Lina Mattsson and Jamal Demachkie assess what a tenant should do when faced with a request for access.
“The Tenant shall permit the Landlord access to the Premises” - virtually all leases will contain a tenant covenant along these lines, but what precisely does it mean? What steps must a tenant take when faced with a request for access? In spite of the frequency with which these questions arise, they have not been subject to a binding authority until now.
In Dorrington Residential Ltd v 56 Clifton Gardens Ltd [2022] UKUT 266 (LC), the Upper Tribunal provided the answer. In doing so, it also dealt with questions concerning the validity of a request for access and the timing of such a request in the context of the Covid pandemic.
The facts
The tenant, Dorrington, owned the long lease ...
“…a request for access on Christmas Day might be just as objectionable as a request for access outside normal working hours”.
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