The 2022 Advent Calendar

Welcome to the Law & Lease advent calendar. 

It has been quite a year. 

Building safety

Aside from political upheaval, 2022 has been dominated by building safety.

Parts of the  Building Safety Act 2022 came into force on 28 June 2022. They were followed by two sets of regulations: the Building Safety (Leaseholder Protections) (England) Regulations 2022/711, and the Building Safety (Leaseholder Protections) (Information etc) (England) Regulations 2022/859. 

The first set of regulations came into force on 20 July 2022. The second set came into force on 21 July 2022.  

The first set – 2022/711 – is a collection of amendments and supplements to Part 5 and Schedule 8 of the Building Safety Act 2022, and include a vital requirement for landlords to provide leaseholders with a certificate effectively disclosing their financial and group arrangements. 

The second set – 2022/859 – requires leaseholders to provide landlords with a “deed of certificate” as and when requested by the landlord, but it also imposes obligations on certain landlords to pay for or contribute towards the cost of relevant measures in relation to relevant defects. 

Looking forward, on 23 January 2023, a date easy to remember for its symmetry, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 will come into force.

Those regulations impose obligations on the “responsible person”, as defined in the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. Amongst other things, the obligations relate to lifts, the design and materials used in the external walls, signage, floor plans and fire doors. 

Service charges

Building safety garnered a lot of attention this year, but 2022 has also been a big year for service charge cases. We began the year with judgment in FirstPort Property Management v Settlers Court RTM Co Ltd [2022] UKSC 1, and we will end it with the Supreme Court hearing the appeal in Williams v Aviva Ground Rents Ltd.

In between, we’ve had a Court of Appeal case on forfeiture costs recovery cases; a really helpful dispensation appeal in the Upper Tribunal and a couple of appeals on ground rent too. 

The advent calendar

This year’s Law & Lease advent calendar is the eighth. It was completed by the most last minute of squeaks, because I had real trouble finding a number 16. When we left London to live in Dorset, I hadn’t really computed how few houses in the countryside actually had numbers on their doors: most houses have names, not numbers, and that is a challenge for an advent calendar that depends on house numbers.

The advent calendar works in the same way as any other. The windows will open one by one throughout December: each window contains a pocket-sized review of an event, case or piece of legislation that cropped up in 2022. 

I hope that the end of 2022 brings you peace.