The check that protects you both ways

How we work

Why everyone gets the same process

In England a landlord must not let an adult occupy a property as their only or main home without establishing that they have the right to rent. The duty is wider than most people assume. It covers every adult aged eighteen or over who will live there, whether or not they signed anything, and it has to be done before occupation starts rather than tidied up afterwards. The penalty for getting it wrong is civil and substantial, calculated per occupier rather than per property, and where a landlord knows or has reasonable cause to believe an occupier is disqualified, the exposure stops being financial and becomes criminal.

That pressure produces a predictable and damaging reflex, which is to check harder on the people who seem foreign. It is unlawful. Applying a different standard by reference to someone's nationality, ethnicity, name, accent or appearance is discrimination, and so is demanding a particular document when the law permits several, or turning down an applicant because their permission to be in the country is time limited rather than indefinite. A landlord who tries to manage the immigration risk by profiling simply swaps one liability for another, and the second one is harder to defend because the reasoning tends to be written down in the messages.

There is only one process that answers both at once, and it is not complicated: ask every adult occupier, at the same stage, by whichever permitted route they prefer, whether that is original documents seen in person, a Home Office online check with a share code, or a certified digital identity provider. Record it the same way each time, date it, and keep it for the tenancy and a year beyond, because that record is what establishes the statutory excuse. Diarise the follow-up where permission is time limited. The rest of how we let follows the same logic of doing it before rather than after: the deposit protected and the prescribed information served, the gas record, the electrical report, the energy certificate at band E or better, alarms tested, the How to Rent guide handed over. If one of those is missing on the day, the start date moves rather than the keys.