The Renters’ Rights Act changed the law for 11 million tenants who live in private properties in England and the 2.3 million landlords who rent them out.

These were the biggest changes to private renting in nearly 40 years so we needed to make sure that landlords and tenants understood their rights and responsibilities for the reforms to be a success.

To help them prepare for the changes, we had to create or update 72 pieces of guidance. Policy leads in the department worked closely with content designers from both MHCLG and the Government Digital Service (GDS) to deliver this work.

You can read the guidance for tenants and landlords on GOV.UK for an overview of the changes.

In this blog post, I share some valuable lessons learnt from the collaboration between content design and policy teams on this large-scale and complex project.

Combining policy and design expertise from the start

Content designers can often be pulled into a project quite late. This means the service is not necessarily getting the full value we bring, such as designing and writing with user needs in mind.

But in this project, content designers were brought in right from the start as we were committed to user-centred design (UCD). This meant that we were able to produce accurate, good-quality guidance with users at its heart. We were writing and amending guidance whilst policy was being debated and refined to make sure it was ready as quickly as possible for users.

Building relationships with policy leads over time also helped us to tailor our approach as each policy team worked differently.

Understanding user needs

Alongside our early research to understand how landlords and tenants access guidance and from what sources, we ran a workshop with policy leads to get them thinking about user needs and what tenants and landlords needed to know.

Bringing UCD approaches into early thinking was important to frame the upcoming work.

Pair writing

The strategy for producing the guidance was to start with a blank page or a page with headings to decide on what needed to be included.

Policy leads and content designers wrote together on calls. This is known as pair writing. Pair writing needs more time upfront but produces more accurate and readable content. It reduces the need for lengthy back-and-forth across multiple documents, emails and messages where meaning and detail can be lost.

Working on all the guidance together meant we used consistent language across all the pieces.

Here’s what Hannah, a policy colleague from the Affordability team, had to say about her experience of pair writing and UCD:

“I learned how powerful a user-centred approach really is. Policy teams often talk to stakeholders, but pair writing takes it further. It teaches you to reflect on how real people will use what you’re writing. Clarity isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’ – it’s crucial. If people can’t understand the guidance, the policy won’t deliver what it’s meant to.”

Navigating complex challenges flexibly

The bill had to be debated in the House of Commons and House of Lords before it could become an act, which means it becomes law. This meant that deadlines shifted throughout the project.

We were developing the guidance while the bill was being debated and amended, so being able to work extremely flexibly was essential. This was especially true towards the end of the project, when last-minute deadlines or bill timelines impacted on ways of working with policy teams having to juggle multiple priorities alongside the guidance.

We also had several layers of clearance with policy and legal teams to make sure the guidance was accurate. Changes were made and then came back to us for pair writing. The process was complex and took time.

Publishing guidance ahead of time

We published landlord guidance 6 months in advance to give users time to prepare for the changes. This meant we had to balance quick delivery of the changes with the fact that landlords, letting agents and organisations that represent landlords and tenants needed time to prepare.

Local councils are responsible for the enforcement of the act, so we also had to publish guidance ahead of time to allow them to adjust their processes and prepare their teams.

Publishing information about the new rules so far in advance presented unique challenges.

Working with GOV.UK content designers from GDS

As we weren’t able to publish the guidance on the GOV.UK’s pages managed by GDS before the bill became law, we used pages which are owned and edited by MHCLG. However, it was not possible to fully mirror how the content would appear on the mainstream GOV.UK pages.

Content designers on the GOV.UK team (who are part of the Government Digital Service and separate from MHCLG content designers) usually aren’t involved in writing the specialist content for departments. However, in this case we shared these early drafts with them. This was because we wanted this advance guidance to match what would go on mainstream GOV.UK pages as much as possible once the policy became law on 1 May 2026.

They reviewed, pair wrote and fact checked the content with policy teams, before it came back to us. The guidance then went through several stages of clearance.

By working with the policy teams to create content in advance, the content designers from the GDS GOV.UK team got a deeper understanding of the rules and could develop a better strategy for the tenant content going on their GOV.UK pages in April and the landlord content moving over in May.

A GOV.UK page showing the Renters' Rights Act guidance on assured periodic tenancies

Successful collaboration on a large project

As a content designer, I’m proud to have worked on a project where legislation is explained in an accessible way through guidance. The guidance has a large reach across many members of the public and I can see the impact of our work.

We took a collaborative and open approach to writing guidance with policy colleagues and it paid off.

Policy and legal teams were receptive and understood the value of good content design. They gave us feedback, clarification and nuance even when we had urgent or short-notice questions. Stakeholders working with tenants and landlords have told us the guidance is clear and easy to follow, and the online pages received unusually high usefulness ratings. Everything was kept on track by the delivery side of policy, and content designers worked hard to get the guidance written and published in time.

We couldn’t have delivered this huge piece of work without working closely with GDS and MHCLG’s internal Publishing team so here’s a big thank you to them too!

What’s next?

We’re continually reviewing and improving the published guidance through user research.

There is a lot more we can learn in our department and across government from delivering guidance at such a large scale and working closely with policy teams.

If you work in digital or policy in the public sector and want to know more about how we designed and delivered this project, join us at Services Week 2026. Register to attend our session on Friday, 3 July, to learn more about our user research and content management systems, and explore the detail behind our work.