Tenants’ alterations made to UK office property in the age of net zero carbon and of minimised waste: The end of the ‘single-use fit-out’?

This paper is an opinion piece relating to current practice and precedents associated with tenant alterations, which hopes to progress the debate about the energy efficiency of commercial office property. The law and practice associated with the dilapidations process at the end of a tenant’s office lease is inherently wasteful. The legal precedents take no account of construction waste and appear to encourage landlords to waste physical resources rather than cherish them. The design of modern offices also encourages removal and replacement rather than reuse. The received wisdom during the letting of office premises is that open-plan offices, with previous tenants’ fit-out entirely removed, are preferable. This adds to the amount of construction waste generated. Potential tenants are often not given the opportunity to consider reusing a previous tenant’s fit-out and therefore they repeat the installation of a new office fit-out, where a previous one has recently been removed. If this wasteful process is to be addressed, legal precedents associated with the measures of loss and associated with landlord’s consent to tenant’s fit-out proposals would need to develop, or regulation would need to be introduced, or, most likely, the demands of the market need to discourage ‘single-use fit-outs’.