Folkestone & Hythe Warns Renters’ Rights Act Enforcement Is Underfunded: What the New Rules Mean for Evictions, Landlord Redress, the Property Portal and Illegal Evictions

Folkestone & Hythe District Council has issued an unusually candid note of caution about the Renters’ Rights Act: the duties are expanding fast, the practical expectations are shifting towards tougher enforcement, and the early funding being trailed by central government looks small beside the workload.

Addressing the council’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee, the Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr Rebecca Shoob (pictured), described the Act as one of “two really significant pieces of housing legislation” recently passed. But it was her next point that landed: the council has now received an indication of “new burdens” funding and she does not believe it matches what the law will require councils to do on the ground.

“It’s really important to stress,” she told councillors, “that there was going to be a lot of work… Councils have extensive new duties under this Act, but the funding that we understand to be in the region of £40,000 to £50,000 for this year… I don’t think that’s going to… cover the work that’s going to need to be done.”

The consequence, she said plainly, is “pressures… for the team” — and, by implication, for budgets across the authority.

That warning matters because the Renters’ Rights Act is not a “nice-to-have” set of aspirations. It is a system that assumes local councils will make it real: investigating, deciding when the legal threshold is met, and then imposing civil penalties or prosecuting where appropriate. The Act’s central promise — that private renting will become safer, fairer, and less arbitrary — depends heavily on how councils enforce it.

A quiet but important shift: from advice-first to enforcement-first

If Cllr Shoob gave the political overview, the most striking operational detail came from Corporate Director responsible for Housing: Andy Blaszkowicz.

“There are… a lot of new obligations,” he said. “We don’t really know how that is going to affect the team already.”

And then came the core of the change:

“We have authorised… another position already for a new officer… But we’re going to be rewriting our enforcement policies and there’s much more onus on enforcement rather than working through with landlords about how you might resolve an issue through awareness notices… rather than going straight to enforcement — which the new… Act is kind of suggesting that that is going to be the approach.”

For residents, that is a significant statement. Many councils have historically tried to secure compliance by persuasion first: informal contact, warnings, “hazard awareness” style interventions, and negotiated fixes. Blaszkowicz is signalling that the Act pushes councils towards something tougher: clearer expectations, quicker escalation, and more use of formal sanctions.

In other words, the council is preparing for a world in which “we wrote to the landlord” is no longer the end of the story.

What, exactly, are the “extensive new duties”? (A layman’s guide)

For a district council like Folkestone & Hythe, the Renters’ Rights Act adds work in several connected lanes. The details can get technical quickly, but the practical reality is easier to understand if you think of the council as being asked to do four things at once:

First: enforce the rules that sit around tenancies and eviction.
Courts still decide possession cases and eviction orders, but the Act creates a larger set of compliance rules around the new tenancy system (including restrictions intended to stop misuse of the new grounds). Councils are expected to investigate and, where the evidence meets the test, penalise breaches. This is how the law tries to prevent the headline reforms being undermined by “workarounds”.

Second: enforce the new “market fairness” rules.
The Act tackles behaviours that have become normalised in some corners of the rental market — including rental bidding practices and discrimination against certain renters. Those aren’t just political talking points; they are enforcement questions. Tenant complaints, adverts, messages, screenshots and agent practices can become evidence— and the council becomes the body expected to act.

Third: connect to national systems — the PRS Ombudsman and the database/portal.
The Act is designed to be trackable. A new redress route (the PRS Ombudsman concept) and a new database/portal model are meant to create transparency about who is renting, what is being rented, and whether basic requirements are being met. District councils are expected to work within that system: supporting compliance, checking information, and enforcing where landlords try to operate outside it.

Fourth: use stronger tools against serious abuse such as illegal eviction and harassment.
Illegal eviction already exists as a serious wrong. The Act’s direction of travel is that councils should be better able — and expected — to take action, not simply advise victims to navigate the criminal justice system solo.

The key point for lay readers is this: the Act doesn’t merely change what landlords are allowed to do. It changes what councils are expected to do about it.

“From April/May next year”: the planned timetable — and why it matters

Timing is not a footnote. In the committee discussion, Blaszkowicz said the Act will start “coming into effect from May next year, April, May next year, with different parts of the Act introduced at the time.”

That staggered introduction matters for enforcement, because councils cannot flick a switch overnight. Policies must be rewritten, staff trained, workflows rebuilt, and partners aligned. Meanwhile, renters will be reading headlines and assuming rights are already enforceable in practice, even where commencement dates and transitional rules may say otherwise.

Blaszkowicz’s message is that the council is trying to get ahead of that confusion: “we’re pre-empting that by introducing a new member of staff” and preparing operationally now.

The money: “£40,000 to be used by the end of March”

Councillors asked what the funding gap might mean in real life. Cllr Laura Davison (pictured) pressed for clarity: what does the difference between the new duties and the new funding look like — and what are the implications “for renters in the district”?

Cllr Shoob replied that the immediate impact would be felt by staff capacity and budgets, even if the council intends to deliver the work:

“I think the impact… will be felt by staff in having to do a lot of work… it just puts extra pressure on our General Fund, the HRA… I don’t think the New Burdens funding necessarily reflects the amount that does need to be done, but I am confident that work will be done.”

Blaszkowicz then narrowed it down: “We think the funding for this year is going to be around £40,000 to be used by the end of March… We don’t know what the funding for next year is going to be yet.”

He added that the early funding “will just about fund” the additional officer post the council has authorised.

For the lay reader, there are two implications here.

The first is arithmetic. £40,000–£50,000 in an English local authority does not buy an enforcement system; it might, at best, cover a single post for a limited period, plus a slice of training and overhead.

The second is governance. If year-one funding is time-limited (“by the end of March”) and year-two funding is uncertain, councils risk being asked to build long-term enforcement capacity on short-term money — the kind of arrangement that creates backlogs, inconsistency, and reactive decision-making.

Training and readiness: a confident team — but a bigger job

The committee also heard reassurance. Blaszkowicz said the team has been heavily engaged in training: “loads of seminars, training,” and he characterised staff as “a really, really competent team” that works “very closely with all the landlords in the district.”

That close landlord relationship is worth noting. An enforcement-led regime can still be effective without being hostile; plenty of regulation works best when compliant landlords are supported and the minority of bad actors are targeted. But the Act’s logic — and Blaszkowicz’s comments — also suggest less tolerance for indefinite “softly-softly” engagement when unlawful practices continue.

A risk the council is openly worried about: landlords leaving the market

Among the most policy-heavy lines in the session was also one of the most politically sensitive.

“What we’re hoping we don’t see,” Blaszkowicz said, “is a lot of landlords leaving the market because of the new pressures on them — which is going to add to the housing problems that obviously we’re experiencing…”

This is the balancing act the Act lands squarely in local laps. The regime tightens to protect renters, but any significant contraction in the supply of rented homes could intensify pressure elsewhere — including on councils’ wider housing responsibilities.

For renters, that may feel like being asked to choose between fairness and availability. In reality, the task is to make the rented sector fairer without triggering a stampede for the exit — but that requires competent, resourced enforcement that distinguishes between the responsible majority and the rogue minority. Which returns the discussion to funding again.

What does “more enforcement” look like for ordinary renters?

When a council says it is moving from “awareness notices” towards “enforcement”, the question for residents is what changes in practice.

In plain English, it usually means three things.

First, more evidence-led investigations. Complaints will still matter, but councils will increasingly look for documentation: adverts, messages, screenshots, tenancy documents, and patterns of behaviour. If the Act is meant to stop rental bidding or discrimination, the evidence is often “in writing” — and modern rental life creates a lot of writing.

Second, clearer consequences. Civil penalties (where applicable) do not require a criminal court trial, but they do require the council to reach the legal threshold and follow the correct statutory process. The point is speed and certainty: a faster consequence than the traditional “report it and hope something happens”.

Third, greater system reliance on the Ombudsman and the portal/database model. That kind of infrastructure makes it easier to track whether a landlord is operating compliantly. But it also creates extra administrative duties for councils — entries, updates, verification, and enforcement when landlords try to circumvent the system.

The politics vs the mechanics: what the committee exchange revealed

There was broad cross-party recognition at the meeting that the Act is aimed at helping those with the least power in the rental market. Councillors called it “good news” that the council is “on the front foot” — but they also drew out the core pressure point: if central government loads councils with legal duties without matching funding, the reform risks becoming uneven in practice.

Cllr Shoob’s position was essentially: the work must get done, and it will, but the council should not pretend the new burdens money is proportionate to the new burdens themselves.

Blaszkowicz’s position was: the council is recruiting, rewriting policies, training staff, and preparing for phased commencement — but the demand curve is unknown, the longer-term funding is unknown, and the council is wary of destabilising the local rental market.

The bottom line

The committee discussion lifted the lid on a national reform that will be won or lost locally. The Renters’ Rights Act may be passed in Westminster, but it is district councils that will be expected to do the difficult bits: investigate, make judgement calls, apply sanctions fairly, and keep systems running— all while managing limited staff time and uncertain funding.

Folkestone & Hythe’s message, delivered without theatrics, was straightforward: new rights are arriving, but so are new duties, and the council is preparing for a more assertive enforcement era on resources that currently look tight.

The Shepway Vox Team

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