Your tenant is in Breathing Space: what you can and cannot do

The letter arrives without warning, usually by email, and it does not read like something that matters. A debt adviser has started a Breathing Space for your tenant. There is a reference number, a date, and very little else. Most landlords file it and carry on chasing the arrears.

That is the mistake. From the moment that moratorium starts you are legally barred from doing several things you were probably about to do, including serving the notice already sitting in your drafts. Get it wrong and you have breached the regulations, and you have handed your tenant a reason to have your notice set aside later.

This guide is the practical version: what actually stops, what does not, and what you should do on the day the notification lands.

What Breathing Space actually is

Breathing Space is the everyday name for the Debt Respite Scheme, run through FCA-authorised debt advisers and local authorities. A tenant cannot apply directly to you or to a court. They go to a debt adviser, and if eligible the adviser starts the moratorium and notifies every creditor, including you.

There are two kinds, and the difference matters:

It is not debt forgiveness. Nothing is written off. It is a pause, designed to give someone in difficulty room to get advice without enforcement action landing on them mid-process.

The part that stops a possession claim dead

This is the bit most landlord guidance skates over, and it is the reason this article exists.

The Debt Respite Scheme regulations do not say "you cannot chase rent" in general terms. They name specific possession grounds. Under regulation 7 of the Debt Respite Scheme Regulations 2020, during a moratorium a creditor must not:

Grounds 8, 10 and 11 are the rent arrears grounds. Ground 8 is the mandatory one (since 1 May 2026: at least three months' rent unpaid if rent is monthly, or 13 weeks if weekly or fortnightly, at both service and hearing). Grounds 10 and 11 are the discretionary arrears grounds.

So if a Section 8 notice on ground 8 is drafted and ready, it does not go out. If you served one last week and were about to issue, that stops too.

Alongside that, GOV.UK's guidance for creditors requires you to stop three more things on the protected debt:

That last one catches a lot of landlords out. The friendly "any update on the arrears?" text message is not allowed.

What your tenant must still do

Here is the half that protects you, and it is worth reading twice because tenants are often told only the first half.

A moratorium covers the arrears that existed when it started. It does not cover the rent that falls due afterwards. GOV.UK is explicit that ongoing liabilities are not moratorium debts and the debtor "needs to keep paying these if they can", and it lists a rental agreement for the debtor's primary residence as exactly that kind of ongoing liability — "this does not include arrears of rent for the property accrued up to the start of the breathing space".

In plain terms:

And if the tenant stops paying the ongoing rent, that is a failure to meet their obligations under the scheme, which can lead to the breathing space being cancelled at the midway review. A moratorium is not a free 60 days of living rent-free, and a tenant who treats it that way tends to lose it.

Why this bites harder in 2026 than it used to

Two things changed on 1 May 2026, and together they make Breathing Space a much bigger deal for landlords than it was when the scheme launched.

Section 21 is gone. The no-fault route out of a tenancy no longer exists for new notices. Before, a landlord facing an arrears problem had a second door. Now the arrears grounds are the route, and the arrears grounds are precisely what the moratorium blocks.

Ground 8 has to be satisfied twice. As amended by the Renters' Rights Act, the arrears threshold must be met both when the notice is served and at the hearing. That makes timing everything. A 60-day pause in the middle of a rising arrears position is not just delay, it can change whether the ground is available at all, in either direction, depending on what the tenant pays while the clock is stopped.

The practical consequence: the sequencing of a possession claim now matters more than it did, and a moratorium lands right in the middle of it.

What you can still do

A moratorium is narrow. It is not a general injunction against being a landlord. During one you can normally still:

The regulation names grounds 8, 10 and 11 and no others. That wording is narrow on its face, but do not read it as a green light to serve on some other ground as a workaround: whether a notice is genuinely on other grounds, and how it interacts with the general bar on "enforcement or recovery action" for the protected debt, is exactly the sort of question a court will look at closely if it thinks you were trying to get round the moratorium. If your reason for possession is genuinely unrelated to the arrears, take advice before serving anything.

Challenging a Breathing Space, and the two deadlines

You cannot appeal simply because it is inconvenient. There are limited grounds, and there are two clocks.

Ask the debt adviser for a review — within 20 days. GOV.UK gives creditors a window of "20 days of the breathing space starting" to request a review. The grounds are narrow: that the moratorium unfairly prejudices your interests, that the debtor is not eligible, that the debt does not qualify, or that the debtor has enough money to repay.

Apply to court — within 50 days. If the adviser's decision does not satisfy you, you can "apply to a court to cancel a breathing space", within 50 days.

The midway review — day 25 to 35. Separately, the debt adviser must review the case "between day 25 and day 35" to check the tenant is meeting their obligations, which includes paying ongoing liabilities such as the current rent. If your tenant has stopped paying rent entirely during the moratorium, this is the point at which that becomes relevant, and it is worth making sure the adviser has an accurate picture of the account.

Note how tight those windows are relative to a 60-day scheme. Twenty days is not long if the notification sat unread in a shared inbox for a fortnight.

What to do on the day the notification arrives

A short, unglamorous checklist. Most of the damage in this area is done in the first week, by landlords who did not realise anything had changed.

At LetCompliance, the reason we care about this is the ledger split at step 4. Our arrears tracking separates what was owed on a given date from what has accrued since, which is the exact distinction the scheme turns on, and the same distinction a Section 8 notice has to get right afterwards.

When it ends

At the end of the moratorium the protection simply stops. The debt was never written off. Interest and charges can resume from that point (not retrospectively for the frozen period), enforcement action becomes available again, and if the arrears still meet the threshold you can serve on the arrears grounds.

What you cannot do is pick up exactly where you left off with a notice served before or during the moratorium and assume it is still good. Ground 8's threshold has to be met at service and at the hearing, so a notice whose arithmetic was overtaken by events during a 60-day pause is worth re-checking rather than relying on.

One honest caveat. Breathing Space sits at the junction of debt law and housing law, and some of the interactions, particularly around notices served on other grounds while a moratorium is running, are not settled by clear guidance. The dates, deadlines and the grounds 8, 10 and 11 restriction in this article come straight from the regulations and GOV.UK's creditor guidance and are quoted above. Anything beyond that, especially if you are mid-claim, is worth twenty minutes with a housing solicitor. It is considerably cheaper than a set-aside.