Lawmakers in Wales are due to publish a draft bill banning landlord and letting agent fees.

The Welsh Assembly indicated earlier in the year that a fees ban would be put in place in line with the proposed ban in England and similar legislation that has operated in Scotland for some time.

The ban in England is due to start after April 2019.

The Assembly’s Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee will call for evidence about the likely impact of the ban after the bill is published.

Once bans are established across England and Wales, letting agents and landlords cannot charge fees for setting up a tenancy.

The ban has been in place in Scotland since 2012.

The effect the ban in Wales will have on landlords is unclear.

Housing charity Shelter found landlords in Scotland were no more likely to have increased rents since 2012 than landlords elsewhere in the country.

“Although some landlords and commentators presume that the ban on fees must have inevitably driven an increase in rents, the evidence suggests that, if this has occurred at all, the increase is small and short-lived,” says the report.

Any rise in rents was attributed to economic factors rather than a letting fee ban.

However, Mitchell Thomson of UKtenantdata, a credit reporting service, wrote in a blog: “One immediate effect of the fees ban was that rents increased between January 2013 to January 2014 – the period immediately following the fees ban – by 4.3%, where they had been relatively static for the previous 12 months.”

The reason for the rent increase, he revealed, was letting agents switched their tenancy set-up charges to landlords, who passed the cost on to tenants as a rent rise.

The Welsh letting fee ban will apply to landlords outside Wales letting homes inside the principality