Leases and licences
PHAEMA records every agreement over council property: leases, licences, tenancies at will, agreements for lease, farm business tenancies, wayleaves, easements and concessions. It covers both directions:
- let out by the council: the council is landlord and receives rent;
- held by the council: the council is tenant and pays rent.
Adding an agreement
Select Add a lease or licence on the lease list, or use Manage data. You need:
- a unique reference;
- the tenant or landlord (a party), and a guarantor if there is one;
- the premises: one or more properties from the register;
- the term start, and the term end unless the agreement is periodic.
To add many agreements at once, see importing leases.
Terms
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Status | Proposed (heads of terms), Current, Holding over or Ended. |
| Security of tenure | Whether the lease is inside the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, Part II, or contracted out. |
| Rent and frequency | The current rent comes from the rent schedule. |
| Review basis and interval | How and how often the rent is reviewed. The next review date creates a rent review event. |
| Repairing and insurance | Who repairs and insures. |
| Service charge payable | Whether a service charge is due. |
| Rent excludes business rates | Ticked unless the rent includes rates. |
| Incentives | Any rent-free period or other incentive. |
| Rent deposit, where held, interest | The amount, where it is held (for example the deposit account and the deed's date) and who the interest goes to and when. |
| Alterations and reinstatement | What the tenant may alter, and whether they must reinstate at the end. |
| Special rights | Parking, rights of way, telecoms access and so on. |
An agreement with its events, premises and tenant.
These match the items the RICS Code for leasing business premises asks heads of terms to cover, so a renewal case can start from what the current agreement says.
The agreement page shows the term in years and months, the next payments due (a guide only: part periods are not apportioned), and all key dates.
Break options
Add break options in Edit this agreement. For each, record the break date, who can exercise it (tenant, landlord or either) and the notice period in months. PHAEMA works out the last date to serve notice and creates events for the notice deadline and the break date.
Documents
Store PDFs of the lease, licence, deeds of variation and other documents in Edit this agreement, under Documents. Only signed-in users can open them.
Ending an agreement
Record the outcome of the expiry event, or set the status to Ended and fill in the actual end date. Open events for an ended agreement lapse automatically.
Worked example
DL-0502 is Northfield Packaging Ltd's lease of Unit 2, Northfield Business Park: ten years, inside the 1954 Act, £39,000 a year plus VAT, reviewed upwards only every five years, on full repairing terms with a service charge. It records a £9,750 rent deposit held in the council's deposit account, with interest to the tenant. The tenant can break at year five on six months' notice, so PHAEMA has created a break notice deadline event six months before the break date event, as well as the rent review and expiry.
DL-0530 is the other way round: the council holds the Northfield Innovation Hub on a ten-year lease at £38,000 a year. It counts as rent the council pays, and the council's own break is recorded the same way.