Right to Rent in England – Guide

We are required by law to check the residency status of each prospective tenant over the age of 18 years before allowing you to live in one of our properties. We need to formally identify you and verify your legal right to live in England and we need to see particular documentation to prove this.

When you sign up for a property we will need to visually inspect the original of certain documents from a Government checklist. We will visually check that these documents are genuine and we will need to take copies of these documents and retain them for the duration of the tenancy and up to one year after the end of the tenancy. We may need to keep these documents for longer than the duration of the tenancy and one year if the law requires it and we may need to share this information with relevant third parties.

We will ask you to fill out our “Right to Rent in England” Tenant Application Form to confirm your acceptance of us keeping and where necessary sharing your documents, you will also be confirming the authenticity of the documents that you provide.

It is required that this application form is completed in the presence of the landlord or agent so that visual proof of your identity and authenticity of original documents can be confirmed. We will be checking any photographs for a likeness, dates of birth, signatures for comparison and expiry dates of documents.

Please read through the government document below to familiarise yourself with credible documents that you will want to bring along to the sign up with you. We will return all documents to you straight away after we have taken copies.

More information can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/right-to-rent-landlords-code-of-practice

British citizens, European Economic Area nationals and Swiss nationals are classed as permanent residents.

All documents as shown in the approved list will be acceptable however passport documentation provided from Nationals of the European Economic Area are the most common document that tenants provide as this single document demonstrates a permanent right of residency in England.

The following countries are members of the European Economic Area:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.