A letting agent who knowingly rents a property to an illegal migrant will from today be committing a criminal offence and may face jail.

The new offences under the Immigrant Act 2016 were announced in November and were created to help prosecute rogue agents ‘intent’ on flouting the law.

Agents who face the lesser charge of omitting or forgetting to carry out Right to Rent checks already face civil penalties since the scheme went national in February. These penalties covers both new tenancies and those being renewed.

The new penalties are in addition to several other criminal laws that apply to agents such as measures for those who flout Consumer Protection regulations, and under the 1979 Estate Agents’ Act against agents who do not stop trading after a prohibition order.

The new criminal penalties will pile the pressure on agents to complete their Right to Rent checks and paperwork meticulously in what is a fast-moving market, particularly in the UK’s larger cities. And the penalties under either legal regime are severe.

Under the civil laws the fines are £3,000 per tenant although agents can object to the penalty in writing up to 28 days of the date of the licence.

The criminal penalties are much more draconian. Penalties range from unlimited fines to a jail sentence of up to five years, Home Secretary Amber Rudd (pictured) announced during October’s Tory party conference.

But although the situation sounds clean cut, there are several grey areas. One is that the government recently conceded that landlords or agents would not be committing an offence if they have taken ‘reasonable steps’ to throw tenants out quickly after realising they don’t have the Right to Rent. What ‘reasonable steps’ are has not been clarified publicly yet.

The other grey area that’s yet to be resolved is how tenants without birth certificates, passports or a driving licence can start tenancies. There is a bewildering array of approved documentation included in the scheme that tenants can use to prove their right to rent, but the most common and key ones are these three principal documents.

The government’s own assessment of the initial Midlands pilot scheme highlighted that those without these three key documents people without these documents could find it harder to find rented accommodation under Right to Rent, particularly those on low incomes, older renters, victims of domestic violence and those who are homeless.

“New Immigration Act offences for landlords and agents will only be welcome if they achieve the central aim of prosecuting and fining criminal landlords who are supplying substandard accommodation at inflated rents on the peripheries of society’s radar,” says David Cox, Managing Director of the Association of Residential Letting Agents.

“Enforcement is absolutely fundamental to this and sufficient resource must be devoted to following up applications to the landlord checking service which are refused, and ensuring that properties occupied by over stayers can be made available again as soon as possible.”