> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.wayline.uk/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Do You Need a Wayleave?
> When a wayleave is required and when it is not: the test that decides it, the situations that need no agreement at all, and when a licence or a lease is the right instrument instead.
Most people meet this question the wrong way round. An operator asks for a wayleave, and the building owner works out afterwards whether that was the right thing to ask for.
It is worth knowing the test, because the answer is sometimes no, and the cases where it is no are not obscure.
## The test
A wayleave is needed when **apparatus will occupy or cross land that the party installing it does not control**, and will stay there.
Both halves matter. Something that crosses land but does not stay, such as a cable run out for a day's testing, is a different kind of permission. Something that stays on land the installer already controls needs nothing from anybody.
That is the whole test. Everything below is a consequence of it.
## When you do not need one
**The same party owns everything.** A freeholder running their own cabling through their own building, with no third party installing and nothing crossing anyone else's land, is not granting rights to anyone. There is no counterparty.
This is the case that most often stops being true partway through. A phased development owns the whole site until it starts selling parts of it, and a route that needed nobody's permission in phase one crosses somebody else's land by phase three. See [wayleaves for new developments](/concepts/wayleaves-for-new-developments).
**An existing right already covers it.** If the land is already subject to an easement, or the operator already holds a lease of the space, the right may already exist. What matters is whether the existing right covers the apparatus actually proposed, which is often narrower than people assume. A right to run a cable is not a right to install a cabinet.
**Nothing is being left behind.** Surveys, inspections and testing that end with the building as it was are usually handled by a short licence rather than a wayleave. The distinction is not about how long the work takes; it is about whether anything remains afterwards.
**The apparatus is in the public highway.** Work in a public road is a matter between the operator and the highway authority, under a separate regime with its own notice requirements. It is not a negotiation with a landowner and it is not a wayleave question, which is why an operator can be laying cable down your street one week and asking for a wayleave the next.
## When a licence is the right instrument
A licence is permission to do something that would otherwise be trespass. It grants no interest in the land.
It fits where the presence is temporary and nothing stays: a survey visit, scaffolding, access to inspect a riser before a request is made. Operators quite reasonably ask for a licence covering the survey, and then a wayleave covering the installation the survey establishes is possible. That sequence is not an operator trying two bites; it is the right two instruments in the right order.
## When it is really a lease
Where an operator needs **exclusive possession** of a defined space, a lease is the instrument, whatever the document is headed.
The usual case is a dedicated equipment room, a plant space or a rooftop site with its own enclosure. The test is not the size of the installation but whether the operator is being given a space to control. A cabinet in a shared riser is not exclusive possession. A locked room the operator holds the only key to generally is.
Rooftop telecoms sites frequently sit on leases rather than wayleaves for exactly this reason, and they carry a different commercial and legal treatment as a result.
The four instruments side by side, and what separates them.
## Who has to grant it
Establishing that a wayleave is needed does not establish who grants it, and the two questions are answered by different things. The test above is about the apparatus and the land. Who grants is about the title, the leases and any management structure sitting between them.
In a building with a freeholder, a head lease, a management company and an agent, all four may have a role and only one of them is the Grantor. Blocks of flats are where this is hardest, and [wayleaves in blocks of flats](/concepts/flats-and-multi-dwelling-buildings) covers that case.
Freeholders, managing agents, RMC and RTM structures, head leases and superior landlord consent.
## What if apparatus is already there?
A common situation, and a different question from the one above.
**Start by establishing whether an agreement exists.** Wayleaves are rarely registered against the title, so a title search often will not show one. The places they turn up are the previous owner's files, the managing agent's records, and the operator's own records, which an operator will usually check if asked. An agreement that nobody can find has not necessarily lapsed; it may simply be filed somewhere nobody has looked.
**If one exists, the question is what it says and whether it still runs.** Terms end. Some agreements continue after their term on their own provisions, some do not, and Code agreements do not follow the ordinary contractual position at all.
**If no agreement exists, the position is genuinely qualified and this page is not going to resolve it.** Apparatus installed without permission raises questions about what rights, if any, the operator has acquired, what remedies are available, and whether the sensible outcome is a retrospective agreement rather than a dispute. Those depend on the facts and on how long the apparatus has been there. It is a solicitor's question and worth treating as one early, because the options narrow with time.
## Other infrastructure, same instrument
The question above is not specific to telecoms. Any infrastructure that occupies someone else's land and stays there raises it: electricity connections, metering, and increasingly electric vehicle charging and building energy equipment.
What changes between them is not the instrument but the terms it carries. A charge point installation raises electrical capacity, parking rights and network operator approval; a fibre installation raises none of those. The agreement is recognisably the same animal with different clauses in it.
The seven things an EV agreement addresses that a telecoms one does not.
## If the answer is yes
Two things follow, in this order.
The process end to end, traditionally and on a platform.
What a request should contain and what each part of it tells you.
**This page describes when a wayleave is the instrument people generally use, not what you should do about a particular building.** Whether an existing easement or lease covers a specific installation, and whether a particular structure gives a particular party the power to grant, are questions about documents. They are answered by reading those documents, and where the answer matters they are worth putting to a solicitor.
The platform these guides document, and what it does with the agreements described here.