Who is responsible for HIU repairs?

Three different questions that get confused

People ask this as one question and it is really three, with different answers.

Who owns the unit. Who has to arrange a repair. Who pays for it. In a leasehold flat those can be three different parties, and in a rented flat inside a leasehold block they can be four.

Working out which one you are actually asking makes the answer a great deal easier to find.

The usual split in a leasehold block

The most common arrangement, and it is only the most common one and not a rule, is that the building's heat network, the plant room, the risers and everything up to the point it enters your flat belong to the freeholder and are managed by the managing agent. The heat interface unit itself, sitting inside the demise of your flat, belongs to the leaseholder.

That split explains a conversation we have regularly: a resident rings about no hot water, and the question of whether it is theirs or the building's is genuinely answered by establishing whether the fault is before or after the point where the pipes enter the flat. Which is one of the reasons our call-out includes testing the supply into the flat and not only the unit.

Some developments do it differently. In a few, the units were installed and are maintained by the heat network operator under the heat supply agreement, and residents are not supposed to touch them at all. If that is yours, the agent will say so.

If you rent

In England and Wales, a landlord's repairing obligations under section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 cover, among other things, installations for space heating and heating water. A heat interface unit is the installation that provides both.

The practical effect is that a tenant with no heating or hot water should be reporting it to the landlord or letting agent rather than arranging and paying for a repair themselves. Doing it yourself and seeking the money back afterwards is a much weaker position than reporting it and keeping a record.

Report it in writing, even if you also ring. A dated message is the thing that matters if it drags on.

How to find out for certain

For a leaseholder, the answer is in the lease, usually in the section defining the demise and the service charge obligations. If reading it is unappealing, the managing agent can tell you in a sentence and will have been asked a hundred times.

For a tenant, the answer is the tenancy agreement plus the statutory position above.

For anyone, the fastest route is simply to ask the managing agent before spending any money. We are happy to speak to them directly if it helps establish where the fault actually is, because that is the question they usually need answered first.

What to do when nobody will take it on

This situation is common enough to be worth its own section: the tenant has reported it, the landlord says it is the building's, the managing agent says it is inside the flat and therefore the leaseholder's, and nothing happens while everybody is right in their own terms.

The thing that breaks the deadlock is almost always a technical answer rather than a legal one. Establishing whether the fault is before or after the point the pipes enter the flat settles whose side of the boundary it is on, and that is a visit rather than an argument.

So: get it diagnosed, in writing, with the boundary question answered explicitly. Our call-out tests the supply into the flat as well as the unit for exactly this reason, and we are happy to say plainly in writing which side the fault is on.

Keep every report dated. If you rent and you are without heating or hot water, the dates are what matter if it escalates, far more than the wording of any individual message.

And ask the managing agent for the relevant clause rather than their summary of it. Agents are not being evasive when they get this wrong; the arrangements genuinely differ between developments and they manage several.

We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice. What we can do is tell you, accurately, where the fault is.