By Milan Patel
01.05.2020
The UK Government has recently announced further steps to protect commercial tenants from aggressive rent collection by landlords including a ban the use of statutory demands and winding up orders where a company cannot pay their bills due to COVID-19 and preventing landlords from using commercial rent arrears recovery (CRAR) unless 90 days or more of rent is unpaid. These measures support the existing ban on landlords evicting commercial tenants. All of these measures will remain in effect until at least 30 June 2020.
Does that mean commercial tenants can now relax?
Definitely not. These measures are temporary and do not alter the terms of the lease. Once they are lifted, landlords will be free to employ such collection methods again and while some landlords have deep pockets, many more do not and almost all will have investors and/or funders to satisfy so it is highly unlikely that unpaid rent will simply be ignored for long once these protection measures end.
So what should commercial tenants be doing now?
Continue reading “COVID-19: New Protections For Commercial Tenants – Are Tenants Now ‘Safe’?”