The Future of right to rent in England
In welcome news for landlords, a recent consultation by the Government has indicated that right to rent checks will become easier to perform in 2022.
The consultation asked for views on using digital tools to verify right to rent documents and perform checks remotely. This is likely to mean that the Government will introduce a new digital checking and verification system for UK nationals next year.
Right to rent checks pre-covid
Right to rent checks have presented an administrative problem when creating tenancies since their introduction in 2016.
To ensure landlords had a ‘statutory excuse’, meaning they couldn’t be prosecuted for renting a property to someone with no right to live in the UK, they had to –
- Meet the prospective tenant in person;
- Check the original document(s) from List A or List B to ensure they are not fake;
- Keep a record of these documents until a year after the tenants leave the property.
This presented two key problems for landlords –
- how could they establish a document is genuine?
- how could landlords meet tenants in person if they lived far away?
These questions were posed regularly to the advice service, reflecting the reality that tenants move for work or study and that many landlords are not trained to identify forged documents.
Right to rent checks during covid
While most things became more difficult during the pandemic, right to rent checks actually became significantly easier to perform.
Between March 2020 and April 2022, the government temporarily changed the right to rent requirements to facilitate remote checks.
Landlords no longer had to meet their tenants in person. Instead, the ‘covid-adjusted’ checks could be performed over a video call, with the landlord typically checking a scanned copy of the tenants passport while the tenant held up the original document on screen.
At the same time, the Government also created a digital checking service for non-UK nationals. Those with settled status can prove their right to rent status by providing their birth date and a share code to the landlord. The landlord could do this remotely without having to check documents were genuine.
This new system is permanent, free and makes it much easier to check non-UK nationals before granting a tenancy. However, the majority of tenancies are granted to UK nationals who can’t access this.
As a result, once the temporary covid changes end next year, there is currently no way to perform a remote check on a UK national unless the law around right to rent changes.
The future of right to rent
Recognising the benefits of remote checks, the Government has extended the covid-adjusted changes until April 2022. This is to give them chance to review and implement a digital system available to UK and Irish nationals.
The first stage in this review came recently - a survey asking for views on the use of Identification Document Validation Technology (IDVT).
IDVT is commonplace for businesses check the immigration status of new employees; allowing them to upload a scanned copy of passports, or other ID, and then receive confirmation as to whether or not the document is genuine.
This technology addresses both the issues that landlords typically face as it can both verify the document and allow the check to be performed remotely.
However, unlike businesses which will routinely use IDVT for new employees, most landlords will rarely have to perform a right to rent check. Most landlords own 1-4 properties and the typical tenancy lasts for more than 4 years.
NRLA position
While the NRLA’s submission was broadly positive around the use of IDVT, we did make the case that any checks on UK nationals should not come with additional costs as this would unfairly prejudice applicants who are UK nationals and be unnecessarily costly for landlords who only need to perform a check rarely.
Our submission made a number of key recommendations that would be an improvement on the current system.
These were –
- That stand alone IDVT options should be free to use and available via smartphone apps. This would mirror the existing free digital service available to non-UK nationals.
- If possible, incorporate IDVT into referencing checks and amend the legislation so that passing a reference check was sufficient to establish the tenant had right to rent.
- Allow UK nationals to upload their information to the existing digital right to rent service so that all tenants can be checked using the same process for free.
Conclusion
While we still have to wait to find out what the Government chooses to do about right to rent, it is clear it will be changing in the near future. The NRLA will keep our members up to date as further announcements are made.
In the meantime, if you do need to perform a right to rent check, please see our full right to rent guidance.
