Real property, real impact: the ground (f) questions left by Franses

Article by Benjamin Faulkner and Francesca Mitchell, published 28^th September 2026

This article was originally published by Estates Gazette here.

It used to be said that ground (f) cases under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 were a landlord’s to lose. Provided the landlord was prepared to throw enough resources at the matter, the advice (and the law) was always that it could devise any scheme of works it liked, all with a view to obtaining vacant possession. Has the tenant challenged the scheme as not being substantial enough? No problem! Just lower the basement, replace a perfectly good lift with a new one and carry out some pointless reconfiguration to the holding – and you can’t lose. And better yet, you probably won’t need to do the work, just threaten the tenant with it, who will probably see sense and agree to leave.

S Franses Ltd v Cavendish Hotel (London) Ltd [2018] UKSC 62; [2019] EGLR 4 put a stop to such nakedly abusive practices. In doing so, Franses has breathed new life into commercial tenant’s security of tenure. However, the limits of the decision still remain uncertain.

What happened in Franses?

Under the 1954 Act, tenants of business premises have security of tenure. However, the landlord is entitled to bring the lease to an end without the grant of a new lease on certain grounds specified in section 30(1), including ground (f), which is (broadly) that the landlord intends to carry out a substantial scheme of development.

In Franses the landlord opposed the grant of a new lease on ground (f). The proposed scheme of works had gone through a number of iterations, and the final iteration was positively destructive: it would have resulted in premises which were incapable of lawful use for planning purposes and included objectively pointless lowering of part of the basement floor, leading to an impractical step in the middle of the lavatory. All this would have cost over £750,000 plus VAT.

When asked about it at trial, the landlord admitted that the proposed works had no practical utility. Rather, they were designed merely to tick the ground (f) boxes,
without needing to take any risk that the works might require planning permission. In essence, the landlord did not want to do the works for their own sake but only proposed the works to get the tenant out.

The Supreme Court unanimously held that the landlord should not be entitled to succeed in these circumstances. The policy of ground (f) was not to inhibit genuine development, but these works were merely a contrivance designed to get around the tenant’s security of tenure.

Ground (f) assumes that the landlord wants first and foremost to redevelop the premises, and that the implementation of that desire is, as it happens, being
obstructed by the tenant’s occupation. Landlords should not succeed if the desire to evict the tenant comes first, and that is the true reason for the proposed works. The intention to redevelop must exist independently of the tenant’s statutory claim to a new tenancy.

Lord Sumption therefore carved out a new ‘acid test’: would the landlord intend to do the same works if the tenant left voluntarily?

In Franses the answer was obviously no. In other cases, the answer may be less clear cut. But importantly, the practice of “beefing up” borderline schemes of work by the addition of structural elements so that they meet the substantiality threshold in ground (f) is now at an end: the acid test is applied not just to the scheme of works as a whole, but to each and every element of it.

The consequences

This decision fundamentally righted the imbalance between well-resourced landlords and tenants in ground (f) cases. Landlords are still perfectly entitled to devise schemes of work with a view to putting their property to the most profitable use, and that use can, as a necessary consequence, involve evicting the existing
tenant and agreeing a new lease with a “more desirable” or higher paying tenant.

However, the intention must be laser focused on what changes are to be made on the ground, as if the 1954 Act did not exist, and not on what works will be able to satisfy the various requirements of ground (f).

Practically, ground (f) cases are now more involved, because tenants are entitled to examine why the landlord intends to carry out the works as evidence of whether they would satisfy the acid test. Tenants can scrutinise iterations of the scheme of works for signs that they have been “beefed up”, and they will scour through emails to understand the genesis and evolution of the scheme. Tenants will also ask whether the scheme makes commercial sense and often invite the court to permit expert valuation or viability evidence at trial.

Franses has not been restricted to ground (f) either. The same “acid test” has been applied in ground (g) cases (see Macey v Pizza Express (Restaurants) Ltd [2021] EWHC 2847 (Ch); [2021] PLSCS 182) and also in cases under the Electronic Communications Code (see Vodafone Limited v Icon Tower Infrastructure Limited and another (“Steppes Hill”) [2025] UKUT 58 (LC.)

The unknowns

However, there are some consequences of Franses that have not yet been fully explored by the courts. We give just two examples here.

First, what does Franses say about the timing of redevelopment schemes? It often happens that a landlord needs to wait for a number of different tenancies to end – eg in respect of different floors of the same building – before it will commence its works.

If those tenancies end at different times, on one view the landlord might fail the acid test for the first lease in time: if the tenant vacated voluntarily, the landlord would probably do nothing until the other leases ended, perhaps putting a temporary tenant in in the meantime, rather than commence works to only part of the building. But in such a case the scheme is genuine. The courts will have to grapple with how to balance the rights of landlords to pursue genuine schemes in due course, with the rights of tenants to security of tenure until that scheme is ready to commence.

Second, what happens where the tenant has constructed the building or structure at the holding, and is obliged to remove and reinstate on yielding the premises up at the end of the term? In such a case a landlord might devise a scheme of works simply to replace the building or structure with an identical one in order to end the tenant’s security of tenure.

Economically, such a scheme would be as wasteful and pointless as in Franses. Intuition tells us that the landlord must fail the acid test. However, strictly applied, the landlord would meet the acid test: if the tenant left voluntarily, they would be obliged to take down the structure first, and in such a case of course the landlord would need and want to rebuild it.

The answer to both these examples, we suggest, is to return to the underlying policy of Act, as discussed in Franses. The acid test is just a test, not a statutory provision, and must be applied in a way that supports landlords’ genuine intentions to improve their property, but avoid schemes and ploys designed merely to evict tenants with security.