Landlord or tenant: who actually pays for the repair
The roof is leaking and your landlord says it is yours. Whether it is depends almost entirely on which lease you signed, and most operators find out which one that was at the worst possible moment.
Repairing covenants are the part of a commercial lease that costs the most and gets read the least. They are also the part where the answer is genuinely unobvious: two leases described the same way on the front page can allocate the roof differently on page eleven.
What follows is the usual position in England and Wales. It is not advice on your lease, because your lease is the thing that decides. But knowing the usual position tells you whether you are having an argument worth having.
The split that matters most
A full repairing and insuring lease, an FRI, puts the whole building on you. Structure, roof, exterior, drains, plant. You repair it and you reimburse the landlord for insuring it. This is the standard commercial lease in England and Wales and it is the single thing tenants are most often surprised by, because the roof is yours despite the fact that you will never own it.
An internal repairing lease keeps the structure and the exterior with the landlord and gives you everything inside the demise. It is the friendlier lease to hold, with one catch covered below.
A tied pub tenancy usually keeps the building with the pub company and gives you the trade, which is generous by commercial standards. The complication there is the inventory: a lot of the kit in a tied pub is theirs, including the cellar cooling and the dispense, so a fault that looks like your equipment often is not.
The catch with an internal repairing lease
The landlord repairs the roof, and then recovers the cost through the service charge. So the new roof still reaches you, as a bill rather than a job, and you have no say in who does it or what it costs.
Two things are worth checking in that clause: whether the service charge is capped, and whether it excludes improvements. A landlord replacing a worn roof with a better one is doing a repair and an improvement at the same time, and a well-drafted clause stops you paying for the second half.
The schedule of condition
If you signed an FRI on an older building without a schedule of condition attached, you may be obliged to hand it back in better repair than you took it on. That is what a dilapidations claim at the end of a term is usually about, and it is a bill that arrives when you have the least appetite for it.
A schedule of condition is a photographic record of the state of the property at the start of the term, and it caps the covenant. It costs a few hundred pounds at the point of signing and it is the cheapest insurance in commercial property. If you have one, dig it out before you accept a claim; if you are signing something now, get one.
Two things override the lease type entirely
Damage you caused is yours whichever way the covenant runs. A repairing covenant allocates fair wear and tear between the parties, and separately almost every lease requires the tenant to make good damage caused by them, their staff or their customers. A window a delivery driver put a trolley through is yours in a building where the landlord holds the exterior.
Statutory testing of equipment you operate follows the operator rather than the owner. The Electricity at Work Regulations and the Gas Safety Regulations put the duty on whoever is in control of the premises. Your landlord owning the appliance does not move the duty to test it.
What to do when something breaks
Report it to the landlord in writing, whatever you think the answer is. A repair you reported and they ignored is a very different conversation from one nobody can find a date for.
Photograph it, with something in shot that dates it.
Find the demise plan and the repairing covenant before you argue. Where the demise boundary falls decides more of these than the lease type does.
If it is urgent and unsafe, make it safe first and argue about the invoice afterwards. Nobody wins the argument about who pays if somebody gets hurt in the meantime.
The pattern worth avoiding is paying for a landlord repair because nobody checked. Once you have paid for one you have made the next one harder to argue about, and the other side will use it.
Check a specific repair
The free Repair Responsibility Checker at paddl-ai.co/hospitality-tools/repair-responsibility-checker takes your lease type and what has gone wrong and shows where each item usually falls, with the reason for each answer. It covers six lease types from a full FRI to a tied tenancy.
Where real money is involved, a surveyor or a property solicitor reading the actual document is cheap next to a dilapidations claim. What a tool like this is for is knowing which repairs are worth taking to them.