Reacting to the government press release “Government steps in to protect families from cowboy builders and aggressive bailiffs”, published by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade on 28 August 2026, and announced by Prime Minister Andy Burnham with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and Minister for Courts and Legal Services Sarah Sackman; and to MoneySavingExpert’s report, in which Martin Lewis calls it “a genuine step forward”. Every fee, notice period and entry rule below is read straight from the legislation and GOV.UK guidance in force today, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it.
Our view, before the detail
This is a real improvement and it is also the slowest kind of good news. Making Enforcement Conduct Board accreditation compulsory closes the gap that has bothered anyone who works with people in debt: the firms most likely to behave badly were precisely the ones free to stay outside a voluntary scheme. Martin Lewis’s line in the press release is the honest summary — some bailiffs “have got away with acting with impunity”. Fixing that is worth doing.
But we would rather you spent the next ten minutes on something else entirely. Nothing announced this morning removes a fee, shortens a notice period or stops a visit. The money that actually leaves a household in this situation is set by a fee table that was quietly rewritten on 1 May 2026, and by a deadline most people miss because it arrives looking like junk mail. That is where the £442 is. So we have put the regulation second and the arithmetic first.
What actually changed this morning
Private bailiffs in England and Wales must now be accredited by the Enforcement Conduct Board themselves, or work for a firm that is, in order to obtain or renew the certificate they need to work. Until today, registering with the ECB was voluntary. Most firms had signed up; the smaller ones were not obliged to. Alongside it, anyone facing enforcement action gets access to an independent complaints process.
Two limits are worth knowing straight away. It covers private bailiffs only — the government is still considering whether councils’ own in-house enforcement teams come into scope. And the ECB, per MoneySavingExpert, gains binding rule-setting power and can strip a firm of its ability to operate, but cannot levy financial fines.
Why this will take up to two years to bite
Accreditation is enforced through the certificate, and under regulation 7 of the Certification of Enforcement Agents Regulations 2014 a certificate has effect, unless cancelled, for two years from the date it was issued. An agent certificated last month is certificated until 2028. Nobody has to re-qualify early because the rule changed. So the requirement phases in across a full two-year renewal cycle from whenever the legislation commences, and the press release gives no commencement date at all.
The fee table that decides your bill
Enforcement fees are fixed in law, not set by the firm. They are in the schedule to the Taking Control of Goods (Fees) Regulations 2014, and the amounts were substituted on 1 May 2026 by the Taking Control of Goods (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2026. For enforcement other than under a High Court writ, the figures now in force are a £79 compliance stage, a £247 enforcement stage, and a £116 sale or disposal stage — with an extra 7.5% charged at the enforcement and sale stages on any part of the debt above £1,900.
Illustrative household, real statutory fees, England and Wales, rates in force from 1 May 2026.
- Debt referred to enforcement. Compliance stage fee £79 is added immediately, before anyone visits. You now owe £679.
- An agent attends. Enforcement stage fee £247. The debt is under £1,900, so no percentage fee applies. You now owe £926.
- Goods removed for sale. Sale or disposal stage fee £116. You now owe £1,042.
A £600 debt has become £1,042. The fees are £442, or 73.7% of the original debt, and not a penny of it is interest. On an illustrative take-home of £2,100 a month with £400 budgeted for food, that £442 is more than a month of groceries — taken from the household least able to find it.
The shape of it matters more than the total. £79 of that £442 is unavoidable once the referral happens. The remaining £363 is a consequence of the visit, and the visit is the thing you still have days to prevent.
The £1,900 threshold, and where it stops mattering
Above £1,900 the percentage fee starts, and it is charged twice — once at the enforcement stage and again at sale.
Illustrative. £3,000 − £1,900 = £1,100 of ‘excess’, and 7.5% of £1,100 is £82.50.
- Compliance stage: £79.
- Enforcement stage: £247 + £82.50 = £329.50.
- Sale or disposal stage: £116 + £82.50 = £198.50.
Total fees £607, turning £3,000 into £3,607. High Court writs run on a separate and much steeper table: £79 compliance, a £200 first enforcement stage, a £520 second enforcement stage and a £550 sale stage, with 7.5% above £1,200. Same debt, roughly double the fees, which is why a creditor transferring a judgment to the High Court is a development worth taking seriously the day you hear about it.
Fourteen clear days — and the twenty-eight nobody mentions
Before an agent can take control of your goods, regulation 6 of the Taking Control of Goods Regulations 2013 requires a notice of enforcement given not less than 14 clear days beforehand. Sundays, bank holidays, Good Friday and Christmas Day do not count towards the 14, so the real window is usually longer than a fortnight on the calendar.
Here is the part almost nobody writes about. Since 1 May 2026, that notice period can be extended to 28 clear days if a debt advice provider makes a request on your behalf before the original period expires. It is free, it doubles your time, and it is the single most useful thing in this article. It is also easy to miss: the request has to come from an adviser, and it has to arrive before the clock runs out. If a notice of enforcement is sitting on your kitchen table right now, that is today’s job.
Three things to do this week
- If a notice of enforcement has arrived, ring a free debt adviser today and ask them specifically about the 28-day extension and about Breathing Space. StepChange, National Debtline and MoneyHelper are all free and independent, and our money worries page lists them with numbers. Fee-charging firms cannot get you anything these three cannot.
- Ask about Breathing Space. Standard protection runs up to 60 days and stops enforcement action, creditor contact, interest and charges — see GOV.UK on the Debt Respite Scheme. An adviser applies for you; you cannot apply directly.
- Read your rights before the door goes. GOV.UK’s bailiff guidance is short and specific: no entry between 9pm and 6am, no forcing entry to a home except as a last resort for criminal fines, Income Tax or Stamp Duty, and no entry at all if only under-16s or vulnerable people are present.
If none of this applies to you today, the useful version is prevention: the arrears that reach a bailiff almost always started as one missed priority bill. Our guides on clearing debt in the right order and budgeting that survives a real month are built around exactly that ordering problem, and the debt payoff calculator will show you which balance to attack first.
What is still uncertain
Three things, and they all matter. Commencement: the press release names no date for when mandatory accreditation starts, and the two-year certificate cycle means full coverage arrives well after that. Councils: in-house local authority enforcement teams are outside the scheme while the government considers them, which leaves a visible hole given how much enforcement is council tax. Teeth: a regulator that can withdraw accreditation but not fine has one very blunt instrument and nothing in between. We will update this page when a commencement date is published.
Where coaching ends, and where to go if this is urgent. Everything above is public information and arithmetic, which is coaching territory. Choosing between formal debt solutions — a debt relief order, an IVA, bankruptcy — is not, and it is not something to decide from an article. Go to MoneyHelper, StepChange or National Debtline first — free, independent, and better placed than us on the day a bailiff is due. Buzz Money Coach is a trading style of Buzz Money Ltd, which is not authorised to give regulated financial advice and does not. Where regulated advice is what you need, we say so and can introduce you to Equity & General, authorised and regulated by the FCA (No. 474163) — optional, with no obligation, and E&G pays us a commission on introductions that convert.
Mandatory oversight of bailiffs is a change worth having, and in two years’ time it should mean the worst firms are gone. Between now and then, the arithmetic is unchanged: £79 for the letter, £247 for the visit, £116 for the van. The 14 clear days on that notice, and the 28 you can ask an adviser to turn them into, are the only part of this you control.