Renters' Rights and the Proper Approach to Pets

With the Renters’ Rights Act now in force and us heading towards implementation I am increasingly being asked by landlords and agents about consent for pets. I was recently speaking with a journalist on this topic and found myself using the meme “it's not about you”.

While this might seem facetious, what I mean by this is that frequently landlords and their agents will give reasons for wanting to say no to pets that are entirely to do with them and their personal viewpoints on pets. So, for example, people will say to me that they don't want pets in their property or, more usefully, that they have a potential allergy to pet hair and might want to live in the property again themselves. There also seems to be quite a narrow assumption for most landlords and agents that pets that we mean cats and dogs, while the definition of pets is not limited in the RRA. Of course most people have cats and dogs as pets but there are a lot of other possibilities. There is also the point that cats and dogs are not all the same. There are wide variations in size, exercise needs, allergens and space requirements. The current thinking for a lot of landlords and agents is quite one dimensional in relation to pets.