Ah I see, thanks, the perils of trying to summarise law, a bag of legal potatoes can get morphed into potato's
Revised version: ...
‘The landlord has a right to enter at reasonable times, having given reasonable notice.
[However], he does not
always [?] need permission to enter his own
property’.
I thought the inclusion of the reasonableness-factors had made it clear it wasn’t an absolute right to saunter in and out when ever he wished to.
The trouble is a landlord can make up a valid reason, or mistakenly believe they have one:
- Water is leaking into the unit below you
or
- He needs a valuation for a re-mortgage., etc. etc.
I once had a landlord (the freeholder of that leasehold building of flats) visit my unit, to carry out an inspection prior to us taking him to court. He did that as he was fishing for any breaches of the lease, to use against us, and also to intimidate us (he was a *really* nasty piece of work). There was nothing we could do to stop him.
Another time I had a landlord’s managing agent, together with their plumber, give a days notice regarding a leak from my flat into the unit below. They dismantled the side of the bath, and took up some floorboards (which I was left to make-good and repair). Nothing found. It turned out the water was coming from the unit above me, by-passing (i.e. water wasn’t visible) my unit, and emerging probably via a stud-partition wall, into the unit below. That was a close call as they were threatening to take up all the floor tiling too. Actually I’ve encountered this precise situation twice now, and have learned that water can move in the weirdest ways, example: water can readily cross a room, or more, from the point of a leak, bypass the unit below, and emerge on the other side of the unit below that. It can be quite a nightmare scenario, being the unit-owner above another where a leak is emerging.