Leasehold Property law. Personally delivered.
Leasehold Property law. Personally delivered.
Where apportionments total exactly 100% but are distributed unfairly, the Tribunal has no jurisdiction to vary them. What landlords and leaseholders can do instead.
Reviewed 25 July 2026
A small flat paying the same as a large one is not, by itself, a ground for varying a lease. The arithmetic has to be wrong, not merely unfair.
Part IV of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987 allows any party to a long lease of a flat to apply to the First-tier Tribunal to vary it, where the lease fails to make satisfactory provision for one of a short list of matters. The list includes the computation of the service charge, and it is exhaustive: nothing outside it will do.
On apportionment specifically, a lease fails to make satisfactory provision where the aggregate of the percentages across the building exceeds or falls short of the landlord's expenditure. That is the ground, and it is narrower than it sounds.
Where the percentages total exactly 100%, the ground is not made out — however inequitably the total is distributed. A studio paying the same percentage as a three-bedroom flat on the floor above is unfair by any ordinary measure, but the arithmetic is satisfied and the Tribunal has no jurisdiction to intervene.
The same is true where a landlord has adjusted its own share to bring a building back to 100%. The sum works; the unfairness is not a ground.
Agreement, under section 37. Two or more leases can be varied together where the requisite majority consents: for fewer than nine leases, all or all but one of the parties; for more than eight, at least 75% of the parties concerned, with not more than 10% opposing. The parties concerned are every leaseholder plus the landlord, so in a hundred-flat block there are a hundred and one parties and seventy-six must agree.
The other opportunity is a block-wide lease renewal. Where the leaseholders own the freehold and are granting themselves new long leases, the company controls the drafting and can adopt one precedent for every flat. That is the moment to correct apportionments, repairing obligations, reserve fund powers and everything else the old leases got wrong — and it does not come round again.
Dealing with defective leases one at a time as flats are sold produces a building governed by several inconsistent schemes and a growing problem. An audit of the leases, followed by agreed variations where possible and a section 37 application where not, is more work at the outset and very much less thereafter.
We audit leases across whole buildings and advise on variations, section 37 applications and block-wide renewals for landlords, management companies and leaseholder groups.
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This article reflects our understanding of the position on 25 July 2026 and is general information rather than legal advice. The law in this area is changing: take advice on your own circumstances before relying on it.
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