Section 21 has gone. Your inventory is now evidence for a judge.

On 1 May 2026 the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 removed section 21 from the private rented sector. Every private assured tenancy is now periodic, the fixed term and the assured shorthold have gone, and a landlord who wants possession has to name a ground under section 8 and prove it.

Most of the coverage has been about notice periods and grounds. Less has been said about the quieter consequence for anyone who runs inventories: a document that used to be read by an adjudicator, in a process with no cross-examination and no costs, can now be read by a judge.

What actually changed, and when

The Commencement No. 2 Regulations brought Chapter 1 of Part 1 of the Act into force on 1 May 2026 for private assured tenancies. The explanatory note is blunt about the effect: the abolition of fixed term and shorthold assured tenancies, so that all tenancies under the 1988 Act are now assured periodic tenancies, and the abolition of section 21 evictions.

The last section 21 notices could be served on 30 April 2026, and proceedings on a notice already served had to be started by 31 July 2026. After that, the route is section 8: a stated ground, a notice, and a hearing.

Ground 13 is the one that reads your inventory

Among the grounds that survived the Act is Ground 13: deterioration of the dwelling-house or the common parts caused by the acts or omissions of the tenant. It is a discretionary ground, which is the part worth sitting with. A mandatory ground obliges the court to make the order once the facts are made out. A discretionary one does not: the judge decides whether it is reasonable to make the order, having heard both sides.

So the question in the room is no longer “has the deposit been fairly apportioned”. It is closer to: how bad is this, when did it start, was it the tenant, and did the landlord act reasonably. Those are evidential questions, and they are answered by documents made long before anybody thought there would be a hearing.

What that asks of an inventory

Three things change in emphasis.

Provenance matters more than presentation. A PDF of photographs proves that somebody had photographs. It does not prove when they were taken or that they have not been replaced since. A record that carries the capture time of each image, and a hash that would change if the image did, answers a question a smart opponent will ask.

The middle of the tenancy matters as much as the ends. Deterioration is a process. A check-in and a check-out two years apart establish that something changed; they do not establish when, or that the tenant was told. Interim visits, with their own dated evidence and their own record of what was reported, are what turn “the property is in a state” into a sequence a judge can follow.

Service matters. A report the tenant never received is a document you wrote about them. The schemes already take this view for deposits, and a court is not going to take a softer one. Whether the tenant signed, and if not, what proof exists that they were sent it and when, is part of the record.

What has not changed

Deposits. The protection deadlines, the prescribed information, and the adjudication process are untouched by this. What changes is that the same underlying evidence may now have a second audience, in a forum with different rules, and evidence built for the softer one will be tested by the harder one.

It is also worth saying plainly what this article is not. Whether a ground is made out, and whether an order is reasonable, is a matter for the court on the facts. Nothing here is legal advice, and a system that produced your inventory cannot tell you whether you will win. What it can do is make sure the facts you have are the facts you can prove.

A short test for the reports you are producing now

• Can you show, for any photograph in a report from eighteen months ago, when it was taken, and that it is the file that was taken?
• Can you show the tenant received the check-in report, and when?
• If a property deteriorated over a two-year tenancy, can you show the point at which it started?
• Is there anything in the report that a person could have edited after the fact without leaving a trace?

If the answer to the last one is yes, that is the one to fix first. Everything else is a gap in the record. That one is a hole in its credibility.

Sources: The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 2 and Transitional and Saving Provisions) Regulations 2026 · Renters’ Rights Act 2025, Schedule 1 · Shelter England, how section 21 notices will be abolished.