Your applicant cannot get a reference. Now what?

A good applicant, a clean credit file, an employer who confirms the salary. One gap: their current landlord will not answer the phone.

It is one of the most common reasons a let stalls, and in July 2026 it got an official answer that most of the coverage skipped past. This is what was actually said, what the alternatives really prove, and where each one still leaves you carrying risk.

What the government actually said

In a written parliamentary answer in July 2026, the Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook replied to a question from Beccy Cooper MP about landlords withholding tenancy references.

The line the trade press picked up was this one:

"Where a landlord has requested a reference from a previous landlord and is unable to obtain this, we encourage landlords to make use of other available referencing criteria."

The alternatives the minister named were employment verification, credit checks, affordability assessments and local authority guarantee schemes.

Two things are worth being precise about, because the headlines were not.

This is not guidance. It is a written answer in Parliament. There is no consultation, no published document, no new duty and nothing to comply with. If you read "the government urges landlords to adopt alternative referencing methods" and assumed a rule had changed, nothing has.

The sharper half of the answer got dropped. The same reply also confirmed this:

"The government has no plans to introduce a statutory duty for landlords to provide tenants references when requested."

So the situation you are in is settled policy rather than an oversight: the previous landlord does not have to reply, and nobody is going to make them.

That reframes the problem. You are not waiting for a system to fix itself. You are deciding what to accept instead.

From £7.99 a month, LetCompliance lets you order a full tenant reference in the app for £24.99 a check, or a guarantor reference for £19.99, and keeps the result on the same record as the application and your notes on why you said yes. Get started

Why the reference is missing usually matters more than that it is missing

Before reaching for a substitute, it is worth asking why the reference has not come. The reasons are not equal.

The landlord is slow, or an agent has changed. Extremely common and means nothing. Chase once, then move on to the alternatives.

The tenancy is still running and the tenant has not given notice. Also common, and a real bind for the applicant: many landlords will not comment on a live tenancy. Not a red flag on its own.

The applicant has never rented. First-time renters, people coming out of a family home, people returning from abroad. There is nothing to obtain, so this is a gap in history, not a gap in character.

The landlord is refusing, and the applicant knows why. This is the one that matters, and it is also the one an applicant will usually steer around rather than lie about. Ask directly. The answer, and how it is given, tells you more than the reference would have.

Treating all four the same way is how landlords reject good tenants and accept bad ones in the same week.

What each alternative actually proves

Each of the minister's alternatives answers a different question. None of them answers all of them, and knowing which is which is the whole job.

Credit check. Proves how someone has handled credit. It shows defaults, County Court Judgments and how much they already owe. What it does not show is whether they paid their rent, because rent is not usually reported to credit files. A clean file is reassuring about debt and close to silent about tenancy conduct.

Employment verification. Proves the income exists and is current. It is the strongest single check for affordability and the easiest to fake, which is why it is worth confirming through a channel you chose rather than one you were given. It says nothing about how someone lives in a property.

Affordability assessment. Proves the rent is a sensible share of what they earn. It is arithmetic, not judgement, and it is the check most likely to be quietly skipped when a landlord likes an applicant.

Local authority guarantee or bond scheme. Where a council runs one, it puts an institution behind the tenancy. Terms vary enormously between councils, so read what is actually guaranteed and for how long before treating it as cover.

A guarantor. Not on the minister's list, but a common substitute in practice. A guarantor is only worth what the paperwork is worth: a name on a tenancy agreement is not a guarantee. It needs its own properly drawn deed, with the liability defined, and the guarantor referenced in their own right. The deed of guarantee guide and template covers what that has to contain.

Rent in advance. Landlords reach for this instinctively, and it is now the most restricted option of the lot. Before asking, read the rules on rent in advance rather than assuming the old norms survived.

Building a picture instead of ticking a box

The useful shift is away from "did they pass" and towards "what do I actually know".

A reference from a previous landlord, when you get one, is a single data point from a person with their own motives. It can be generous because they want the tenant gone, or hostile because of a dispute you are not being told about. It was never the gold standard it is treated as.

Three independent, mediocre signals usually beat one glowing reference. Income confirmed through a channel you picked, a credit file with no CCJs, and an affordability figure that is not stretched will tell you more than a two-line email from an agent who barely knew them.

Write down what you checked and what you found, whatever you decide. If the tenancy goes wrong later, the question is rarely whether you had a reference. It is whether you can show what you knew and when.

Where this leaves you legally

Two boundaries are worth keeping in sight while you are improvising.

You still cannot discriminate. Widening your checks is not permission to narrow your applicants. The rules on refusing tenants because they claim benefits or have children apply exactly as they did before, and a reference gap is not a lawful proxy for either.

You still have to do the checks that are actually required. Alternative referencing is about commercial confidence, not statutory duties. Right to Rent, deposit protection and the documents you must serve at the start of a tenancy are unaffected by how much you liked the applicant. The Right to Rent guide covers the one that most often gets rushed when a let is running late.

Doing it without the paperwork sprawl

This is the point where a let usually turns into a folder of screenshots, a WhatsApp thread and a spreadsheet that only one person understands.

LetCompliance keeps the whole applicant picture on one record: the application form, the credit-backed reference, the guarantor and their own reference, the affordability figures, and the notes you made about why you said yes. When you make them the tenant, their details carry into the tenancy record that the agreement, the deposit and the compliance dates are built from, so they are not typed again.

Where an ordinary reference has not been enough, the Tenant Risk Report is the deeper look: a written risk grade produced by a credit risk analyst rather than a pass or fail, which is the right tool exactly when the standard check has come back thin.

General information, not legal advice. The parliamentary answer quoted above is from July 2026; policy positions can move, so check the current position before relying on it.