The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on when a Section 21 notice is valid where the gas safety paperwork is in dispute. The judgment will take a while. The principle underneath it won't, and it holds in every regulated sector.
In a regulated business, the record is not evidence of the asset. Very often the record is the asset.
A care home without its registration and its files in order is not a care home with an admin problem. It's a building. Lose the licence and the valuation doesn't take a haircut, it goes to zero. Anyone who has run that kind of business holds no romantic ideas about paperwork, because it reminds them daily.
Lettings has exactly the same structure, and plenty of portfolios are run as though it doesn't. Compliance gets filed under the bit you catch up on once the real work is done. So a missing certificate, or one served a week late, sits quietly in a folder as a minor irregularity. Years later it can be the thing that decides whether you can recover your own property.
The real dividing line isn't whether you hold the documents. It's when they were created. Compliance records have to be made at the moment the obligation arises, not reconstructed when somebody asks. Reconstruction is where the gaps appear, and gaps are what get tested.
So the useful thing to do while this case is pending isn't to follow the case. It's a plain test: could you produce today, without going hunting and without asking anyone, dated proof of every document served on every tenancy you hold.
Most operators can't. Doing it now costs nothing but time.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
