The freeholder said no: boiler and flue permission in a leasehold flat

This is for the person who has already asked. You wrote to the freeholder or the managing agent about replacing your boiler and you got a no, or a bill, or nothing at all, while you have an installer waiting and a boiler you do not trust. Most pages on this subject stop at telling you to check your lease. That is where the problem starts, not where it ends.

First, which of the three leases have you got

It matters more than anything else, because it decides whether the freeholder even has to engage with you. The Leasehold Advisory Service, the free government funded service for leasehold problems, sets out four things a lease can do about alterations: ban them outright, allow them, allow them with the landlord's written permission, or allow them subject to conditions set out in a licence.

If yours bans alterations, the freeholder does not have to consider your request and does not have to reply, and no amount of chasing changes that. The route there is varying the lease, which is a legal process rather than a heating one, so take the free advice before you spend money.

If yours allows alterations with consent, you are in a stronger position than most people realise, with one important exception.

Source: The Leasehold Advisory Service, alterations and home improvements

The line that decides it is not the boiler, it is the wall

Leases split a building in two. The demised premises are the parts you own and control, broadly the inside of your flat. The retained premises are the parts the freeholder owns or controls, which usually includes the external walls, the structure and, in many leases, the chimneys and flues.

Where your lease allows alterations with consent, the freeholder must reply in writing, must give consent unless there is a reasonable reason to refuse, and must state their reasons. That is a real protection, worth quoting back at anybody who ignores you.

The exception is the one that catches boiler jobs. That duty does not apply where the alteration involves the retained premises, and a new hole through an external wall for a flue terminal is exactly that. So a swap entirely inside your own four walls and a swap that needs a new flue penetration are not the same request, even though your installer priced them as one job. LEASE's own list of clauses that commonly restrict work names two that could have been written for this situation: changing the boiler system, and drilling into the external wall to install a flue.

Source: The Leasehold Advisory Service, alterations and home improvements

The change to the job that unblocks most refusals

Once you know the wall is the problem, the answer is usually to take the wall out of the job.

Ask your installer for the constrained version: boiler in the same room and the same position, existing flue penetration reused, no new terminal anywhere on the outside of the building, nothing running through a wall, ceiling or void that is not yours. A replacement that does all of that is often not an alteration to anything the freeholder owns, which changes the conversation completely.

Two things trip people up. The condensate pipe, which every condensing boiler needs and older appliances did not have, so a swap that looks like for like can still create a new drain run outside. And flue position: a modern terminal may not sit exactly where the old one did, and an inch of difference is still a new opening. Ask the installer to state on the quote whether the existing penetration is being reused. That sentence is what you send to the managing agent.

Get both versions priced. You then have a choice rather than a stand off.

If they simply have not replied

Silence is the most common version of no. Your lease may set a period for a response. If it does not, you can ask for an answer by a date, but the freeholder is under no obligation to meet your deadline. What they must do is answer within a reasonable time, and LEASE suggests two weeks as a reasonable period to allow.

Put everything in writing, date it, keep copies, and never act on a yes given over the phone. Send the whole picture at once, because a complete request is much harder to sit on: what the work is, where the flue goes, your installer's quote and Gas Safe details, and your proposed dates.

Source: The Leasehold Advisory Service, alterations and home improvements

If they want paying before they will say yes

A fee for dealing with a consent application is an administration charge, and those are regulated. Three things have to be true before you owe one: the lease has to allow it, the amount has to be reasonable if it is a variable charge, and the demand has to arrive with a summary of your rights and obligations in the prescribed wording.

That third one is the part almost nobody knows. The prescribed summary says in terms that unless it is sent to you with the demand, you may withhold the administration charge, and you cannot be charged interest until they provide one. So when a licence fee turns up as a bare line on a letter, the first question is not whether it is fair, it is whether the summary came with it.

If you think the charge is unreasonable or not payable under your lease, you can challenge it. In England that is the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber), in Wales the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal. LEASE make one point about that application which is easy to miss and expensive to miss: at the same time, apply for an order preventing the landlord from recharging their own costs of the proceedings back to you through the service charge or as another administration charge.

Source: The Leasehold Advisory Service, administration charges

The premium, and why the flue is where you are exposed

There is a second kind of money and it works differently. A premium is a payment for the consent itself, rather than for the cost of dealing with the application.

It is against the law to charge a premium for non-structural alterations that need the landlord's consent or licence, whatever your lease says. But where the work affects parts of the building the freeholder owns, a premium can be charged, there is no legal limit on it, and you cannot challenge the amount at a tribunal.

Read that next to the section above and the shape of the problem appears. Keep the job inside your own flat and you have protections at every step. Put a new hole in the outside of the building and you are negotiating, not enforcing. Which is the real reason to ask whether the existing flue route can be reused, and to ask it before you accept anybody's price.

Source: The Leasehold Advisory Service, alterations and home improvements

What you must not do

Do not let anybody start while consent is outstanding, however long it has taken and however reasonable you think you are being. An alteration made without a permission the lease required is a breach, and the breach attaches to the flat rather than to the person who caused it. That is why leaseholders inherit them: buy a flat whose previous owner moved the boiler and put a flue through the wall without asking, and the problem is now yours. Unauthorised alterations make a flat harder to sell, remortgage and insure, which is a far worse outcome than a delayed boiler. If it has already happened, the route is retrospective consent rather than silence.

Source: The Leasehold Advisory Service, alterations and home improvements

Where to get help, and what to do with your quotes

LEASE is free, funded by government, and leasehold consent is exactly what it exists for. Use it before you pay anybody for an opinion on your lease. We are heating people rather than lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice about your own lease.

On the heating side, the useful move while you wait is to have both versions priced by installers who have actually looked at your flue. That is what turns a stalled consent request into a decision you control.