UK landlords must check tenants’ immigration status or face fine

New rules obliging landlords to check the immigration status of tenants will make it harder for British nationals without passports to find somewhere to rent, giving rogue landlords “a guaranteed population of desperate people”, lawyers have warned.

From Monday, the government’s “right to rent” measures require landlords in England to check that a person can legally rent the property if their tenancy begins on or after that date. Landlords must see the original documents allowing tenants to live in the UK, check they are genuine and keep copies.

The scheme, part of efforts to get a grip on rising immigration, introduces stiff penalties for those who rent a property to someone who has no right to be in the UK, making them liable to fines of up to £3,000 per tenant.

Landlord groups have raised a series of concerns over the policy, including their members’ lack of expertise in verifying documents. David Smith, policy director of the Residential Landlords Association, said: “How familiar are you with a passport of Liechtenstein? Can you spot a forgery? I certainly can’t. But that is what landlords are being asked to do and if they don’t they will be at risk of a financial penalty.”

The measures threaten to introduce a form of document-based discrimination based not on race but on possession of a passport, lawyers say. In the 2011 census, 17 per cent of people resident in England and Wales — 9.5m people — said they did not hold a passport.

People without passports were more likely to rent, Mr Smith said, since they tended to be in lower socio-demographic groups, and landlords were less likely to go the extra mile to verify their right to stay. “There are means of checking but they are not as simple,” he said.

The rules would push more illegal immigrants into the shadows towards rogue landlords happy to charge inflated rents. “All you’re doing is giving the very worst criminal landlords a guaranteed population of desperate people,” Mr Smith said.

It also stood to increase the pressure on hostels and other places where residents would not be required to show proof of a right to be in the UK — or risked passing the problem back to councils.

“I can see a real prospect of local authorities having to house people, not because they couldn’t pay but because they couldn’t find anyone to take them,” said Alison Harvey, legal director at the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association.

I can see a real prospect of local authorities having to house people, not because they couldn’t pay but because they couldn’t find anyone to take them

James Brokenshire, immigration minister, said last month that the scheme would be “as simple and as light touch as possible”.

“Right to rent is part of the government’s wider reforms to the immigration system to make it stronger, fairer and more effective. Those with a legitimate right to be here will be able to prove this easily and will not be adversely affected,” he said in a statement.

Given a choice between passport-holding potential tenants and those with complex but legitimate documentation or whose cases were still being processed, landlords were unlikely to opt for the latter, Ms Harvey said. “Faced with [the risk of] a £3,000 fine and, under the current Immigration Bill, a criminal sentence, landlords will just want a quiet life.”

The “right to rent” scheme covers not only landlords and their tenants but anyone who takes in a lodger or sublets a room. They may pass responsibility on to a lettings agent as long as they instruct them in writing and keep a copy.

The government launched a pilot of the scheme in the West Midlands in December 2014 and published an evaluation last October. This found little evidence of race discrimination among landlords, with a “very small number of potentially discriminatory behaviour or attitudes”, but did suggest a problem of awareness: only 61 per cent of landlords said they felt informed about the scheme, while 68 per cent of tenants said they were poorly informed or uninformed.

Paul McCarthy, a solicitor specialising in immigration at Charles Russell Speechlys, said the government needed to do more to communicate the scheme “and make sure that those undertaking the checks know what they have to do”.