Reviewing a Wayleave Request

A request has arrived. Before anything is agreed, it is worth knowing what a complete one looks like, because an incomplete request is the most common reason a wayleave takes months rather than weeks. This page describes what each part of a request tells you. It does not tell you what to require, because that depends on the building and it is your decision to make.

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What a complete request contains

A request missing one of these is not necessarily a bad request. A RAMS in particular often cannot be produced until the operator has surveyed the site. What matters is whether the gap is acknowledged or simply absent.

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The operator, and their Code status

Who they are is worth establishing before anything else, because altnets consolidate, and the entity submitting a request is not always the entity that will hold the agreement or the one that will still exist in five years. Whether they hold Code rights changes the shape of the negotiation rather than its content. A Code operator has a statutory position behind it; a non-Code operator has only the contract. Both negotiate the same terms with you. They differ in what is available to either side if the negotiation fails. It also changes the agreement itself, because a Code agreement references the operator’s statutory rights and a purely contractual one does not.

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Insurance: present is not the same as adequate

Two separate questions, and they are easy to run together. Does cover exist, and is it current? Public liability and employers’ liability, both in date. This is a yes or no. Is it adequate for this building and this work? A different question entirely, and the answer depends on the work rather than on the operator. Drilling through compartmentation in an occupied residential block is not the same risk as pulling a cable through an empty duct, and the cover that is obviously sufficient for one may not be for the other. Insurance minimums are a term you set per building rather than a fixed standard, and the level that is right for a small commercial unit is not the level that is right for a 200-unit residential block.

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The RAMS

The Risk Assessment and Method Statement is where a request stops being a form and starts being evidence of thought. The question it answers is not “is this operator competent” but “has this operator thought about this building”. A generic template that never names your building, your riser or your asbestos position tells you something, and what it tells you is not about the operator’s competence. A ten-page document written for the actual site beats a forty-page one that could be about anywhere. Silence on asbestos in a UK building of any age reads as an omission. So does silence on fire stopping, because sealing penetrations is where telecoms installation most often damages something that matters.

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Consents above you

Where the building is held on a head lease, granting rights to a third party commonly requires the superior landlord’s consent, and that requirement is a condition of the agreement rather than a formality that follows it. The time to establish the consent position is when the request arrives, not when the agreement is ready to sign. Consent can take weeks, and a request that reaches signature with the question unresolved has to stop there anyway.

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The terms, against your own

The most useful thing you can do before any request arrives is decide what your terms are: the fee, the notice period, insurance minimums, access hours, and who is named as Grantor. Having decided once, a request becomes a comparison rather than a negotiation from first principles. What a wayleave agreement contains covers what each clause is for, which is the other half of knowing whether a proposal is reasonable. Where the operator’s proposal matches, there is nothing to discuss. Where it does not, the difference is the whole of the conversation.

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When something is missing

A request with a gap in it can be sent back for the gap rather than declined. That is usually the right move and it is almost always faster, because a decline ends the process and an operator who wants access will simply start it again. Where a RAMS is thin, asking for a specific list of what is missing gets a better document than asking for a better document.

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Where the decision is not yours

Managing agents rarely hold the authority to approve. The decision sits with a client, an asset manager or a board, and none of them are going to log in to read a request. For that case the facts of a request and a recommendation can be produced as a document and sent to whoever decides.

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Before any of this

If you are not yet sure a wayleave is the right instrument at all, that question comes first.