In fact, any transaction carried out at the request of another party.
Whilst an in-house legal team cannot make a profit on such transactions, it is important they are at least cost- neutral for the local authority. It is about accurately assessing the amount of work likely to be involved and seeking a professional undertaking for that amount. And then being able to work within that quoted budget so that there is no cost overrun.
On a final note, what I have always valued from my work with in-house legal teams is the general culture of courtesy which has always existed between local government officers at every level.
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V.Charles Ward is a Senior Property Lawyer with HB Public Law and author of Local Authority Conveyancing: Law and Practice (UK)
First Published in Local Government Lawyer – August 2025
I’m nervous about Leveson’s proposals to abolish jury trial in intermediate cases and replace them with trial by a judge and two magistrates. It is as though he’s suggesting that either way offences carrying a likely penalty of less than 3 years imprisonment are not serious. But a theft conviction can be very serious if you lose your career as a result. Fair enough if you are actually guilty of the offence charged. That’s where the jury comes in. People like you and me with the same collective sense of fairness and justice. Not quite the same when you are facing an impatient prosecution-minded magistrate or judge who just wants to get through their case list. And what is the point of even electing trial, if you are not going to get to argue your case before 12 people who are living similar lives as you are.
Another thing I have long noticed is the increasing remoteness for our justice system from common expectations of right and wrong. Where everything seems to be decided on on academic technicality. We’ve come a long way since the passing of ‘people’s judge’, Tom Denning. Then there is the secrecy over the judicial appointments process itself. Whether it’s the appointment of judges and magistrates or the members of a parole board, who ignore public outrage when releasing a dangerous murderer. Who appoints these people? I’m sure that I have never been consulted. All that is left between them and us is 12 members of a jury. Now they want to take that away, Why? Because of successive government incompetence when it comes to our criminal justice system. How does it save money by delaying a case for two or three years instead of bringing it on now? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
My own solution would be to move to an American system of elected judges and magistrates. Make them accountable.
BRUCE AND HOLLY 