Leasehold and balcony solar: do you need the freeholder's consent?

Check the building before you check the lease

This ordering is deliberate. A freeholder’s consent is worthless if the product may not lawfully be installed on your building, and flats with balconies are exactly where the restrictions bite.

The specification prohibits installation on ACM and MCM cladding, on HPL cladding, on timber cladding systems, on timber balconies, and on buildings subject to external wall remediation works or equivalent fire safety restrictions. It also requires that panels are not fixed to walls forming a property boundary between dwellings, that escape and rescue paths stay clear, and that the installation does not increase the risk of fire spreading along external walls or balconies to neighbouring properties.

If any of those apply, the conversation with your freeholder is over before it starts — and it is better to know that first than after you have paid a consent fee. Our pre-installation checklist runs through them.

The distinction that decides everything

Leases restrict alterations in one of two ways, and the difference is worth more to you than any argument about solar.

A qualified covenant prohibits alterations without the landlord’s consent. An absolute covenant prohibits them full stop.

Section 19(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 applies to a lease “containing a covenant condition or agreement against the making of improvements without a licence or consent”, and provides that such a covenant

shall be deemed… to be subject to a proviso that such licence or consent is not to be unreasonably withheld

On the wording, the section reaches covenants framed around consent. A covenant that forbids alterations outright is not one against making them without consent, so the implied proviso has nothing to attach to. The Leasehold Advisory Service puts the practical position simply: if your lease allows alterations with the landlord’s consent, the landlord must give consent unless there is a reasonable reason to refuse.

What a freeholder may ask for even when they must consent

“Not unreasonably withheld” is not “free”. Section 19(2) expressly preserves the landlord’s right to require:

• payment of a reasonable sum in respect of any damage to or diminution in the value of the premises or any neighbouring premises;
• legal or other expenses properly incurred in connection with the licence or consent;
• where the improvement does not add to the letting value, and where it is reasonable to ask, an undertaking to reinstate the premises to their prior condition.

There is also a mechanism if the sum itself is the dispute: where a court of competent jurisdiction has determined what is reasonable, “the landlord shall be bound to grant the licence or consent on payment of the sum so determined to be reasonable”.

For an 800 VA device that is designed to be removable, a large diminution-in-value figure would be a strange claim. Legal costs for a licence to alter are the more realistic charge, and they can exceed the cost of the kit.

Is it an alteration at all?

Worth settling before you concede it. The specification requires that any attachment method “shall be reversible and non-permanent, and shall not compromise the structural integrity, fire performance, or weatherproofing of the building”.

So a compliant kit is, by design, one that comes off again. Standing on your own balcony floor on a ballasted frame, nothing drilled and nothing altered, the case that this is an alteration to the demised premises is a thin one. Bolted to a railing or a wall, it is not thin at all.

Two leasehold-specific wrinkles sit underneath this:

• The balcony may not be yours. Whether a balcony is part of the demised premises or retained by the freeholder is a question about your particular lease, and the answer varies between buildings that look identical from outside.
• External walls usually are not yours. Even where the balcony is demised, the external wall it hangs off commonly is not.

If you are also a landlord

If you let your flat, you are a leaseholder and a landlord at once, and both routes apply to you.

Your tenant can make a request under the Energy Efficiency (Private Rented Property) Regulations 2015 — and the guidance is explicit that where third-party consent is needed, “you, the landlord, must identify this need and seek consent”. That work is yours, not theirs. Conversely, leaseholders are themselves a category of tenant under those Regulations and can use the request route against a superior landlord, with the additional requirement that they confirm in writing that their own tenants consent where that is required.

What the government said, and did not do

The consultation response is candid that this is a barrier. Respondents pointed out that the benefits for renters and flat-dwellers are “subject to leasehold and planning barriers”, and that “leasehold restrictions, landlord consent requirements, planning barriers and wider building management considerations may limit uptake unless addressed alongside the framework”.

The government’s answer is guidance, not reform: its forthcoming consumer guidance will “make clear that renters, leaseholders and residents in managed buildings should obtain any permissions that may be required before installing a device”.

That is an instruction to ask. Nothing in SI 2026/848 or the specification gives a leaseholder a right to install anything, and nothing overrides a lease.

What we could not confirm

Whether any freeholder or managing agent has published a position on plug-in solar. We found none. Large managing agents will presumably develop one, and when they do it will shape this more than the legislation does.

What a tribunal or court would make of a ballasted, unfixed device on a demised balcony. We found no decision on it. The argument that it is not an alteration is available and we think it is a reasonable one to put; it has not been tested.

If your freeholder has given you a decision either way, please tell us. Actual outcomes are worth more here than any amount of further reading, and this is the page where we have the least of them.