Once landlords realise that emailing a link doesn't count as serving the Information Sheet, the next question is usually the bigger one. What does count as proof of service, and how much evidence do you actually need to keep?
This is the question I've been thinking about most over the last few months because honestly, the GOV.UK guidance doesn't spell it out in detail. There's no precise list of what a council enforcement officer will ask for. So what I've done is reason from analogous areas of housing law, look at how proof has worked in deposit scheme disputes and Section 21 challenges, and talk to a few landlords who've already been on the receiving end of council compliance checks for other regulations.
Here's where I've landed.
The Burden of Proof Sits With You
The first thing to understand is that the legal burden of proof sits with the landlord, not the council. If a council asks whether you've served the Information Sheet and you can't demonstrate that you have, the assumption defaults to no. That's a different position to most everyday situations where the accuser has to prove the case.
What this means in practice is that the question isn't whether you did the right thing, it's whether you can prove you did the right thing. Those are not the same question. A landlord who served correctly but kept no records is in roughly the same position as a landlord who didn't serve at all, when an enforcement officer is in front of them asking for evidence.
The Five Pieces of Evidence I'd Recommend Keeping
For each tenant you've served, I'd aim to have five pieces of evidence available. Some of these are obvious and some of them aren't.
The date and time of service. Sounds obvious, but it matters more than you might think. If a council asks in October whether you served before 31 May, you need to be able to point to a specific date. "Sometime in May" isn't proof, it's a hope. Email timestamps work fine. For hand delivery and post, you need to write it down.
The method used. Was this hand delivery, post, email with attachment, or document left at the property? If you used different methods for different tenants, you need to know which method went to which tenant. This matters because the evidence you need differs by method.
The recipient's full name and contact details. Not just "my tenant" but the specific person, in case there are multiple tenants on the same tenancy or the tenancy changes hands later. For email service, the specific email address the document went to. For hand delivery, the specific person who received it.
A copy of the exact PDF you served. This is the one most landlords miss. GOV.UK has updated the Information Sheet at least once already and may update it again. If you served the April version and they ask in July, you want to be able to show which version your tenants received. Save the PDF locally when you serve, not just a link to GOV.UK.
Delivery confirmation where the method allows. For email, this means the sent email with the attachment intact, not just a record of the send. For post, recorded delivery receipts and tracking information. For hand delivery, ideally a signed acknowledgement from the tenant.
If you've got all five for each tenant, you're in a strong position. If you're missing two or three, you might want to top up the record this week while there's still time.
What Evidence Isn't Enough
Worth flagging a few things landlords sometimes assume count as proof but don't, or don't on their own.
A note in your diary saying you served on a particular date. That's a self-made record and carries almost no evidential weight without corroborating evidence.
A screenshot of the GOV.UK page. That just proves the page existed, not that you served the document.
The word of a friend or family member who saw you do it. Witness evidence has some value but it's much weaker than documentary evidence and any council is going to ask for the documents first.
A general statement that you serve all your tenants properly. Even if it's true, it's not proof of any specific instance of service.
The strongest evidence is always the contemporaneous documentary record, created at the point of service, that ties together date, method, recipient, document served, and confirmation of delivery.
Where to Keep It
This is the bit that sounds boring but matters enormously, because evidence you can't find when you need it isn't useful evidence.
I'd suggest a single folder per property, organised by tenant, with everything related to that tenant's service in one place. Whether that's a physical folder, a cloud drive, or built into compliance software, the structure matters less than the principle. When the question comes up in October, you should be able to put your hands on the answer in two minutes, not two hours.
Don't trust your email inbox alone. Emails get deleted, archived in unexpected places, filtered by mistake. Save copies of the key emails as PDFs or screenshots and keep them with the rest of the evidence. Your sent folder six months from now might not look the same as it does today.
If you're using software to manage this, make sure you understand where the evidence is actually stored and whether you'd be able to export it if you needed to give the council a copy. A compliance tool that doesn't give you exportable proof isn't really giving you proof, it's giving you the appearance of proof.
How Long Do You Need to Keep This For?
The Information Sheet duty itself is a one-off transitional requirement. But the proof of service matters for as long as the tenancy continues, plus a reasonable period after.
I'd suggest keeping the evidence indefinitely while the tenancy exists, and for at least six years after the tenancy ends. Six years is the standard limitation period for contractual claims, so it covers most realistic scenarios where someone might dispute service after the fact.
If you're worried about storage, the documents are small. A PDF and an email per tenant is a few megabytes at most. You can keep a thousand tenants' worth of evidence on a free Google Drive account.
What a Council Enforcement Officer Is Likely to Ask For
I've spoken to a few people who've been through council compliance checks for other regulations and the pattern is fairly consistent. They tend to ask for evidence of compliance for a specific subset of tenants, not the whole portfolio. They tend to want to see documents quickly, in the meeting if possible. They tend to be reasonable about minor gaps if the overall pattern is clearly compliant.
The landlord who pulls up a folder, finds the right tenant, and shows the served PDF and the sent email in 30 seconds is in a completely different position to the landlord who says "I'll send it over later this week." The visible evidence of being organised is itself part of the demonstration of compliance.
If you've already missed the 31 May deadline, the evidence question doesn't go away — it just changes slightly. The post on what to do if you serve late covers how to handle the proof trail in that situation.
A Quiet Truth About All of This
The proof of service question is one of the reasons I started building Doorkeep, because it became obvious to me that landlords were going to need a system for this and most of them were going to try to do it in their email inbox and spreadsheets. That works for one or two tenants but it gets unmanageable quickly, and the evidence quality degrades over time as inboxes get archived and spreadsheets get edited.
Try Doorkeep for 99p → Start your trial
Doorkeep stores the served PDF, the email content, the recipient details, the timestamp, and the delivery confirmation in an Evidence Vault you can export at any time. 99p for the first month, £5.99/month after that. The manual process I've described above works perfectly well if you're a one or two property landlord who's organised about this kind of thing. The main thing is to actually keep the evidence, not just plan to.
The deadline is the headline, but the proof is what matters in six months. Don't skimp on it.
Published 15 May 2026. Based on GOV.UK guidance current at the date of publication. This is informational content, not legal advice. Always check the latest version on GOV.UK.