Section 21, RRA and the Fixed-Term Trap

I’ve run a few RRA courses/webinars and a fairly frequent question I am asked is on the following scenario:

Section 21 notices have a hard shelf-life of 31st July 2026. What if your fixed term/break clause expires after that point? Does the fact that all tenancies go periodic on 1st May mean that you can ignore the fixed term because as long as the notice expires after 1st May it will be in a periodic contract and so there is no problem?

The fact that I’ve been asked this a few times means that someone is almost certainly going to try this as the idea seems quite wide-spread, or at least not that hard for people to come up with independently.

My stance is that at the time you serve the Section 21 notice it is invalid because it cannot expire earlier than the fixed term. The fact that the fixed term is swept away on 1st May doesn’t retrospectively make the notice valid, in my view. I can’t think of any examples of actions a landlord can take to make a Section 21 notice valid if at the time it was served it was invalid.

It’s also worth pointing towards Schedule 6, Para 4 of the RRA where the transitional provisions for Section 21 are laid out. It starts with ‘a valid [Section 21 Notice] has been given’. If the notice isn’t valid then the transitional provisions are not going to assist.

On the basis that landlords shouldn’t be trying this (but almost certainly will), what are they to do? Well, they need to be looking at the Section 8 grounds because they simply cannot serve a valid Section 21 Notice – it’s still going to be possible to get possession in most scenarios where a landlord would serve a Section 21 today; once you know the landlord’s motivation you can guide them forward.