Pets and property in the Renters Rights era

Under the new law, most assured tenants will have the right (implied into the terms of their tenancy) to request the consent of their landlord to keep a pet. The request must be made in writing, with a description of the animal, and landlords will be required to respond within 28 days.

Critically, landlords must not unreasonably refuse consent and if they do, they will be breaching the implied term.

If they do not reply within the statutory timeframe or refuse unreasonably, the Bill does not go so far as to provide that consent should be treated as having been given. Strictly speaking, the tenant will not have consent in those circumstances, but will have a potential claim against the landlord for breach of the implied term of the tenancy agreement. The court will have the power to determine whether any reasons given by the landlord were reasonable or to make an order for specific performance to oblige the landlord to respond where they have failed to. 

Refusal is permitted, but only on reasonable grounds. A general ‘no pets’ policy will no longer be sufficient. The Bill only gives two examples of circumstances where it will be reasonable, but it does not state that these are the only circumstances where it could be reasonable to refuse consent:

• leasehold restrictions preventing pets, such as the landlord’s own lease outright prohibiting pets; and
• inability to obtain consent from a superior landlord where such consent is required

It is likely that most landlord concerns will be less to do with superior landlords and more about the suitability of the property and the potential for damage to be done. Others may be concerned about the impact on other tenants or neighbours or may themselves have a genuine fear or phobia which may impede their management of the letting. 

It appears that the vast majority of potential reasons landlords are going to cite will be open to challenge and it will only be after judicial scrutiny that clarity will emerge. However, it seems unlikely that in practice tenants will be quick to bring claims against landlords who refuse consent. A court claim will be expensive and inherently risky. A claim would also take a sizeable portion of the average pet’s lifespan to come to a conclusion. 
It seems far more likely that tenants who wish to keep a pet but are refused consent will either abide by that decision, ignore it and get a pet anyway (taking the risk that the landlord will not have the appetite or means to bring their own claim) or decide to move to a property that has a landlord who is more amenable to requests for consent to keep a pet. It therefore remains to be seen whether the new law will in fact cause any significant shift in practice. 

To address concerns about property damage, for many months during its passage through parliament the draft legislation provided that landlords could require tenants to obtain pet insurance or to pay the reasonable cost of the landlord’s own insurance policy covering pet-related damage. 

Payments made for such insurance were to be carved out as permitted charges under the Tenant Fees Act 2019. These provisions were used to compensate landlords for the shift to allowing more tenants to keep pets. The logic was that landlords need not be concerned as they would be protected by way of insurance. At the time of this article being written, it is looking increasingly likely that the landlord’s right to require insurance cover be put in place is not going to make it into the final legislation and, instead, landlords will be expected to recoup the costs of any damage done to the property from the standard tenancy deposit. That deposit is capped at the equivalent of five weeks’ worth of rent for most tenancies so there will be a significant risk that it will not be sufficient to cover any degree of significant damage that is caused by a pet. 

Landlords and agents should:

• review tenancy templates to align with the new legal rights – although the new legislation will imply the right to request a pet into most assured tenancies, it will be best practise to have this catered for in express terms within template tenancy documentation and at the very least to remove any outright prohibitions (unless there is a superior lease that contains such prohibitions)
• develop a clear, consistent policy for evaluating pet requests
• consider suitable insurance products that may come to the market for landlords – the cost of such cover will likely not be recoverable from tenants if the legislation remains as currently drafted, but it may be a cost that some landlords consider worth incurring themselves

This reform seeks to address tenants’ growing demand for pet-friendly accommodation, but it will potentially result in increased disputes between landlords and tenants. For landlords, this is a cultural as well as legal shift and is consistent with the general messaging of the Bill. Tenancies grant the tenant a right to treat a property as a home and this means the landlord’s right to dictate how the property is used during that tenancy is being curtailed. Refusing pets will no longer be possible as a matter of routine — it will need to be reasonable.