Two things are happening in leasehold at once, and they are moving at very different speeds.
The first is that resident control is being actively encouraged. Since March 2025, changes under the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 have made the Right to Manage considerably easier to exercise. The cap on non-residential floorspace rose from 25% to 50%, bringing far more mixed-use blocks into scope, and leaseholders are no longer routinely liable for the freeholder’s legal costs of a claim. Those changes removed the two most common reasons groups gave up before starting.
The second is that, from September, the Building Safety Regulator will publish guidance aimed specifically at small, resident-led management companies. It is the first time this part of the market has been addressed in its own right rather than treated as a rounding error in material written for institutional landlords.
Both are welcome. But note the order: people were recruited into statutory accountability first, and how to support them is being worked out second.
WHEN RESIDENTS BECOME RESPONSIBLE
I have taken residents through the process and then run the buildings afterwards, and what is consistently underestimated is the moment a claim is admitted. On paper it is a change of management.
In practice, a group of leaseholders becomes a company, and that company becomes the responsible entity for the building.
Day one is not abstract. Insurance has to be in force from the acquisition date, not the week after. Contracts have to be novated or retendered.
On-site staff transfer under TUPE and their terms have to be right. Residents have to know what is changing and who to call. None of that touches building safety, and all of it lands in the same fortnight.
STATUTORY DUTIES DO NOT SCALE DOWN
Then the statutory duties arrive, and they do not scale down.
The Building Safety Act draws no distinction between a landlord with in-house surveyors, retained fire engineers and a legal team, and five volunteers meeting in a residents’ lounge. The duties are the same. So is the enforcement.
EIGHT WEEKS FROM A STANDING START
The new cladding funding for buildings under 11 metres shows what that means in practice. Applications open on 17 August and close on 9 October, and must be made by the responsible entity – which, in a resident-led building, means the board itself.
An application cannot be submitted without a Fire Risk Appraisal of External Walls carried out under PAS 9980 by a suitably qualified professional: an assessment costing thousands of pounds, in a field with a known shortage of assessors.
Applicants will also be asked whether they have explored redress through insurance claims, developer contributions or warranty schemes. Meeting the requirements creates no entitlement to funding.
Read that list again as a volunteer director. It assumes someone who knows what a FRAEW is, can commission one competently, and can show that developer and warranty routes have been pursued.
For an institutional applicant, that is a Tuesday. For a board formed this summer, it is eight weeks from a standing start, fitted around everyone’s day job.
THE COST OF COMPLIANCE
The money makes it harder still. Hamptons’ 2025 Service Charge Index puts the average service charge in England and Wales at £2,405, or £200.42 a month – the first time the monthly average has passed £200 – and found charges rose 55.6% over the decade to 2025, against Consumer Price Index inflation of 39.8%.
Asking leaseholders who have lived through that to fund a several-thousand-pound survey at short notice, with no guarantee of a grant, is not a straightforward conversation. Boards without professional support behind them frequently do not win it in time.
GUIDANCE IS ONLY PART OF THE ANSWER
September’s guidance will help, and the regulator deserves credit for writing for this audience. But knowing what you are required to do and being equipped to do it are separate problems, and guidance addresses only the first.
A board can read every document published and still be unable to commission an assessment, challenge an eligibility decision, or hold an application together to a deadline.
CONTROL WITHOUT CAPACITY
There is a wider point for the industry. Resident-led management has been treated as a niche for years. It is not one. It is a growing share of managed stock, expanded deliberately by policy, and the part of the market with the least professional infrastructure behind it.
Government has decided that leaseholders should be able to take control of their own buildings, rightly so. But control without capacity is not empowerment. It is liability, handed over at the door.
Professional, accredited support for resident-led boards should not depend on whether a group happens to find the right adviser. It should be built into the process from the day the claim is admitted.
