STAIRs covers shared owners, not just renting tenants. A plain English guide to both dates, the seven publication classes, and the two questions the guidance leaves open.

Published by News on the Block - 22 July 2026 Good customer service. We're all taught it. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. Give the customer what they want. So that's what people do: run themselves ragged doing 'their job,' when half the time they're not doing the job at all. They're doing the opposite of it, and they've no idea. Let me admit something. A lease is a hard read. I'll hold my hands up to that after 20 years of knowing the troublesome clauses inside out. It'

There's a brown ring on an apartment ceiling. It appeared over a weekend, the way these things do. It might be a communal pipe. It might be a slow weep from the washing machine in the flat above, which makes it a demised-premises matter and nothing to do with the landlord at all. The stain looks identical in every version. You can't read the cause off the symptom. That's the part that makes leasehold repairs so much harder than they look on paper. The lease sorts out who rep

Notes from the estate Picture a small rectangle of ground on an estate. Now picture four separate sets of rules all wanting to live on it at the same time. The bins needed to be close enough for residents to actually use and for the lorry to actually reach, which are two different distances and almost never the same one. The parking bays had been promised in a planning agreement signed years earlier by people who are no longer anyone's problem. The fire strategy needed its ac

If you own or are buying a leasehold flat, the service charge is one of the biggest running costs you take on, and one of the hardest to pin down before you buy. The first question is usually the simplest to ask and the hardest to answer in general terms: what does a service charge cover? Two flats on the same street can pay very different amounts, and the difference usually comes down to the lease rather than the building itself. This is a plain-English look at what a servic