Landlord and tenant

A tenant’s right to utilise a break clause was limited to the original tenant. At no time had a court interpreted a contractual provision as conferring on a person a right to break a lease at a time when they were neither the landlord nor the tenant. Competent property advisors needed to take particular care to make unambiguously clear, if intended, that a person would be entitled to break a lease not only when they were a tenant, but even after they had assigned the lease.

Although the object of all interpretation was to identify the intention of the parties to the particular document in question, it was undesirable that the courts should reach radically different interpretations of break clauses in commercial leases based on slight differences in language which were not obviously intended to achieve different objectives.