If you hold your lease jointly with another person, you are both responsible for meeting the terms of the lease, including paying rent and service charges, whether you are both living in the property or not. If your relationship breaks down or there is a change in your family circumstances, you will need to consider what should happen to your lease.
We will normally allow you to add a joint leaseholder to your agreement, provided you and any other existing joint leaseholder agrees. The additional leaseholder must not own another property or be ineligible for shared ownership.
We will normally allow you to remove a joint leaseholder from the lease, provided every existing joint leaseholder agrees. Before we do this, we will need to check that the remaining leaseholders can afford to pay the rent, service charges and mortgage.
We cannot remove someone from the lease without his or her consent. This is sometimes a problem when partners decide to separate. If both partners want to stay in the home and cannot agree who will, you will need to take legal advice. Only a court can decide who should keep the lease in these circumstances.
To change the names on a lease, you have to vary the lease, which you can only do with our consent. You will need to employ a solicitor and pay their fee.
