A trade association is furious with the government as it now intends to introduce a national register of landlords in spite of a previous promise of not going ahead with one.

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The government is putting its support behind the set of recommendations proposed in an independent consultation and review of selective licensing, one of which was to set up a national landlord register.

It should be noted that at this moment in time, the government hasn't given its final 'thumbs up' to the proposals but has left the final decisions within the hands of the MHCLG - Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

The trade association has already told the government of its thoughts when it responded to its recommendations.

The policy manager of the association, said: “Ministers have repeatedly made clear a national register of landlords would become an unnecessary and costly additional layer of bureaucracy. We agree. All it would become is a list of good landlords which brings us no closer to finding the crooks that operate under the radar.”

He backed up the stance with the comment made last year by the housing minister, Heather Wheeler, who told the Commons: “The government does not support a mandatory register of private landlords. The majority of landlords provide decent and well managed accommodation and requiring those landlords to sign up to a national register would introduce an unnecessary and costly additional layer of bureaucracy.”

The policy manager also responded to other recommendation points and said: “Selective licensing has become a replacement for lost central government funding and provides no assurances to tenants about the quality of accommodation.

“Properties do not need to be inspected before a landlord is given a licence and the association has found that many councils are charging eye-watering sums of money for almost nothing in return.

“Local authorities need the will and the resources to put real effort into finding the criminal landlords who never come forward to make themselves known.

“That means using a range of information they can already access including council tax returns, information on tenancy deposits and benefit data to root out the minority of landlords who bring the sector into disrepute.”

Another trade body is also highly critical of the government's recommendations when saying that as usual the government refuses to listen to landlords.

A spokesperson said: “Far too often we see local authorities failing to live up to their side of selective licensing. It’s shameful that the review has ignored our call for regular reporting against schemes’ published objectives, which would be easy to implement and would actually hold councils to account.

“The majority of selective licensing schemes are introduced without any thought having been given to their implementation, funding and enforcement, leading to good landlords paying for effectively nothing. For the most part, selective licensing has failed to root out the bad landlords and the recommendations in the report will do very little to change that.”

Many within the sector are expecting a wave of changes over the summer for the private rented sector, such as the exact details on how landlords will be required to join a redress scheme by law, as well as estate and letting agents having to achieve certain qualifications to operate within the sector.

No doubt there will be more announcements made by the government on other measures for the over regulated and taxed private rented sector.

Richard Merrick of PIMS, said: "At the end of the day landlords and companies just want to get on with their jobs to the best of their abilities, without being further hampered by unnecessary mandates which invariably involves paying out even more money