Renewing a lease?  Be realistic

CTIL v Christopher George Manwaring (and others) (“Totties Farm”)

This May 2025 renewal case highlights the importance of landowners understanding how best to protect their legal position without going overboard, given the landlord in this case lost on every drafting point they raised.

In this case, the Greater London Authority (“GLA”) template lease was referred to as a comparison to the drafting being sought by the landlord.

three mainThe main three points at issue were as follows:

1. Health and safety – the landlord’s requirement for the operator to provide a health and safety file on request was considered onerous and intrusive, given the professionalism expected of the parties and existing safeguards in the Code.

2. Rent review – the proposed review was an upwards-only review which went beyond the GLA template and was not based on Code valuation principles, so it was not imposed.  

3. Alienation – The GLA template refers to the fact that an operator can share with or assign its lease to any other person to whom the Code applies. The tribunal held that in Totties Farm the landlord’s proposals were instead needlessly complex, likely to cause disputes, and not aligned with the flexibility intended by the Code.

Cellnex Connectivity Solutions Limited (“Cellnex”) v Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government (“Croydon County Court”)

This case involved a request for Cellnex to install new equipment on the rooftop of Croydon County Court. They made an application under both paragraph 26 of the Code for interim rights allowing them to progress the installation, and under paragraph 20 of the Code for permanent rights. The initial hearing was in March, with subsequent hearings taking place in April and June.

Whilst Cellnex’s connectivity conundrum was noted, the landowner was in any event concerned about granting rights to Cellnex, given the nature of the site chosen as a court building dealing with confidential information and criminal cases, along with other site-specific sensitivities.

In a nutshell, the tribunal’s approach was as follows:

• They concluded that Cellnex had demonstrated a ‘good arguable case’ that the Paragraph 21 Test had been met, so they granted interim rights.
• That said, they acknowledged that “careful consideration [still] need[ed] to be given to the bespoke drafting of terms [in the permanent agreement]…to meet the concerns…identified in respect of security, access and noise” on the basis that this is not a situation in which “a Claimant’s standard terms are in any way appropriate”.
• When the hearing of the permanent rights application took place, most of the drafting points had been agreed, save for six points. Given Cellnex’s success in the points relating to use of the roof, forfeiture and sharing, they were awarded their costs in the Paragraph 20 aspect of the reference.

The Birketts view

Choose your arguments carefully so as not to become fixated on points that a tribunal is unlikely to be sympathetic towards.

A tribunal will often honour a landowner’s justified requirements, and this was clearly demonstrated in Croydon Crown Court. That said, these requirements will always be weighed against the need to maintain an effective telecommunications network, and so caution should be exercised against becoming entrenched in complicated and onerous drafting which is not proportionate to protecting landowner rights.

It helps to seek early professional intervention so as to understand the risks and navigate the drafting in a pragmatic, proactive and collaborative way, which avoids the expense of litigation where possible.