Who is responsible for storm damage to a roof?

It depends on what you own. If you own the house, the roof is yours. If you rent, it is your landlord’s, and the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 says so whatever the tenancy agreement says. If you own a flat on a lease, the roof is usually the freeholder’s, and the cost comes back to you through the service charge.

The short version

A private landlord must keep the structure and exterior in repair, and the statute names drains, gutters and external pipes in the same breath. A tenancy agreement cannot take that away.
Tell your landlord in writing and keep a copy. The obligation only bites once they know there is a problem, so the date you told them is the date that matters.
Leaseholders: the reason nothing happens for months is usually the section 20 consultation, not the freeholder ignoring you. Above £250 per flat they have to consult before they spend.
The freeholder can ask the tribunal to dispense with that consultation where the work is urgent. If your ceiling is wet, that is the question to put to them in writing.
Whoever owns the building usually holds the buildings policy, and your own contents are a separate claim on a separate policy.

The four answers

Four situations, four different answers

Almost every argument about a storm-damaged roof comes from two people assuming different rows of this table. Find your row first.

Who is responsible for repairing a storm-damaged roof, by what you hold, and what puts the duty there
What you hold	Who repairs the roof	What puts the duty there
You own the house you live in	You. Nobody else.	No statute involved. It is your building, and a policy pays for damage rather than moving the duty somewhere else
You rent from a private landlord	The landlord, for the structure and exterior, including drains, gutters and external pipes	Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, implied into the tenancy whether or not it is written down
You own a flat on a long lease	Usually the freeholder or the management company, with the cost recharged to you through the service charge	The lease itself, plus the consultation duties that sit on top of it
You are the freeholder of a block	You, and you must consult the leaseholders before you spend above the threshold	Section 20 of the same Act, which caps what you can recover if you skip it

A lease can move the default position, and some of them do. Read yours before you rely on row three or row four. Nothing here is legal advice, and a tenant or leaseholder already in a dispute should take proper advice rather than a builder’s.

If you own the house

Owning the house is the simple answer, and the expensive one

If your name is on the freehold of a house, the roof is yours, and no insurance policy changes that. A claim is a question of who pays, not a question of who is responsible. If the claim fails you still own a roof with a hole in it.

Two boundaries catch people out. The first is a terrace or a semi, where a shared chimney stack sits astride the party wall. The stack is normally shared, the flues inside it are not, and repairs to it engage a different piece of law entirely. That is set out in what the Party Wall Act covers on chimneys, garden walls and extensions, and it is worth reading before you instruct anyone to work on a stack that is not entirely yours.

The second is water that leaves your roof and lands on somebody else. A broken gutter soaking a neighbour’s wall is a different order of problem from the same gutter soaking your own. Fix that one quickly.

If you rent

If you rent, the roof is the landlord’s, and the statute names the gutters

A tenant on a short lease does not repair the roof. Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 implies a covenant into the tenancy requiring the landlord “to keep in repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house (including drains, gutters and external pipes)”.

The bracket is the useful part. Gutters and external pipes are named in the statute, so the standard argument that a gutter is maintenance rather than structure does not work. An overflowing gutter that has soaked a bedroom wall all winter is squarely inside the covenant.

If you rent a flat rather than a house, the section reaches further than the four walls of your flat. It extends to any part of the building in which the landlord holds an estate or interest, so a roof three floors above you is still covered, provided the disrepair actually affects your enjoyment of the flat or of the common parts.

The agreement cannot sign it away

You will occasionally see a tenancy agreement that makes the tenant responsible for the exterior, or for “minor repairs” that turn out to include the gutters. Section 12 makes any such term void so far as it purports to exclude or limit the landlord’s obligations under section 11. Citizens Advice puts the same point in one line: those repair responsibilities cannot be removed by anything your tenancy agreement says.

Report it in writing, and keep the copy

This is the practical half, and it is the half tenants lose on. The landlord only has to act once they know there is a problem. If you rang the agent and nobody wrote it down, you have no date. Send an email or a text, describe what you can see and where the water is coming in, attach photographs, and keep it. If you report it by phone, follow it up the same day with a message saying what you reported and when.

Then let them in. Refusing access is the one thing that genuinely shifts the argument onto you. And do not pay for the repair yourself and try to recover it afterwards without advice first, because the rules on deducting repair costs from rent are narrower than people think.

If you own a flat

“Check your lease” is true, so here is what to check

Every page you will read on this tells a leaseholder to check their lease and then stops. Here is what you are actually looking for, in the order it appears in most leases.

The demise. The clause that defines what you own. In the great majority of flat leases it stops at the plaster, the floorboards and the internal face of the windows. The roof, the outside walls and the structure are not demised to you, which is why the repair is not yours to organise.
The landlord’s covenant to repair. Usually a few clauses later. Look for the words “main structure”, “roof” and “maintain”. If the roof is named there, the freeholder has a contractual duty to repair it and you can enforce it.
The service charge clause and the apportionment. This tells you what share you pay. It is often a percentage, sometimes by floor area, occasionally an equal split. Your share of the roof bill comes out of this clause.
Any reserve or sinking fund. A roof is exactly what one exists for, and a short fund is often the real reason nothing is moving.

Top-floor flats are the exception worth knowing about. A handful of older leases demise the roof void, or even the roof itself, to the top-floor leaseholder. It is unusual, and it is why reading the demise clause first matters rather than assuming.

If the roof is the freeholder’s and they still will not act, the route is a written demand quoting the repairing covenant, then the First-tier Tribunal. That is a solicitor’s job rather than ours.

Section 20

Why the roof leaks for eight months and nothing happens

Because above a published statutory figure, the freeholder is not allowed to just get it done. Section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 says that where qualifying works cost more than an appropriate amount, the leaseholders’ contributions are limited unless the consultation requirements have been complied with or dispensed with by the tribunal. The regulations set that amount at the point where any one leaseholder’s contribution would be more than £250.

Read that as a per-flat figure, not a per-block one. A twelve-flat building crosses it on a roof bill of a few thousand pounds, which every real roof job is. So the consultation is not something the freeholder is choosing to do. It is the only way they get the money back from you afterwards.

The procedure has two waiting periods built into it, each of thirty days. The first is a notice of intention, describing the works, giving the reasons and inviting observations, during which any leaseholder can nominate a contractor they want asked for a price. The second comes after the estimates are in: the freeholder circulates them, and another thirty days runs for observations on the figures. Add the time to get roofers up there, priced and back, and two months of statutory waiting turns into six or eight months of nothing visible happening.

That is the answer to the thing that drives leaseholders mad, which is being told the roof is leaking and that nothing can happen yet, by the same person, in the same letter. Both statements are usually true.

What to actually do about it

There is a release valve, and it is worth asking for. Under section 20ZA the tribunal can dispense with the consultation requirements where it is satisfied that it is reasonable to do so, and genuinely urgent work is the classic case. So the question to put to your freeholder or managing agent, in writing, is this: are you applying for dispensation, and if not, why not?

Two more things worth knowing. Emergency work to make the roof safe and stop further water getting in is a different animal from the full repair, and a sensible freeholder does it straight away. And a section 20 notice is your one chance to put a roofer’s name forward, so if you know somebody, nominate them inside the thirty days.

Who claims

Whose insurance pays, and what we can and cannot do about it

The buildings policy sits with whoever owns the building: you for a house you own, the landlord for a rented one, and normally the freeholder or management company for a block, with the premium recharged through the service charge. Contents are a separate policy and a separate claim, so a tenant whose carpets and books were ruined claims on their own.

Be clear about what we are. We can quote for the repair and we can put in writing what we found and what caused it. We do not handle claims, we do not talk to your insurer for you and we are not loss assessors. Everything above is about knowing who has to act, so that whoever does handle the claim has something to work with.

What decides most roof claims is not who owns the building but whether the weather caused the damage or merely finished off a roof that was already going. That is a separate question and it has its own piece: what evidence to gather for a roof damage claim. If the water is still coming in as you read this, start instead with what to do in the first 24 hours after storm damage, which is mostly done from indoors and none of it involves a ladder.

You own the house. Get it looked at, get the cause in writing, then decide whether to claim. Photograph the debris before you clear it.
You rent. Report it to the landlord or agent in writing today, with photographs, and keep a copy. Give access when they arrange it. If nothing happens, your council’s environmental health team can inspect a rented home in disrepair.
You own a flat. Report it to the managing agent in writing, ask whether a section 20 notice is coming and whether they are applying for dispensation, and ask what emergency work is being done in the meantime.
You are the freeholder. Make it safe now, serve the notice of intention, and consider dispensation if the water is still coming in. Skipping the consultation is the expensive option, because you cannot recover the difference afterwards.

One warning for everybody in a block. After a storm, callers work these buildings precisely because nobody is quite sure who is in charge, and no communal roof should ever be authorised at the front door of one flat. That is covered in what your rights are when somebody knocks and says your roof is dangerous.

If you need a price and a written description of what has failed, whether that is for you, for your landlord or for a managing agent who has asked you to get quotes, that is what our roofing work covers. Thomas comes out and looks at it himself, and if the damage turns out to be in the brickwork or a chimney stack rather than the covering, that is repointing and brickwork instead. Ask for a written itemised quote or describe what you are looking at and we will tell you which row of the table you are in.

Questions

Common questions

Is a tenant ever responsible for repairing the roof?

Almost never, section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 puts the structure and exterior on the landlord, and section 12 makes any tenancy term that tries to shift it void. A tenant is responsible for damage they or their visitors cause, and for letting the landlord in to do the work.

Who pays for a roof repair in a leasehold flat?

The freeholder or management company organises and pays for the work, then recovers it from the leaseholders through the service charge in the shares the lease sets out. So you pay your share, but you do not instruct the roofer and you cannot usually do the job yourself.

Why is my freeholder taking so long to repair the roof?

Usually the section 20 consultation: where one leaseholder's share would be more than £250, the freeholder has to consult before spending, and the procedure carries two thirty-day notice periods. They can ask the tribunal to dispense with it where the work is urgent.

Does the landlord have to repair the gutters as well?

Yes. Section 11 names drains, gutters and external pipes in the same sentence as the structure and exterior, so a gutter is not maintenance the tenant can be pushed onto. Report it in writing, because the duty only bites once the landlord knows.

Do I claim on my own insurance or the freeholder's?

The buildings policy for a block is normally held by the freeholder or management company, so damage to the roof and the structure is claimed there. Damage to your own furniture, carpets and belongings goes on your contents policy, which is a separate claim.

Related advice

The guides below pick up where this one leaves off, and the roofing page covers the work itself and the places we cover, if you would rather have the job looked at.

Roofing, and where we cover All advice articles

Who wrote this

Thomas Hannen

Thomas owns Bournemouth Roofing & Building and prices every job himself instead of sending somebody else. The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, number 15471719, registered in England and Wales. If you want to talk something through before you commit to anything, the site visit and the written itemised quote are both free.