The short answer
In most lettings the landlord is the party who has to keep the roof in repair, either through the lease or through the general duty to maintain the structure and exterior of a let home. A repair duty is difficult to meet without looking at the roof, so regular inspection, and a look after storms, is the sensible routine. Check your own lease and take legal advice on the wording.
Where the duty to keep the roof in repair comes from
There is no single rule that says a landlord must climb onto the roof every year. What exists is a duty to keep the roof in repair, and that duty arrives from two places.
The first is the tenancy or lease itself. On a residential let, the landlord normally keeps responsibility for the structure and exterior of the building, and the roof is the clearest example of exterior. On a commercial lease the picture is more varied. A tenant on a full repairing lease can be handed the roof, while a tenant on an internal repairing lease will not be. A shared building often runs a service charge, with the landlord or a management company looking after the roof for everyone.
The second source is statute. Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 makes the landlord of most homes let for a term of less than seven years responsible for repairing the structure and exterior, and separate rules require a let home to be fit to live in. That duty is to repair, not to inspect on a timetable. We are roofers rather than solicitors, so take legal advice on how it applies to your letting. What we can say from the roof side is this. A landlord who knows, or ought to know, that a roof is leaking and does nothing is in a much weaker position than one who can show a record of checks and prompt repairs.
If you are unsure who holds the repair duty, read the repairing clauses of the lease, and ask a solicitor or your managing agent to confirm them. It is a short job for them and it saves arguments later.
Why looking at the roof is the only way to meet that duty
A repair duty works in practice only if you know the condition of the thing you are repairing. Roofs hide their faults. The first sign a tenant sees is usually a brown stain on a ceiling, and by then the water has frequently been entering for weeks or months, soaking insulation, rotting timber and working along a rafter to appear somewhere quite different from the entry point.
Landlords also face a particular problem. They are not in the building every day, and tenants do not always report a small drip, especially if it only appears in driven rain. A tenant who has a loft they never visit may not know a slate has slipped. So the landlord's inspection fills a gap that the tenant's day-to-day living does not.
For that reason we suggest treating a roof check as part of owning a let property, in the same category as the gas safety record and the electrical checks. Unlike the annual gas safety check, it is not a fixed legal requirement, but it is the evidence that you have taken the repair duty seriously.
A sensible inspection routine for a let property
You do not need anything elaborate. A routine that works on most houses and small blocks looks like this.
- A look from the ground each year. Binoculars from the pavement or garden show slipped or missing tiles and slates, a sagging ridge, cracked chimney pointing and lifted lead. Our page on how to inspect a roof from the ground explains what to look for.
- A look after any named storm. High wind is when ridge tiles, flashings and loose slates move, so check afterwards rather than waiting for the next annual visit.
- A loft check. Daylight through the roof, damp patches on timbers, wet insulation and droplets on the underside of the covering all tell you something the outside view cannot.
- A closer survey every so often. An older roof, or one with a known weak spot, deserves a survey where someone safely gets close to it.
- Gutters and downpipes. Blocked guttering often lies behind damp at the eaves, and it is easy to clear before it does harm.
If your property is a block of flats, the same ideas apply on a larger scale, and our page on a block of flats roof survey covers the extra access and flat roof issues.
What to record and keep
The value of an inspection is partly the finding and partly the paper trail. Keep a simple file for each property that holds:
- the date of each check and who carried it out;
- dated photographs of each slope, the chimneys, the valleys, any flat roof and the main flashings;
- a note of any defect found, what was done about it and when;
- copies of invoices, guarantees and surveys for any roof work.
This file does several jobs. It shows a tenant, an insurer or a court that you acted promptly. It gives a baseline, so a new stain can be compared with last year's photograph. And it is useful when you come to sell or remortgage, because a buyer's surveyor or a lender will ask about the roof. If a lender wants evidence that a defect has been dealt with, our page on mortgage retention and the roof explains how that tends to go.
Insurers add a further reason. Most policies exclude damage from gradual wear and tear, and a record of maintenance helps show that a sudden loss really was sudden.
Special cases: older, listed and flat roofs
Some roofs need more attention than others. Older Bath buildings often carry natural slate or stone tiles, with lead in parapet gutters, valleys and flashings. A parapet gutter is the drainage channel set behind a raised wall at the roof edge, usually lined in lead, and carries rain to an outlet you never see from the street. A split or a blockage sends water down inside the masonry and onto the ceilings beneath, with little warning outside, which is one reason these roofs reward a closer look.
If the building is listed, remember that repair is different from alteration. Like-for-like repair is one thing, but changing the covering or the detailing can need listed building consent from B&NES Council, so ask before work starts. A landlord of a listed building should build that conversation into the plan so that it is settled before the job begins.
Flat roofs deserve their own routine because they age by cracking, ponding and lifting at the edges, and these faults are invisible from the ground. A walk-over by someone competent, with photographs, is the usual answer.
Where roofs are unsafe or hard to reach, do not send a tenant or a handyman up a ladder. Use someone with proper access equipment.
What we can do for a landlord
We survey roofs in Bath and across the 30 road miles around it, residential and commercial. A visit gives you photographs of your own roof, a clear description of which items are urgent and which can be left for a season, plus a written fixed price for whatever work follows. We repair where repair is enough.
If you have several properties, a written note for each roof, with dated photographs, slots straight into the file described above. Our workmanship is covered by a 10-year written guarantee, a useful paper to hold on file for a let property.
When a tenant reports a leak, tell us what they have seen and we will prioritise getting the roof made safe first, with the proper repair following once the cause is known. You can ring on 01225 285181, drop us a WhatsApp or use the contact form.
For the wider picture on what a survey covers, see our roof inspections service page.
