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In the context of a business lease renewal there are quite a number of new factors which both landlords and tenants of commercial property need to consider in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdown. That is particularly so in circumstances where the tenant’s business is in leisure, hospitality, retail, or some other business which hasn’t been able to carry on in lockdown and no benefit whatsoever has been derived by the tenant from its leased premises. Rent during this period may well not have been paid and cash strapped tenants may have negotiated for rent suspension, or waiver. Fortunate indeed is the tenant which finds it has a business interruption insurance policy, such as that apparently issued by Hiscox, which seems to cover the risk which has “come home to roost” here.

The government’s pledge to “build, buld build” and its announcement of “Project Speed” surely represents a great opportunity for schools and academies who have struggled for years, if not decades, with school buildings and facilities seriously in need of refurbishment, to grasp this opportunity and get their school refurbished.

In acting for a landed estate seeking to resist, or at the very least keep the consequences to the minimum of flat tenants exercising their rights to collectively enfranchise the freehold to the block of flats, or mansion house within which their flats were situated, care was taken to identify what constituted the ‘Specified Premises’ which the flat owners could insist be transferred to them and differentiate from that

Overturning previous judgements of both the High Court and the Court of Appeal the Supreme Court has ruled that a landlord could use a qualified tenant covenant controlling the making of planning applications and use this alone to reasonably refuse consent to the making of a planning application the grant of planning permission to which (1) if implemented would increase the residential use made of the building and (2) would immediately increase the risk of enfranchisement of the landlord’s freehold interest to the landlord’s financial detriment. The qualified tenant covenant controlling the making of planning applications sufficed for the majority of the judges while those dissenting from this view felt more explicit controls in the lease were needed for the landlord to eliminate this risk given that the tenant user covenant in the lease didn’t explicitly further restrict residential use made of the premises.

R (on the application of Miller) v The Prime Minister, Cherry and others v Advocate General for Scotland