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Your lease

What's in your lease? An overview.

You can get advice on your lease from The Leasehold Advisory Service – an independent organisation that provides free legal advice to leaseholders. Your lease is an important document – if you don’t have a copy you catn order one from the Land Registry. For more details, see the Land Registry websie.

Your rights and responsibilities

Your exact rights and responsibilities depend on your lease, but a general list can be found in the document below. If you have a question about your rights and responsibilities, please contact us.


Extending your lease

You have the right to extend your lease as long as you meet the qualifying criteria:

  • Your flat must be held under a long lease, i.e. a lease that was granted for more than 21 years
  • You must have owned the flat for more than 2 years

You may be eligible to extend your lease for an additional 90 years - on top of what is left. For example, if you have 7 years left on your lease, you may be given a new lease of 97 years.

You should contact a solicitor before taking any action to extend your lease. Your solicitor will need to send us notice to extend your lease or enfranchise.

You will have to repay our costs of getting a valuation and negotiating and granting a new lease to you or selling the freehold.


Breaches of your lease

Where there is a persistent breach of any term of the lease, we can apply to the court for forfeiture of your lease. If forfeiture were granted, you would lose your home and any value that is in the property.

We would only do this in exceptional circumstances and where a persistent breach of the lease occurs. We will always send you notice of our intention, giving you an opportunity to correct the breach before we make our application for forfeiture.

Ordering a copy of your lease

Always keep your lease in a safe place, so that you can refer to it when you need to. If you need a copy of your lease you can: