Why a New Water Meter Needs Your Freeholder's Consent

A plumber fits a water meter on a Tuesday. By Wednesday morning the flat downstairs has no water at all, nobody knows why, and the managing agent is hearing about it for the first time from an angry resident.

This is one of the most common avoidable problems in a block of flats, and nobody involved has usually done anything malicious. The leaseholder wanted a meter. The plumber did the job in front of him. Nobody realised that the pipework he was working on also served somebody else.

We have written elsewhere about the formal process for planning renovations in your flat — knocking through walls, moving bathrooms, applying for a Licence for Alterations. This piece is about the smaller jobs that nobody thinks of as alterations at all, and which cause more disruption per hour of work than almost anything else.

Your pipes don’t stop at your front door

Most leases make the leaseholder responsible for the water, gas, electrical and heating apparatus that exclusively serves their flat — and that phrase does a lot of work. Pipework serving your flat is still yours even where it runs outside your flat: under the hallway, through a riser cupboard, across the bin store.

Two consequences follow, and leaseholders are often surprised by both:

• You maintain it, even though you can’t see it and it isn’t behind your front door.
• If work on it damages the building or another flat, that’s on you — not on the service charge, and not on the freeholder.

The flip side is that a shared riser can carry pipes belonging to several different flats, often unlabelled and installed decades apart. Isolate the wrong one and you have cut off a neighbour who had no idea any work was happening.

”But it’s only a meter”

Nearly every flat lease prevents the leaseholder from making alterations or additions without the freeholder’s previous consent in writing. People tend to read that as being about walls. It isn’t only about walls — utility apparatus sits squarely within it, and a water meter is an alteration to the utility network.

Consent is not there to be obstructive. In practice it is a technical check: does the contractor’s proposed method isolate a riser that serves other flats, and do the neighbours need warning before their water goes off? For a straightforward job it is usually a few days’ work to get an answer.

It is worth adding that a water company is entitled to install a meter when a customer asks for one, and has statutory powers of its own. That does not make the conversation unnecessary. The disruption to a shared riser is identical either way — telling us in advance is simply what lets everyone else be warned.

Everybody has a right to an uninterrupted supply

Leases in a block typically grant every flat the right to the free and uninterrupted passage of water, gas, electricity and drainage through the building’s pipes and cables. That is a right you hold — and one you owe to your neighbours.

So it isn’t only the alteration that causes the problem. Interrupting somebody else’s supply is a breach of their rights under the lease in its own right, whether or not you meant to. If you are on the receiving end of it, our guide to what to do when your ceiling starts leaking covers where you stand.

Why it usually happens in a let flat

Look at how these incidents actually unfold and the common thread is distance. Where a flat is let, the leaseholder is often not in the building and not in the conversation. A tenant reports a problem, someone local instructs a contractor, and the work is done before anyone thinks to ask the managing agent.

The lease obligations still sit with the leaseholder. The leaseholder is simply the one person in the chain who didn’t know it was happening — and the one who carries the cost when it goes wrong.

That gap is worth closing deliberately. If your flat is managed by someone who already knows the building — where the risers run, which stopcock serves what — then consent is handled as part of the job rather than remembered afterwards, and your tenant has one number to call that reaches someone who can coordinate the work properly.

What to do next

• Ask before you instruct anyone. A short email to your managing agent with the contractor’s proposals is usually enough to start.
• Tell your agent if works have already happened. Coming forward is always cheaper than being found out later, and it lets the pipework be checked before the next person loses their water.
• If you let your flat, decide who is watching it. Whoever that is needs to know the building, not just the tenancy.

If you’re a leaseholder in a block we manage, you can report a problem — photos and all — on the Gena Go app. And if you let a flat and want the building side handled properly, our flat management service covers repairs, contractors and compliance for a flat annual fee rather than a percentage of your rent.