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Your landlord has a deadline on 1 October, and it is about people who are not online
From 1 October 2026, if you rent from a private registered provider of social housing, you get a new right to see information about how your home is managed. From 1 April 2027 you can request specific information directly.
To use either, you will almost certainly need to be online. Not everybody is.
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government · Social Tenant Access to Information Requirements: policy statement · Checked 8 August 2026
Two things, on two dates. A publication scheme from 1 October 2026, with certain classes of information published proactively, without anybody having to ask. Then individual information requests from 1 April 2027, where a tenant asks for something specific and gets an answer.
Tenant is defined broadly. It includes licensees and shared owners holding under 100% of the equity.
A publication scheme is a website. An information request arrives, in practice, by an online form.
Eight million UK adults cannot do all eight of the tasks that make up the basic level of digital skills, and the sharpest predictor is not age. It is qualifications. Fifty-three per cent of adults with no formal qualifications reach that basic level, against ninety-three per cent of graduates. Attainment is 71% among adults not in paid work.
Those groups are heavily represented in social housing. So a right that exists only online is, for a real share of tenants, a right that exists on paper.
Ipsos for Lloyds Banking Group · Essential Digital Skills 2025 · Fieldwork 5 March – 2 April 2025
Four things a landlord can do before October
- Find out how many of your tenants have never used your online portal. Not how many are registered. How many have logged in this year.You should get a number that is lower than anybody in the room expects. That number is the size of the problem and it takes an afternoon to get.
- Decide, now, what the non-digital route is. A phone number that is answered, a form that can be posted, a person at a desk. Write it down and publish it alongside the scheme.You should have one sentence you can put on the page: here is how to do this if you are not online.
- Check that your published information is readable by somebody who is online but not confident. Reading age, plain English, no PDFs that need pinching and zooming on a phone.You should find at least one document that fails. Twenty per cent of online UK adults depend exclusively on a smartphone.
- Brief whoever answers the phone. They will be the route for everybody the scheme does not reach, and they will find out first.You should have told the contact centre before October, not after the first request arrives.
Ofcom · Adults' Media Use and Attitudes 2026 · 2 April 2026
Briefing a team so they can help somebody who is not confident online is a day's work and it is what the paid programmes do. But the first three are yours and they do not need anybody from outside.
Checked by a person · not auto-published
Published 8 August 2026 · Sources: MHCLG policy statement, Ipsos for Lloyds Essential Digital Skills 2025, Ofcom Adults' Media Use and Attitudes 2026
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