RICS says tenant passports are solution to rental woes

Letting agents and landlords could soon be able to review tenants’ rent payment histories if proposals from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) for a national system of tenant passports becomes a reality, a direction of travel that industry leaders say the government has already embarked on. The RICS Rented Sector Policy Paper published today outlines a national passport system using a database of all the UK’s ten million social and private sector tenants, along with a similar database of landlords. RICS says this would help more vulnerable tenants because, by offering more details on a person’s payment track record, landlords and agents would have a greater understanding of them than currently offered by referencing checks. The idea is a more ambitious version of several local tenant passport systems already being trailed including in Kettering, Northamptonshire where the local borough council offers a voluntary tenant passport scheme for those moving from social to private rented sector housing. RICS says this enables potential landlords to see that they have been good tenants, even though they may have a bad credit history. “An ever-increasing proportion of the population is looking to rent. By 2025, we know that there will be a 1.8 million shortfall…