The wildfires are out but are disputes on the horizon?

When a fire tears through a home or business, the damage is immediate and obvious. What’s less visible, but often more drawn-out, is what happens next: the disputes between landlords, tenants and neighbours over who is responsible for what. Having acted for both commercial and residential landlords for 20 years, I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself after almost every major property-damage event, and this summer, following the wildfires near Stourbridge that destroyed homes, businesses, and forced evacuations, I expect to see it again.

2026 is shaping up to be one of the most severe wildfire seasons the UK has recorded. That’s not a one-off. It follows 2022 and 2025, each of which broke the records set the year before. Wildfire in the UK has gone from a rare summer news story to a recurring feature of our warmer, drier summers, and the legal fallout is starting to follow the same trajectory.

The rebuild is the easy part

In my experience, the physical reinstatement of a fire-damaged property is rarely where the real difficulty lies. Rebuilding is a known process with known costs. The harder part is agreeing who pays for it, who is liable for it, and what happens to the relationships and contracts that governed the property before the fire.

For residential landlords and tenants, that usually means a dispute over repairing obligations. Most tenancy agreements are written on the assumption that repairs will be minor and routine – a leak, a broken boiler, general wear and tear. They are rarely drafted with a fire that has destroyed a property in mind. That gap creates genuine uncertainty – who is responsible for reinstatement, what happens to rent while the property is uninhabitable, and whether either party can end the tenancy altogether.

Commercial leases raise sharper questions

Commercial tenants face a different but related set of problems. A fire that puts a business out of its premises for weeks or months can be existential for that business, and leases don’t always deal cleanly with that scenario. Disputes commonly arise over who bears the cost of reinstatement, whether service charge continues to apply to a building that can’t be occupied, and whether a break clause can be triggered early. These are the kinds of disputes that, left unresolved, end up in litigation, not because either party is acting unreasonably, but because the lease simply wasn’t written with this situation in mind.

It’s also worth noting that many commercial leases already treat fire as an insured risk. Where that’s the case, an accidental fire doesn’t automatically become a dispute between landlord and tenant – insurers are often involved from the outset, and the dynamic becomes more complex than a straightforward two-party disagreement. That said, disputes over reinstatement costs, service charge, and break clause rights still commonly follow, particularly once the insurance position is established and the parties turn to what it does and doesn’t cover. If the premises are destroyed or severely damaged, the lease could also be deemed at an end in any event.

When fire crosses a boundary

Wildfire, by its nature, doesn’t respect property lines. Where a fire spreads from one garden, boundary, or piece of land to a neighbouring property, questions of liability and negligence follow close behind. Was the fire foreseeable? Did the party where it started take reasonable precautions? These disputes can be some of the most contentious I see, because they involve neighbours who will likely still be living or working next to each other once the dispute is resolved.

Dilapidations complicate an already difficult process

For any landlord and tenant nearing the end of a lease, fire damage adds a further layer of complexity to dilapidations claims – the process of agreeing what state a property should be returned to. Where fire has affected part or all of a property, disagreements over the standard of repair required, and who is responsible for meeting it, are common and often expensive to resolve.

Why early advice matters more than people think

If there’s one pattern I’d point to above all others, it’s this: the disputes that end up in costly, drawn-out litigation are very often the ones where nobody sought advice early enough to head off the disagreement before positions hardened. Once a landlord or tenant has committed to a position, verbally or in correspondence, it becomes harder, not easier, to resolve the dispute efficiently. Early advice doesn’t just protect a party’s legal position; it often prevents a dispute from becoming adversarial in the first place.

A recurring risk, not a one-off

The properties affected by this summer’s fires range from family homes to commercial premises, and the disputes that follow will be just as varied. But as wildfire becomes a more regular feature of UK summers rather than an exceptional event, I’d encourage landlords, tenants and property owners to treat this not as a one-off risk to react to, but as a recurring one to plan for through clearer lease drafting, better insurance conversations, and faster access to legal advice when damage occurs.

The fires themselves may be out within days. The disputes they leave behind can take considerably longer to resolve.

Author
Peter Humpherson is a property dispute solicitor at Higgs LLP, advising commercial and residential landlords across the UK.