Housing and Animal Ownership
RSPCA Cymru strongly believes that allowing pets in private and social rental properties can yield wide-ranging benefits, help promote responsible animal ownership and facilitate happy, healthy, long-term tenants.
As it stands, many current and prospective tenants face challenges in relation to the keeping of pets in sheltered, social, council and private rental accommodation and dealing with these issues should be an important consideration for all landlords. The use of well-enforced Pets Policies, potentially linked to tenancy agreements, can mitigate many of the issues associated with pet ownership and have often proved to be a useful and successful tool.
Positively, many social housing providers in Wales allow pets and their work is therefore recognised through the RSPCA's annual PawPrints scheme. However, we still have a long way to go to ensure that more renters can benefit from pet ownership and that less people are faced with the heartbreaking decision to give up their animals in order to access accommodation.
As it stands, around one in three people in Wales live in rented accommodation, and 53 per cent of all households in Wales own at least one pet. The Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 came into effect in 2022 to provide greater safeguards to those in the private rented sector. While the act’s guidance forbids landlords from unreasonably refusing a pet, it falls short from making the keeping of companion animals a legal default. As such, adverts for rental properties which state ‘no pets’ remain common and finding suitable rental accommodation can still prove highly challenging for animal owners in search of new housing.
As such, we are continuing our calls for blanket bans on pet ownership to be addressed to provide tenants with greater flexibility to keep their pets where it is appropriate, and where they can look after them responsibly. In 2023, we gave evidence to the Senedd’s Local Government and Housing Committee calling for such action from the Welsh Government and hope that much-needed changes will soon be forthcoming.
To help increase the availability of pet-friendly properties in Wales, the RSPCA has produced standard pet policies for private landlords and best practice guides which can be downloaded below.