PBSA exemption follow-up questions
I have had two big questions following my post yesterday about the PBSA exemption to RRB. Suzanne Smith wanted to know about the possibility of it applying to private student landlords (non-PBSA) and Sophie Lang wanted to know about whether a compliant agent could count for the purposes of this. Usual caveats; this isn’t yet part of the RRB so subject to change.
Lets first drill down into Clause 34 which introduces the PBSA exemption. Clause 34 identifies three things to be approved by future regulations:
Members of a Housing Management Code of Practice (these are the ‘codes’ that you will read about)
Types of Landlords
Types of Building
The future regulations will then say, for example:
Housing stock owned by PBSA Provider A in the City of Bath are exempt the Renters’ Rights Act
Members of XYZ Code are exempt from the Renters’ Rights Act.
Development ABC in the City of Durham is exempt from the Renters’ Rights Act
And so on. I would expect, in order to be truly exempt, a landlord must themselves be in an exempt class, own a building in an exempt class, and subscribe to a code that is also exempt. You need all three basically.
This allows me to answer Suzanne’s question: it is certainly possible for a private student landlord to meet those three criteria in principle. The real answer is that currently none of these rules exist so we do not know what landlords and buildings will be caught by this (though I suspect we can make an educated guess). We can, however, look at the current approved codes and see who might currently fit within that.
There are two codes as far as I can see: The Unipol/ANUK code that I linked yesterday, and the Universities UK/Guild HE Code. These seem to be the only active codes because they are the only ones mentioned in the Regulations that authorise a ‘Housing Management Code of Practice’ mentioned in Clause 34 and empowered by S233 of the Housing Act 2004. A link to those regulations is here:
The regulations revoke earlier versions of the Regulations so I believe the intention is that there is only ever one ‘live’ set of regulations which will list all of the approved codes.
The Unipol/ANUK code is named the ‘Code of Standards for Larger Residential Developments’ for both those managed and not managed by universities, which indicates it is not appropriate for small landlords. The Universities UK code is for the Universities themselves, so also not appropriate.
Unless and until a code is created and approved by the government there is no code that a private landlord can subscribe to and so they will be excluded from the PBSA exemption.
It is also worth my mentioning that there is an amendment to the RRB directly below Clause 34 which requests permission for a private landlord who has signed up to a code of conduct to also be exempt. This amendment is unlikely to make the final version, but it seems to me to be a tacit acknowledgment that private landlords are excluded from this exemption by design.
As for Sophie’s question, if we say that a landlord and a building must themselves be made exempt then we need to see whether an agent can comply with a code on a landlord’s behalf. I am looking at the Unipol/ANUK code here.
On page 21 of the code it says:
Member (with a capitalised initial) is used throughout this document to mean a member of the National Code of Standards for Larger Developments for student accommodation NOT managed and controlled by educational establishments. In practice, much of the work entailed in complying with Code standards and requirements will fall to agents or contractors. Nonetheless, Member is consistently used because it is Members who are responsible for compliance and who will be held accountable for failure to meet Code standards or other breaches.
This acknowledges that most PBSA landlords outsource their management to agents who do the leg work for them but that the landlords remain responsible. On this basis, if the agent fully manages the building and that management is compliant with the code then the landlord is also compliant with the code. I think this is fine.
