Service Charges: What Communal Cleaning Buys

If you own a flat in a block around Canary Wharf, the Isle of Dogs or Royal Wharf, you pay a service charge, and some slice of it buys cleaning. Most leaseholders could not say how big that slice is, who the cleaner works for, or what happens if the corridors are dirty for six months. All three are knowable.

What the charge is actually buying

Cleaning in a service charge means the common parts. In a typical E14 or E16 block, the split runs like this.

Where the line falls

Your lease divides the building into your demise and everything else, and the service charge funds everything else. That line is set by the lease, not by asking politely on the day, and leases differ, so the only reliable answer to what yours covers is in your own document.

Reasonable is a legal test, not an opinion

Section 19 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 does two separate things. It says costs must have been reasonably incurred, and it says that where the charge covers services or works, those must be of a reasonable standard.

Two tests, two different failures

Both halves matter for cleaning, because they fail in different ways. A contract priced well above the market fails the first test even if the lobby is spotless. A cheap contract where nobody has touched the bin store since spring fails the second even though the money was well spent on paper. When you complain, say which one you mean.

Your cleaning contract may be a section 20 agreement

Is it a qualifying long term agreement?

This is the part almost nobody uses. The definition turns on the length of the term: a contract made by the landlord, or by someone acting for the landlord, qualifies when the term it was granted for is longer than twelve months. A contract of exactly twelve months therefore falls outside it, and the regulations take some agreements out of the definition altogether. Ask the agent for the contract term before you assume it either way.

The threshold is low

In England, consultation is required once costs under the agreement in an accounting period result in any tenant’s contribution being more than £100. Qualifying works are defined separately and more broadly, as works on a building or any other premises, and there the appropriate amount is an amount which results in any tenant’s contribution being more than £250.

What consultation has to include

Clear either and the landlord has to consult. The regulations set out the steps.

Most leaseholders bin the letter. It is the one moment where you have a formal say in who cleans your lobby and how often.

If nobody consulted you

If consultation does not happen and the tribunal has not dispensed with it, the limit bites on each leaseholder individually. Your own contribution towards the works or the agreement is capped at £250 for qualifying works, or at £100 for the accounting period under a long term agreement. It is a cap on your share rather than on what the block is allowed to spend in total, which is worth being precise about before you raise it, and it is also why agents apply for dispensation when they realise they have missed a step.

What you can ask to see

Government guidance sets out two rights that work together. The first is a summary of how the charge has been calculated and what the money was spent on. The second builds on it: with the summary in hand, you can then look at the paperwork behind it, receipts included.

Ask for four things

For cleaning specifically, ask for the contractor’s name, the contract term, the specification of what they are meant to do and how often, and the invoices for the period. The specification is the useful document. Without it, poor cleaning is one person’s opinion against another’s. With it, you can point at the line that says the bin store is washed down weekly, which is also the line to quote if the block is dealing with mice in East London flats.

Old costs have a shelf life

Section 20B is the provision that catches catch up demands. It works on a clock that starts when a cost is incurred: once 18 months have passed without a demand being served on you, that cost stops being payable. The one exception is where, inside those 18 months, you were notified in writing, by the landlord or on the landlord’s behalf, that the cost had been incurred and that you would have to contribute towards it.

Agents changing hands is when this surfaces. A new managing agent finds unbilled invoices and issues a demand covering an earlier period. Check the dates first.

The bit that costs us money to say

We clean the inside of flats, so if you are looking for a domestic cleaner in Canary Wharf, that is the work we quote for. The lobby, the lift and the bin store belong to the block’s own contract and we do not quote for those at all. If the communal cleaning in your block is poor, hiring us for the corridor is not the answer. You already pay for that corridor. Paying a second time fixes one month, funds the same failure again next month, and quietly destroys the evidence you would need if you ever argued the standard was not reasonable.

The same goes for cleaning windows above the ground floor if the block has a contract for them. Check what the service charge already covers before you buy it privately. If the block has a cradle contract and nobody has sent you the specification, ask for the specification before you pay anyone else to do the same panes.

If the cleaning is genuinely bad

Photograph it with dates. Write to the agent describing the standard against the specification rather than your general irritation. Ask for the summary and the receipts in the same letter. Talk to other leaseholders, because one complaint is a personality and six is a pattern.

None of this is fast. It is the process that works, and the paperwork you build along the way is what makes the reasonableness test mean something.