For thirty-eight years, Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 was the workhorse of private-sector eviction. A landlord could end an assured shorthold tenancy by serving two months' notice and, if the tenant did not leave, obtaining a possession order through the accelerated procedure. No reason needed.
That route closed on 1 May 2026.
What replaced it
Possession is now only available through specific legally defined grounds, set out in the reformed Schedule 2 of the Housing Act 1988. There are mandatory grounds (the court must grant possession if you prove the ground) and discretionary grounds (the court may grant possession if it is reasonable).
The grounds that matter most to ordinary private landlords:
Ground 1, Landlord moving back in
You or a close family member (spouse, civil partner, child, parent, sibling) intends to occupy the property as their only or main home. Four months' notice. You cannot have used Ground 1 to evict someone in the previous twelve months.
Ground 1A, Sale of the property
You intend to sell the property. Four months' notice. Critically: you cannot re-let the property within twelve months of recovering possession on this ground. If you serve notice to sell and then change your mind, you are out of the rental market on that property for a year.
Grounds 8, 10, 11, Rent arrears
The mandatory rent arrears ground (Ground 8) still exists but the threshold has been raised. The tenant must now be in at least three months of rent arrears at both the date of notice and the date of the court hearing. Two months' notice required.
Ground 14, Anti-social behaviour
This ground has been strengthened. The court must give 'particular regard' to the impact of the behaviour on others. Notice can be served immediately in serious cases, with court proceedings starting straight away.
Ground 4A, Student tenancies
A new possession ground for student lets in HMOs, you can recover the property for the next academic year by serving notice between June and September, with possession effective at the end of the tenancy academic year. There are strict notice requirements.
What the process actually looks like
Here is the practical sequence, a self-managing landlord trying to recover possession in 2026 will run through some version of this:
- Identify the correct ground. Picking the wrong ground means the case is thrown out. There is no general 'I want my property back' option any more.
- Serve the correct notice. Each ground has its own form, notice period, and content requirements. A defect in the notice means the case is thrown out.
- Wait the notice period. Most grounds require two to four months. The tenant can remain in the property and pay (or not pay) rent during this period.
- File at the County Court. If the tenant has not left, you issue possession proceedings. The accelerated procedure that used to apply under Section 21 is no longer available for most grounds.
- Court hearing. Listing times in London vary materially. We are seeing hearings 8 to 16 weeks after issue, depending on the local court's backlog.
- Possession order. If you win, the court grants a possession order, typically with 14 days for the tenant to leave.
- Bailiff/enforcement. If the tenant still does not leave, you apply for a warrant of possession. Bailiff lead times in London are currently 4 to 10 weeks.
End to end, on a contested case, a landlord is realistically looking at six to ten months from serving notice to physical recovery of the property. During that period, the tenant may stop paying rent, and the landlord is on the hook for council tax, utilities (if liable), and any deterioration.
What this costs
For a contested possession in London, a landlord who instructs a specialist housing solicitor should budget realistically as follows (these are rough working ranges, every case differs):
- Drafting and serving notice: £300 to £600
- Issuing court proceedings: £355 court fee plus £800 to £1,500 solicitor
- Contested hearing: £1,500 to £4,000 in counsel and solicitor fees
- Warrant of possession: £130 court fee plus enforcement costs
Add the rent foregone during the process, typically four to nine months at the property's market rate, and the all-in cost of a single contested possession in a £2,000-per-month London house can easily exceed £15,000 to £25,000 in cash and opportunity cost.
Where landlords are getting caught
Three patterns we are seeing already, just three weeks into the new regime:
Wrong notice for the ground
Landlords are using out-of-date Section 21 templates and old possession notice forms. The forms changed on 1 May. Anything issued on a pre-1-May template is defective.
Selling on Ground 1A and then changing their mind
Landlords serve notice under Ground 1A intending to sell, recover possession, then market the property to let when their sale falls through. This breaches the 12-month re-letting restriction and triggers a civil penalty of up to £40,000.
Trying to negotiate around the rules
'Mutual surrender' agreements where the tenant agrees to leave in exchange for a cash payment, these are still legal, but a poorly drafted surrender can expose the landlord to harassment or illegal eviction claims under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977. Get this in writing, get advice.
The strategic question
The shift is not that eviction is now impossible. It is not. The shift is that the cost and time risk of any difficult tenancy has materially increased. A bad tenant, non-paying, anti-social, or simply uncooperative, now ties up your asset for the best part of a year, with the legal bills you have to fund yourself.
For landlords with a single property, that risk can wipe out a year's profit. For landlords with three or four properties, the risk of one tenancy going wrong is structural rather than incidental.
This is exactly the risk Morgan Prescott takes off the landlord's hands. Under our guaranteed-rent arrangement, we are the tenant on paper. The eviction risk, the court risk, the rent-arrears risk all sit with us, and you receive a fixed monthly rent for two to five years regardless of what happens inside the property.
Build the evidence before you need it
The deepest change the new grounds regime makes is not procedural but evidential: possession now has to be proven, and proof is built long before a notice is served. If arrears become the issue, the ledger is the case: dated rent demands, a clean payment history, records of every conversation about the debt. If anti social behaviour becomes the issue, the case is the log: dated incident reports, complaints from neighbours in their own words, police references where they exist. If you one day need the property back to sell or to live in, your case is the honesty of the intention and the documents that evidence it.
The time to set up this record keeping is at the start of a tenancy, when everyone is on good terms and it feels unnecessary. A managed tenancy generates this file as a by-product: rent collection produces the ledger, inspection visits produce dated condition reports, and every tenant contact is logged as a matter of routine. Self managing landlords can absolutely do the same; the failure mode is not inability but entropy, because the discipline is only tested on the day it is too late to start.
The economics of settling versus fighting
One more shift worth naming plainly: because a contested possession now takes the better part of a year, the negotiated exit has become a financial instrument rather than an admission of defeat. Where a tenancy has genuinely broken down, a properly documented surrender agreement, sometimes with a payment attached, can cost a fraction of the contested route once you price the rent at risk, the legal spend and the months. The arithmetic deserves to be done coldly each time: what does the court route cost in cash and time at realistic estimates, what would a clean handover in eight weeks be worth, and which number is smaller.
Handled badly, these conversations create their own legal risk, which is why the drafting and the conduct around them matter as much as the sum. Handled well, they are simply two adults pricing an outcome. This is work we do for landlords with inherited problem tenancies more often than any other single task, and the consistent lesson is that the earlier the situation is assessed honestly, the cheaper every available exit becomes.
The cheapest possession case is the one that never starts
The new regime rewards, above everything, not needing it. That sounds glib until you examine where contested possessions actually come from: rushed tenant selection at the start, drift during the tenancy, and surprise at the end. Each is compressible. Selection: the referencing file described across this site, affordability with headroom, verified income, a landlord reference that answers the real questions, guarantors where the file is thin, is the single biggest determinant of whether you ever meet the court service. Drift: rent problems are progressive, and the difference between a wobble and a crisis is usually whether anyone noticed at day five or day sixty; managed tenancies escalate on a fixed timetable precisely so small problems stay small. Surprise: inspections on a calendar mean the property's condition and occupancy are known facts rather than annual discoveries.
None of this abolishes risk; people lose jobs and lives change. But run across a portfolio and across years, disciplined selection and early escalation remove most of the cases that would otherwise have become the six-to-ten-month story this article describes.
Protecting the downside you cannot prevent
For the residual risk, two protections deserve a look. Rent protection insurance, bought while a tenancy is healthy, typically covers arrears and the legal costs of recovering possession, subject to referencing conditions and policy limits; it cannot be bolted on once trouble has started, which is why the moment to consider it is at tenancy start, not at the first missed payment. And the structural alternative is the one this site describes at length: a company let or guaranteed arrangement in which the counterparty standing between you and the occupier is a business whose covenant, not a court timetable, is what your income rests on. Which protection suits you is a portfolio question rather than a slogan, but going entirely unprotected into a regime where the downside case runs the better part of a year is a choice that should at least be made consciously.
Questions we hear most about the new process
Can I still get my property back to sell it? Yes, on four months' notice under the sale ground, with the caveat that the intention must be genuine and the property cannot be re-let for a year if the sale falls away. Plan the marketing and the notice together so the empty period is as short as the process allows.
My tenant has stopped paying. How fast can I act? The mandatory arrears route needs three months of arrears at notice and at hearing, so the practical answer is that the clock matters from the first missed payment: document the arrears, engage the tenant early, and take advice before the position drifts. Early engagement resolves a striking share of arrears cases without any notice at all, which is the cheapest outcome available.
Is it worth doing this without professional help? The forms are public and a careful landlord can navigate them, but the failure points, wrong ground, defective notice, thin evidence, each restart the clock at your expense. Whether the help comes from a specialist solicitor or from a manager whose files make the case easy to prove, the economics rarely favour going in alone on a contested matter.
Step back far enough and the theme of the new regime is simple: possession has moved from being a right you exercise to a case you prove, and cases are won in the preparation. The landlords who will barely notice the change are those whose tenancies were selected carefully, papered completely and managed attentively, because for them the evidence already exists on the day it is needed. The landlords at risk are those for whom every tenancy file would need to be reconstructed from memory and a shoebox. Deciding which of those two landlords you are going to be is free, and it is the single highest-return decision the new framework leaves entirely in your hands. Everything else in this article is detail; that choice is the substance, and it is available to every landlord regardless of portfolio size, borough or budget, starting with the next tenancy you sign.
If you have a difficult tenancy on your hands, or you simply want to know whether the new regime is worth managing yourself, get in touch for a free 24-hour valuation.