Every buying guide covers the plug and the panel. Almost none of them covers the person who owns the wall you want to fix it to.
When the department consulted on plug-in solar, consent came back as a live problem rather than a footnote. The published response records respondents raising "the need for renters and leaseholders to seek landlord or freeholder consent", and goes on to warn that "leasehold restrictions, landlord consent requirements, planning barriers and wider building management considerations may limit uptake unless addressed alongside the framework".
That is the department describing its own policy's ceiling, in its own document, before the rules came into force. In a city where a large share of homes are flats, it reads less like a caveat and more like the main event.
SI 2026/848 amends plug and socket safety law and the electricity supply regulations. Its subject is what may lawfully be sold and connected. There is nothing in it about tenancies or leases, and the response above shows the department expected consent to remain exactly where it was. A device being legal to buy and a building permitting you to fit it are two separate questions with two separate answers.
We cannot read your lease. What we can do is stop you asking the open-ended question that gets a no by default, because a managing agent who has to work out what you mean will usually work out that refusing is less effort.
| Put it like this | Rather than this |
|---|---|
| Does the lease restrict attaching anything to an external wall, or only to the structure? | Can I put solar panels up? |
| If the device is free-standing and fixed to nothing, does the lease still engage? | Would you mind if I tried something in the garden? |
| Is there a written alterations procedure, and what does it cost to use? | Do I need permission? |
| Does the buildings insurance policy say anything about resident-fitted electrical equipment outdoors? | Is it insured? |
| If consent is given, is it recorded as a licence to alter, and does it bind a future freeholder? | Is that a yes then? |
The freeholder owns the building. The managing agent runs it. A residents' association or a right to manage company may hold the decision instead of either. A verbal yes from whichever one answers the phone is not worth the call it came on.
The consultation response names renters alongside leaseholders, so the department plainly expected this to come up. A plug-in device has one advantage here that a roof installation does not: it is yours, it unplugs, and it leaves with you. A landlord refusing a permanent alteration is refusing something different from what you are proposing, and it is worth making that distinction on paper.
What we will not do is tell you a tenancy agreement permits it. We have not read it, and the answer lives in the clause about fixtures rather than in anything the government published.