Plenty of commercial buildings sit for years without anyone booking an air-conditioning assessment, and the reason is the same every time. The landlord assumed the tenant had arranged it. The tenant assumed it came bundled with the lease. Nobody checked. Then an enforcement officer asks for the report, and the question stops being academic.
The law does not divide this duty neatly between the two sides. Responsibility for a TM44 inspection rests with whoever controls the technical operation of the air conditioning, which might be the freeholder, the managing agent or the occupying business. Deciding which of those applies to your building is the entire exercise, and your lease will probably not spell it out.
Who the Regulations Treat as the TM44 Inspection Duty Holder
The wording used in the Energy Performance of Buildings Regulations points to the person who can control the temperature of the equipment. If your staff adjust setpoints, hold the plant room keys and instruct the maintenance contractor, the duty is probably yours. Ownership of the building matters far less here than day-to-day control does.
Buildings get pulled into scope more often than owners expect, because the threshold applies to combined capacity rather than to any single unit. Where one person can control several units, those units count as one system, and their effective rated output is added together. Six modest cassettes across two floors can be enough to qualify.
Why Leased Buildings Cause TM44 Inspection Disputes
Multi-tenanted offices often run cooling from central equipment rather than separate units per floor. A variable refrigerant flow system serving four tenancies has one set of outdoor condensers, one controller and several parties benefiting from it. Each occupier assumes the building manager handles compliance, and the building manager sometimes assumes the opposite.
Service charge clauses cover maintenance and repair in detail. Statutory assessment obligations are mentioned far less often, or are hidden in a general clause about complying with legislation affecting the premises. That vagueness suits nobody once an authority starts asking questions, because the regulator acts against the controlling party regardless of what the lease implies.
What Happens When Nobody Books the Assessment
Silence between landlord and tenant carries a cost that neither side budgeted for. Penalty notices apply per building, and a portfolio with the same gap repeated across sites quickly multiplies exposure. There is a second charge for failing to produce the report when an officer requests it, which catches out owners who genuinely arranged an assessment but cannot find the paperwork.
The practical damage usually shows up somewhere else first:
- Property sales stall at the due diligence stage while a valid report is chased.
- Incoming tenants query the gap and use it to push for concessions.
- Insurers ask for evidence of compliance at renewal and get an awkward answer.
- Energy reporting obligations lose a data source that should already exist.
- Relationships between landlord and occupier sour over who pays to fix it.
Settling Responsibility Before an Officer Raises It
Start with the thermostat rather than the title deeds. Whoever sets the temperature, arranges servicing, and reaches the plant is the most likely duty holder, and a brief written confirmation between the parties removes years of ambiguity. Agreeing this at the point of a lease renewal is easier than arguing about it under enforcement pressure.
Assessments are lodged on the national register, so a previous report may exist without either party knowing. Checking the record before commissioning anything avoids duplicate work and reveals the expiry date you need to plan around. Reports run on a five-year cycle, and renewals sneak up faster than most maintenance calendars allow.
A verbal agreement between a facilities manager and a letting agent survives roughly as long as the two of them stay in post. Put the outcome in the property file alongside the report reference, the assessor details and the date the next assessment falls due, so the answer outlives whoever worked it out.
Getting the Question Answered Rather Than Passed Along
The parties who avoid trouble are the ones who settled this before it became a dispute. Check who controls the cooling, whether a valid report already sits on the register, and get the position recorded where both sides can see it. Speaking with an accredited assessor will confirm whether your building falls within scope and when the next assessment is due.