Section 21 Is Abolished on 1 May. What Do Your Records Need to Prove?

On 1 May 2026, Section 21 no-fault evictions are abolished. Every assured shorthold tenancy in England becomes periodic. From that date, if you need to regain possession of your property, you need grounds, and grounds means evidence.

Most landlords I speak to know this is happening, it’s hard not to given the number of articles in the press. What we’re all struggling a bit with is, ‘yes, what does this actually bloody mean for me?’

Where I think we should start is look at what we actually have (the WhatsApp messages, the emails, the PDFs in folders, the spreadsheet they started in 2019) and ask ourselves: ‘if I had to produce this in front of a tribunal, what would it actually prove?’

The answer, for most of us, irritatingly, is probably less than we think.

What changes on 1 May

Under Section 21, a landlord could recover a property without giving a reason. You served notice, the notice period ran, and if the tenant didn’t leave, the court ordered possession. The landlord’s records were largely irrelevant to the process.

In a stroke, that’s gone.

From 1 May, every possession claim must be made under Section 8, which requires the landlord to establish specific grounds. Rent arrears. Anti-social behaviour. Breach of tenancy terms. The landlord wanting to sell or move in. Each ground requires evidence that the ground is met.

This isn’t limited to possession hearings. Deposit disputes already require evidence. Ombudsman complaints will require evidence (once the new Ombudsman for private landlords is operational, whenever that is).

Awaab’s Law, when extended to private landlords (whenever that is), will require evidence that you responded to maintenance reports within fixed timelines. The direction is clear: the burden of proof on landlords is increasing, and it’s not going back any time soon.

Is this unfair? Not in the abstract, but it does assume you have records that are worth something. So let’s look at what most landlords actually have.

WhatsApp messages

This is where most landlord-tenant communication happens. A tenant texts about a dripping tap. You reply saying you’ll sort it. You call a plumber. The plumber fixes it. You text the tenant to confirm.

What does this prove? It proves messages were sent. It proves you were in communication. It does not prove what action was taken, when the repair was completed, or whether the response met any particular timeline. The messages are editable: you can delete them, the tenant can delete them. They’re stored on personal devices that can be lost, replaced, or wiped.

Evidential value: Low. A tribunal will look at WhatsApp screenshots, but they’re easy to challenge. There’s no independent verification that the conversation is complete, unedited, or accurately timestamped. The benefits of WhatsApp: encryption, anonymity, lack of central records, don’t exactly lend themselves to court proceedings (or, indeed, tribunals about ambassadorial appointments, ahem).

Emails

Better than WhatsApp, because email servers retain independent copies and timestamps are harder to manipulate. If you emailed a tenant about a repair on 3 March, there’s a server record of that.

But email proves communication, not action. It proves you said you’d fix the boiler. It doesn’t prove the boiler was fixed, or when, or by whom. And unless you’re disciplined about filing (which, honestly, most of us aren’t), finding the relevant thread six months later means searching through an inbox that contains everything else in your life as well.

Evidential value: Moderate for communication. Weak for proving actions were taken or timelines were met.

PDFs in a folder

Gas safety certificates. EPCs. Tenancy agreements. Most landlords have these as PDFs somewhere: in a folder on their laptop, in Google Drive, in an email attachment they never downloaded, in that folder that I swear was on my desk last time I looked.

A PDF proves the document exists. It does not prove when you obtained it, whether it was valid at the relevant time, or that it was provided to the tenant when required. If someone asks “was your gas safety certificate current in October 2025?” the PDF shows the certificate dates, but it doesn’t show when you filed it, whether you served it on the tenant within 28 days, or what your compliance position was at any given point in time.

Evidential value: Proves document content. Proves almost nothing about your behaviour or compliance timeline.

Spreadsheets

The backbone of most landlords’ financial records (pace, all you Xero-heros, we see you). Rent received, expenses paid, maybe a column for maintenance. Possibly the same spreadsheet they’ve used since they bought the property.

A spreadsheet proves you typed numbers into cells. It does not prove those numbers are accurate, when they were entered, or whether they’ve been changed since. There is no audit trail. You could update the entire thing the night before a tribunal hearing and nobody would know. Which is exactly why, from an evidential perspective, nobody gives it much weight.

Evidential value: Useful as a personal record. Close to worthless as evidence of anything.

Property management apps

(Disclosure: minor conflict of interest here…)

An improvement on all of the above. A dedicated app will organise your documents, track your rent, remind you about certificate renewals. Several of them are very good at this.

But most of them are designed to help you manage, not to help you prove you managed properly. There’s an important difference. If the data in the app can be edited (a maintenance entry changed, a date adjusted, a record deleted) then the record it produces is only as trustworthy as the person who entered it. A tribunal or ombudsman looking at an editable record has no way of knowing whether it reflects what actually happened or what the landlord wishes had happened.

Evidential value: Good for organisation. The evidential weight depends entirely on whether the record is immutable, and most aren’t.

The gap

The common thread across all of these is the same: they record information, but they don’t produce evidence. And the distinction matters, because what’s changing on 1 May isn’t the information landlords need to keep. It’s the standard of proof they’ll be held to when challenged.

Evidence, in the sense that a tribunal or ombudsman uses the word, means a record that is contemporaneous (created at the time of the event), tamper-proof (can’t be edited after the fact), and independently verifiable (the system, not the user, guarantees the integrity). A WhatsApp message is none of these things. A spreadsheet is none of these things. A PDF in a folder is one of these things, at best.

This is what we built Harthing to solve (I know, see above). Every action on the platform, every repair logged, every document uploaded, every payment recorded, is timestamped and hash-chained. Nothing can be edited or backdated. The record builds itself as you manage, and it can be produced as a complete, chronological Evidence Bundle with a single click.

We built it this way because my co-founder Neil spent twenty years building trading platforms where this is how records work as a matter of course. The idea that you’d run a regulated operation on editable records would be laughable (and not ‘funny, ha ha’ laughable) in financial services. We think property management is heading in the same direction, and 1 May is the date it gets serious.

What to do before 1 May

Regardless of what tools you use, there are practical steps you can take right now.

Check your compliance documents are current. Gas safety certificate, EICR, EPC, legionella risk assessment if applicable. Know the expiry dates. If anything is overdue, sort it now. A lapsed certificate is the kind of thing that turns a straightforward possession hearing into a counter-claim.

Serve the Information Sheet. The Renters’ Rights Act requires you to serve the official GOV.UK Information Sheet on every existing tenant by 31 May 2026. The fine is £7,000 per offence. We covered this in detail in our previous article. An absolute gimme, this one. If you haven’t done it yet, stop reading and do it now.

Start recording maintenance properly. When a tenant reports a problem, log it with a date. When you arrange a repair, log it with a date. When the repair is completed, log it with a date. Even better, get the tenant to write you an email saying it’s been done. Or at least reply to yours with the word ‘done’.

The method matters less than the habit, but the method matters more than most people think, because an editable log and an immutable log are very different things when someone asks to see them.

Think about what you’d produce if asked. If your tenant disputed a deposit deduction tomorrow, could you produce a dated, chronological record of the relevant maintenance history? If the Ombudsman asked for evidence that you responded to a complaint within a reasonable time, could you show them? If the formal answer is “I’d need a few days to pull it together,” and the internal monologue is “oh, sh*t,” that’s the gap.

The regulations coming into force aren’t designed to catch good landlords out. They’re designed to hold bad landlords accountable. But the way the system works, the burden of proof falls on you regardless. The landlords who have a proper record will be fine. The question is whether what you have right now is a proper record, or just information you might be able to reconstruct into one after the fact.

Good letting, on the record.