Solar for flats and apartments: is it even possible?
Usually not on the roof, because the roof is almost never yours. But the honest answer is more useful than a flat no — because plug-in solar reaches most of the situations rooftop cannot, and the leasehold question has a specific legal shape worth knowing.
The obstacle is almost never planning. It is ownership.
Class A of the permitted development order covers “a dwellinghouse or a block of flats”, so the planning position is usually straightforward. What stops a flat owner is that the roof is not theirs to use.
Three routes exist: communal solar promoted by the freeholder, balcony or plug-in solar on a surface you do have rights over, and — rarely — a top-floor lease that demises the roof.
First: what does your lease actually demise?
Most flat leases grant the internal space — often described as extending to the inner surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings — and retain the structure, roof and external walls to the freeholder.
Read the demise clause. If the roof is not in it, a rooftop array is not yours to install regardless of what planning says.
Then read the alterations covenant, because that decides balcony and wall installations too. The distinction is set out in full on our leasehold page: a qualified covenant requiring consent carries an implied reasonableness requirement under section 19 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927; an absolute prohibition does not, and there is nothing to be reasonable about.
Check whether leaseholders own the freehold. In a block where the leaseholders have collectively enfranchised, or hold shares in a residents’ management company, the decision is one you have a vote in rather than one made about you.
The three routes
Communal solar — a single array on the block’s roof, serving landlord-supplied loads: lifts, stair lighting, corridors, pumps. Technically the simplest, because there is one owner, one connection and one meter. The benefit reaches leaseholders as reduced service charges. It needs the freeholder or the management company to want it, so the work is persuasion rather than engineering.
Balcony or plug-in solar — on a surface within your demise. This is the route that actually reaches individual flat owners, and it is why our plug-in cluster exists. It still needs consent under the alterations covenant in most leases, and the fire safety position matters on balconies in particular.
A demised roof — genuinely rare, but top-floor flats occasionally have roof rights or a demised terrace. If yours does, you are in the ordinary rooftop position, and the planning and buying guidance applies as it would to a house.
Even where a freeholder is willing, an individual leaseholder’s array on a shared roof raises problems nobody wants to own: who maintains it, who is liable for leaks, what happens when the roof is recovered, how the cable reaches your meter through common parts, and what happens when you sell.
Communal schemes exist precisely because those questions have one answer instead of twenty.
If you want to propose a communal scheme
Establish who decides. Freeholder, managing agent, or a residents’ management company with a board you can join.
Frame it as a service charge question, because that is what it is. An array serving communal loads reduces a cost every leaseholder pays.
Expect questions about the roof. Structure, remaining life of the covering, and what happens at the next recovering — structural surveys covers what a competent assessment involves.
Expect questions about the lease and the accounts. Whether the cost is recoverable through the service charge, and on what basis, is a question for the managing agent and possibly for a solicitor.
Do the arithmetic honestly. Communal loads run all day, which makes self-consumption unusually high — often the strongest argument available, and one that a residential array on a single flat cannot make.
Renting a flat
The renting page covers the tenant position, and the short version is that a tenant needs the landlord’s consent, and a leaseholder landlord needs the freeholder’s — so there can be two layers of permission above you.
Sources
- Landlord and Tenant Act 1927, section 19
- The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, Schedule 2, Part 14
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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