Start with the lease, not with the general rule
Every answer on this page has the same footnote: your lease decides. The Leasehold Advisory Service sets out the usual division and then says directly, "check the terms of your lease carefully, because leases can vary." Two flats in the same converted terrace, sold in different decades, can have materially different repairing obligations.
What you are looking for in the lease is the definition of the demised premises, the repairing covenants on both sides, the insurance clause and the access clause. On most leases those are four separate places in the document and they have to be read together.
The usual division
| Item | Usually |
|---|
| Pipes serving only your flat | You, even where part of the run is outside the flat |
| Your appliances: washing machine, dishwasher, your own boiler | You |
| Sanitaryware, taps, shower, waste within the flat | You |
| Internal finishes: plaster surfaces, floor coverings, decoration | You, on most leases |
| Communal pipes, risers, cold water tanks, communal boilers serving more than one flat | Freeholder |
| Roof, external walls, parapets, gutters, structure | Freeholder |
| Buildings insurance for the block | Freeholder arranges; leaseholders pay through the service charge |
LEASE's wording on the first and fifth rows is worth having exactly: leaseholders are usually responsible for "pipes serving their own flat, even if part of the pipe is outside the flat", and landlords for "communal pipes, water tanks or boilers that serve more than one flat".
The clause people misread: a pipe outside your flat can still be yours
This catches people constantly. A cold feed that leaves your flat, runs three metres through a communal ceiling void, and comes back to serve only your bathroom is, on most leases, your pipe. It is not communal because it serves one flat. Where the pipe is has nothing to do with it; what it serves does.
The practical effect in a London conversion is that a leak in a communal hallway ceiling can be entirely your responsibility, and a leak inside your own ceiling can be entirely the freeholder's, if the pipe above it is a riser feeding the flats above. You cannot tell which from the damage. You can tell from isolating the services and seeing which one loses pressure, which is the first thing a detection visit does.
The demise line in older buildings
Victorian and Edwardian conversions are the hardest, because the pipework was installed piecemeal over a century by people who were not thinking about lease drafting. Typical problems:
- A single soil stack serving every flat, boxed into different flats at different floors. Communal, almost always, but the boxing that has to come off to reach it is inside somebody's demise.
- Shared branches where two flats were created from one dwelling and the waste was never separated. Whether a shared branch is communal is a drafting question that older leases often simply do not address.
- Pipework in the floor void between two flats. Which flat's demise includes the void depends on whether the lease demises to the underside of the joists, the top of them, or the finished surfaces. This one sentence decides who pays.
- Retro-fitted heating installed after the lease was granted, running through parts of the building the lease never contemplated.
Where the cause or the boundary is genuinely unclear, LEASE suggests an assessment from a professional such as a surveyor, who can also advise on what repairs are needed. For the plumbing half of that, a pressure test on each circuit separately tells you which system is losing water before anyone argues about which lease clause it sits under.
Insurance, and the excess
Damage to the fabric goes on the block's buildings policy. LEASE: buildings insurance should cover "repairs and redecoration to the fabric of the building, such as redecorating or replastering a ceiling, or repairs to fittings such as kitchen cabinets", your landlord is responsible for arranging it, and you will need to ask them to claim. It will not cover your possessions, which are a contents matter.
Then the excess. LEASE: it "might be recoverable from the person who was responsible for the leak, or it might be shared by all leaseholders through the service charge. This will depend on what the lease says." On blocks with a history of escape of water claims, LEASE warns the policy "might no longer cover leaks, or there might be a very high excess", in which case the landlord may expect leaseholders to fund repairs themselves.
Two consequences follow for you as a leaseholder. First, find out the escape of water excess on your block's policy before you have a leak, because it changes whether claiming is worth it at all. Second, if the excess is recoverable from whoever caused the leak, establishing the cause properly stops being an academic point.
What you are expected to do
Insurers expect mitigation, and the lease usually requires you not to cause damage to other flats. In practice:
- Know where your stop tap is before you need it.
- Deal with symptoms quickly. LEASE lists taking steps to fix problems quickly, such as a dripping tap or a slow-draining sink, among the ways to reduce the risk. A leak you knew about and left is the kind of delay an insurer treats as negligence.
- Report building defects — roof damage, blocked gutters — to the landlord or agent, in writing.
- Hold contents insurance that covers escape of water.
- Tell the managing agent early when water appears, even if you think it is your own problem.
Where we come in
The question a detection visit answers for a leaseholder is narrow and useful: which service is losing water, and where. Isolation and pressure testing by circuit separates your pipework from the communal runs; thermal imaging and moisture mapping show where the water has travelled; tracer gas finds what neither picks up. That is the finding that tells you whether this is your bill, the freeholder's, or the flat above's, and it is the same finding the insurer needs. See what the report contains, and how block managers handle it if the agent is already involved.
Detection is charged at our hourly rate, fixed before we attend, with no fee for the search time if we do not find it. Trace, access and reinstatement covers the repair and putting the opening back.
