A tenant moving out of a flat owes their landlord a clean flat. Not the stairwell, and not the scuffed corridor their wardrobe scraped down on the way out. Their responsibility ends at their own front door – and in a block of flats, that boundary is exactly where the money goes missing, because no deposit ever reaches past that door.
Where does the tenant’s cleaning obligation actually stop?
At the demise. Every question in a block starts and ends with that word.
The demise is what the lease hands the leaseholder to hold exclusively – in most flats, the inside of the property and not a great deal else. Internal finishes, the plaster and inward, the kitchen units, the floor coverings, the decoration. That’s the leaseholder’s world, and by extension the tenant’s, because an assured shorthold tenancy sits inside the lease like a box inside a box. The structural walls that hold the building up, and the ones dividing the flat from the corridor next door, usually aren’t the leaseholder’s at all – they belong to the freeholder, even though they stand inside the four walls the tenant lives within. When a tenant leaves, their cleaning duty covers that inner box and stops dead at its edge. The communal parts beyond – the entrance hall, the lift, the stairwell, the bin store, the car park, the shared garden – belong to the freeholder’s world and are kept up through the service charge.
Common sense doesn’t draw this boundary. The lease does, and leases vary. One lease demises the flat’s windows to the leaseholder; the next keeps them with the freeholder as part of the structure. Read the wrong assumption into it and you’ll clean or repair the wrong thing, then argue about it. When somebody in a block asks me who’s responsible for something, the honest first answer never changes: what does the lease say?
The front door that belongs to two people
The front door is the neatest illustration of how fine this line runs.
In a great many London leases the leaseholder owns the inner face of their flat’s front door and the freeholder owns the outer face, because that outer face reads as part of the communal hallway. So the tenant who wipes their side of the door clean has done their bit. The scuff on the outside, the one facing the shared landing, is a communal matter and the service charge’s problem, not something to dock from a departing tenant. The same slab of timber, owned twice. The entry phone divides the same way – the handset inside the flat is the leaseholder’s, the panel and wiring down in the lobby belong to the building – and end-of-tenancy claims trip over the distinction constantly.
Who cleans the communal areas, and how is it paid for?
Not the tenant, and not on move-out.
The managing agent holds a contract with a communal cleaner who comes round on a fixed rota – a mop through the lobby, the stairs and the lift on a Tuesday, say, week in and week out, whether anyone’s moving or not. That’s a service the lease obliges the freeholder to provide and the service charge pays for, pooled from every leaseholder in the building. It runs on its own schedule and owes nothing to the churn of individual tenancies. A flat can turn over three times in a year and the communal cleaner’s round doesn’t shift by a minute.
What the service charge quietly covers
Once a communal cleaning contract runs long enough and costs enough, it stops being a quiet line item and turns into a legal process.
A long-term agreement that bills any single leaseholder more than a hundred pounds a year pulls the freeholder into Section 20 consultation under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 – notify the leaseholders and put the estimates in front of them before signing. Skip it and cost recovery gets capped, which is an expensive way to learn the rules. Most people paying a service charge have no idea that their weekly lobby clean sits under the same statute as a new roof. It does.
What happens to the mess a move-out makes in the shared parts?
Move-outs are messy, and the mess rarely stays inside the flat.
A wardrobe gouges the lift wall. A sofa takes a chunk of paint off the stairwell corner. Movers prop the fire door open with a brick and leave boot-scuffs the length of the corridor, and somebody abandons a dead mattress in the bin store on the way to the van. None of that is inside the demise. Some of it isn’t even cosmetic – a fire door wedged open with a brick for an afternoon of carrying is a safety breach the building carries the liability for, long after the van’s gone. All of it costs money to put right. And here’s the trap that catches every managing agent I know: the tenant who caused it has a deposit, and you cannot lay a finger on it.
Why the tenant’s deposit never reaches the lobby
The tenant’s deposit is protected under a scheme like the TDS, and it’s tied to exactly one thing – the assured shorthold tenancy of the demised flat. It answers for the condition of the flat and nothing beyond it. The managing agent isn’t a party to that tenancy; they’ve no contractual relationship with the tenant whatsoever, so they’ve no route to the deposit for a scratched lift, however plainly the tenant’s movers did it.
What follows is a two-step that usually breaks on the second step. Under the lease, the leaseholder is answerable to the freeholder for damage their tenant, or their tenant’s movers, cause to the common parts. So the cost lands on the leaseholder, who then has to chase their own former tenant for it, separately, out of the deposit if there’s anything left in it and out of their own pocket if there isn’t. By the time the leaseholder works out the lift damage is theirs to sort, the tenant’s gone and the deposit’s been handed back in full for a spotless flat. The lift paint stays chipped.
Which is a genteel way of saying nobody chases it. Pursuing a couple of hundred pounds of communal paint through the small-claims court, against a tenant who’s already moved on and whose deposit went back weeks ago, is a fight a sensible landlord simply declines. So the damage rolls quietly into the building’s running costs and stops being anybody’s fault. The retired couple in Flat 9, who haven’t shifted a stick of furniture in fifteen years, pay for that repair through next year’s service charge.
How should a block handle move-outs so the costs land fairly?
Protocols, and the nerve to enforce them.
The well-run blocks I deal with treat a move-out as a booked event. The tenant or their agent has to notify the managing agent in advance. The lift gets padded with protective blankets before anything heavy goes near it. Bulky waste is the leaving tenant’s job to remove properly, not a parting gift for the bin store, and that gets spelled out before the van turns up. A porter in an old Marylebone mansion block enforces half of this by simply standing in the lobby; a new-build tower with a keypad on the door and nobody watching enforces none of it. The cheapest control of the lot is a clause in the tenancy agreement making the tenant answerable for their movers’ damage to the common parts, and almost nobody bothers to write it in.
Here’s the opinion, and letting leaseholders won’t love it. A block full of buy-to-let flats churning tenants every twelve months throws off far more communal wear and mess than the owner-occupiers ever do, and under a flat service charge the owner-occupiers quietly subsidise it. That isn’t fair, and it’s fixable. Blocks can and should take a refundable move-out deposit from the letting leaseholder, or recharge the real cost of churn – the extra lift repaint, the repeat waste uplifts – to the flats that generate it, instead of smearing it evenly across everyone. A few hundred pounds held and refunded when the common parts survive a move unmarked changes behaviour overnight; people are careful with money they want back. The widow on the ground floor should not be funding the turnover of a portfolio landlord four floors above her.
The bin store nobody will own
I did an end-of-tenancy clean last spring at Woodberry Down, one of the newer towers up by Manor House.
The flat itself was easy – a young couple, tidy, off to something bigger in Walthamstow. We handed it back immaculate and their deposit came back in full, exactly as it should have. The bin store told the other half of the story. On the morning they moved, somebody – them, or the flat two doors along that also went that week, no way to prove which – had left a stained mattress on its side, a broken Billy bookcase with the shelves still rattling in it, and a bin bag that turned out to hold actual kitchen waste, split and leaking across the floor. The managing agent couldn’t pin it to a flat. So the special uplift to take it all away, about a hundred and twenty quid, went onto the block’s service charge for the quarter.
Everyone in the building paid a slice of that mattress. The couple whose flat we’d cleaned to a shine paid their share too, from their new place in Walthamstow, through the service charge that trails the leasehold around. The flat was spotless. Six feet outside its own front door, on the communal side where no deposit reaches, a stranger’s mattress leaked onto a floor that thirty households were about to be billed for.
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