Criminal Background Checks on Tenants: What Is Actually Legal in the UK

Search this question and you will find a great deal of confident writing, much of it wrong, and some of it quietly imported from American practice where the law is entirely different. This page sticks to what the UK statute book and the government's own guidance actually say, and it is explicit about the questions nobody has answered.

Disclaimer: This guide is for information only and does not constitute legal advice. It describes the position in England as at 19 August 2026, and it does not tell you whether to accept or decline any applicant. Where the law is genuinely unresolved, it says so rather than guessing. Consult a solicitor for your specific situation.

The Single Sentence That Settles Most of It

The Ministry of Justice publishes guidance on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. Its section on housing says:

"A housing provider or landlord cannot apply for a DBS check on you, however they may request that you get a basic DBS check (sometimes at your cost) and share this with the housing provider or landlord."

Two rules in one sentence, and the distinction between them is what most articles collapse.

You cannot obtain a check. There is no route by which a landlord submits an application about an applicant.

You can ask them to obtain one. A basic DBS certificate is applied for by the individual, about themselves, and they may then choose to show it to you.

Everything below is detail on how that works and what it does not permit.

The Three Levels, and Which One Exists for You

Disclosure levels come from Part V of the Police Act 1997.

Basic. Section 112. Applied for by the individual about themselves, from age 16. Section 112(3) confines the content to unspent convictions and cautions. This is the only level available in a lettings context, and it is available only because the applicant chooses to get it.

Standard. Section 113A. Requires a registered body to countersign, and requires that the question being asked is an exempted question — one prescribed in the Exceptions Order.

Enhanced. Section 113B. As above, plus police intelligence, and a narrower list of prescribed purposes still.

The gate on Standard and Enhanced is at the point of issue. Section 113A(2) and section 113B(2) each require a countersigned application from a registered person and a purpose that qualifies. A landlord is neither.

The Exceptions Order does not mention you

The instrument that lists exempted questions is the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975, as amended.

The words tenant, landlord, letting agent and lodger appear in it zero times.

The only accommodation-adjacent entry is article 3(1)(a)(v), which concerns the Homes for Ukraine sponsor check — and that is a check on the host, by the scheme, not a landlord checking a tenant. It is the exception that proves the rule, and it is regularly misquoted as though it opened a door for private lettings. It does not.

A correction worth making

You will read that it is "illegal to ask a tenant for a Standard or Enhanced DBS check". That is not how the prohibition works, and getting it wrong leads people to the wrong conclusion about what is risky.

The bar is on issue, not on asking. There is no offence of requesting a certificate you are not entitled to see. What exists is section 123(2) of the Police Act — an offence of knowingly making a false statement to obtain a certificate — and section 124(7), a summary offence carrying up to six months' imprisonment and/or a fine at level 3, which is built around the chain of disclosure from a registered person.

The practical consequence is not that you commit an offence by asking. It is that you will never receive the certificate, because the DBS will not issue it, and in the meantime you have created a written record of asking for something you are not entitled to — which is a data-protection and discrimination-risk problem rather than a criminal one.

Spent Convictions: What the Applicant May Lawfully Withhold

This is the part with real teeth, and it is also the part most often cited from the wrong subsection.

You will see section 4(3)(b) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act quoted at landlords. Read it: its operative words are "office, profession, occupation or employment". A tenancy is none of those things. Citing 4(3)(b) at a lettings decision is a mis-citation, and if you are relying on it you are relying on nothing.

The provisions that actually apply are section 4(2) and section 4(3)(a).

Section 4(2) provides that where a question seeks information about a person's previous convictions, the question "shall be treated as not relating to spent convictions … and the answer thereto may be framed accordingly", and that the person "shall not be subjected to any liability or otherwise prejudiced in law" by reason of a failure to acknowledge a spent conviction.

So an applicant with only spent convictions may answer "no", and that answer is not a lie in law. You cannot later treat it as a misrepresentation, and you cannot build a possession case on it.

Section 4(3)(a) prevents a spent conviction being a proper ground for excluding a person from, or prejudicing them in, any occupation or employment — and while that again is not a tenancy, section 4(1) and 4(2) together are what do the work here.

When a conviction becomes spent

The periods sit in the section 5 Table, as amended by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. For an adult:

Some convictions never become spent. Section 5(1)(b) excludes sentences of more than four years for offences listed in Schedule 18 to the Sentencing Code. Those remain disclosable on a basic certificate indefinitely.

Note what the custodial rows mean in practice: the clock starts at completion of the sentence including licence, not at release, and not at conviction. Landlords routinely calculate this two years early.

The Data Protection Problem Nobody Mentions

Suppose an applicant hands you a basic certificate voluntarily. You now hold criminal offence data, and that is regulated separately from ordinary personal data.

Article 10 of the UK GDPR permits processing of personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences only under the control of official authority or where authorised by domestic law with appropriate safeguards. The domestic authorisation is Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018, and for this purpose Part 3 of that Schedule — paragraphs 29 to 37 — is exhaustive. If your processing does not fit one of those nine conditions, you have no lawful basis for it at all.

Work through them for a private landlord and the realistic answer is paragraph 29: consent. Paragraph 36 looks tempting until you follow it through to Part 2 paragraph 10, whose limb (b) a private lettings decision does not satisfy.

Which puts you on consent — and the ICO's published warning about consent is worth reading before you rely on it:

Consent must be freely given, and it is not freely given where there is a clear imbalance of power between the individual and the controller, or where the individual has no genuine choice.

A prospective tenant who believes the tenancy depends on producing a certificate does not obviously have a genuine choice. We are not going to tell you that the ICO has ruled on this, because it has not: the ICO publishes nothing on tenant screening, and the examples it gives for the imbalance-of-power problem do not include landlords. The argument is available to a tenant. It has not been tested. Proceed knowing that.

Two further consequences follow from consent being your basis. Consent can be withdrawn, at which point your basis for continuing to hold the certificate evaporates. And you should not be keeping the document: note the outcome if you must, return or delete the certificate, and do not build a filing cabinet of other people's convictions.

Enforced subject access

Section 184 of the Data Protection Act 2018 creates an offence of requiring another person to produce a record obtained by exercising a subject access right, in connection with recruitment, continued employment, or a contract for services.

Landlords are sometimes told this criminalises asking a tenant for a DBS certificate. That is not clearly right, and it is worth being precise about why.

Schedule 18 paragraph 3(1) confines the offence to a record obtained "in the exercise of a data subject access right". A DBS certificate is not obtained by making a subject access request — it is issued under the Police Act on the individual's own application. So the most common landlord scenario probably falls outside section 184 entirely.

Further, section 184(1) is framed around recruitment, employment and contracts for services, none of which describes a tenancy. If a landlord fell within section 184 at all it would have to be under section 184(2), and whether a residential tenancy can be brought within it is arguable and, as far as we can establish, unresolved by any reported decision.

We are therefore not going to tell you that asking is a criminal offence. We are telling you that the position is untested, that the safe course is to ask for nothing you do not need, and that the penalty where the offence does bite is a fine — and, by section 196(2), a fine only in England and Wales.

Discrimination: State the Risk Accurately

A criminal record is not a protected characteristic. Section 4 of the Equality Act 2010 lists the nine, and it is not among them. Anyone telling you that rejecting an applicant for a conviction is direct discrimination is wrong.

The route that exists is indirect discrimination under section 19: a provision, criterion or practice applied to everyone, which puts people sharing a protected characteristic at a particular disadvantage, and which the person applying it cannot show to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.

And for letting premises, the relevant part of the Act is Part 4 (sections 32 to 33) — the premises provisions — not the services provisions in Part 3. Getting that wrong changes which exceptions apply.

Now the careful bit. The factual premise of an indirect-discrimination argument is that contact with the criminal justice system is not evenly distributed across ethnic groups. The government's own Ethnicity Facts and Figures service reports that in the year ending 31 March 2023, black people were 2.2 times as likely to be arrested as white people. That statistic is solid and it is the government's own.

What we are not going to do is tell you that a blanket no-convictions policy has been held to be indirect race discrimination in a UK housing context. No UK case, no EHRC guidance, no ICO guidance and no GOV.UK material makes that link. It is an argument that follows from the structure of section 19 and a published statistic. It is not a decided point, and the American case law that gets cited into these discussions has no application here whatsoever.

The practical takeaway is not "this is illegal". It is that a blanket rule is the shape of policy that has to survive a proportionality test, and a case-by-case assessment tied to the actual tenancy risk is a much easier thing to defend than "we never accept anyone with a record". Our guide to tenant screening and the Equality Act covers the general framework.

The Renters' Rights Act does not help here

Chapter 3 of the Renters' Rights Act 2025 creates new discrimination provisions in the private rented sector, and they are frequently over-summarised. They cover benefits and children, and nothing else. Section 39 is a power to extend the chapter to other characteristics by regulations; it has not been used. Criminal records are not within it.

What a Credit Check Does Not Tell You

Because a lot of landlords believe this box is already ticked. GOV.UK's guidance is explicit that credit checks:

"will not disclose any convictions, unless they are for a financial crime (e.g., fraud)."

A credit file carries County Court Judgments, bankruptcies, IVAs, Debt Relief Orders, the electoral roll and payment history. It is a financial record. If your referencing provider's report came back clear, that tells you nothing at all about offences, and it was never designed to. See what landlords actually see on a credit check and why credit checks are not enough.

What We Would Actually Do

Not advice, and not a policy you should adopt without your own thought.

1. Do not ask a blanket convictions question on an application form. It generates data you have a weak basis for holding, an answer that may lawfully be "no" regardless of the truth, and an audit trail of a practice that has to survive a proportionality test.
2. If you have a specific, articulable concern, ask about that, at the point it arises, and record why.
3. If you are going to accept a basic certificate, ask for it once, at offer stage, from the person you are minded to let to — not from every applicant at the start. Note the outcome, return the document, keep nothing.
4. Assess affordability and conduct on evidence you are entitled to: income, payment history, previous landlord references, the ways to check a tenant that do not touch offence data.
5. Write down the reason for every decision, positive and negative. A contemporaneous, non-discriminatory reason is the entire defence to an indirect discrimination claim, and it is worthless if written afterwards.
6. Never treat a "no" to a convictions question as a lie where the convictions are spent. Section 4(2) says it is not one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a landlord do a DBS check on a tenant?

No — not on them. The Ministry of Justice's guidance on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act puts it directly: "A housing provider or landlord cannot apply for a DBS check on you, however they may request that you get a basic DBS check (sometimes at your cost) and share this with the housing provider or landlord." A basic DBS certificate is applied for by the individual about themselves, and it shows unspent convictions only. Standard and Enhanced certificates cannot be obtained for a tenancy at all, because there is no entry for landlords, letting agents or tenants in the Exceptions Order that governs who may ask.

Does a tenant have to disclose a spent conviction?

No. Section 4(2) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 provides that a question about a person's previous convictions "shall be treated as not relating to spent convictions … and the answer thereto may be framed accordingly", and that the person "shall not be subjected to any liability or otherwise prejudiced in law" for failing to disclose one. In plain terms: an applicant may lawfully answer "no" to a question about convictions if the only convictions they have are spent, and you cannot treat that answer as a lie.

Will a credit check show a criminal record?

No. GOV.UK's guidance on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act states that credit checks "will not disclose any convictions, unless they are for a financial crime (e.g., fraud)." A credit file carries public financial records — County Court Judgments, bankruptcies, IVAs, Debt Relief Orders — and payment history. It is not a criminal record search. Landlords who assume a referencing report has screened for offences are relying on a check nobody ran.

Sources

• Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 — sections 4(1), 4(2), 4(3)(a), 5 and the section 5 Table
• Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 — article 3
• Police Act 1997 — Part V, sections 112, 113A, 113B, 123 and 124
• Data Protection Act 2018 — section 184, section 196(2), Schedule 1 Part 3, Schedule 18 paragraph 3
• Equality Act 2010 — sections 4, 19 and Part 4
• Renters' Rights Act 2025 — Chapter 3 and section 39
• GOV.UK: guidance on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974
• GOV.UK Ethnicity Facts and Figures: arrests — year ending 31 March 2023

Screen the Thing You Are Allowed to Screen

The reason landlords reach for criminal record checks is almost never criminal records. It is a general anxiety about who is moving in, looking for something concrete to hold onto.

There is something concrete, and it is lawful, and it is far more predictive of whether the rent arrives: what the applicant's money actually does. LetSorted's screening reads three to six months of bank statements and reports on affordability, income stability and commitments — with no verdict, no score threshold and no recommendation, because the decision is yours to make and ours to inform.

Run your first check, and keep the reasoning you can defend.