England and Wales telecoms tenancy cases go to tribunals

Some legal changes look small until you ask who actually gets to decide a dispute. This one is like that. A new statutory instrument made on 1 June 2026 and laid before Parliament on 4 June 2026 says that, from 30 July 2026, certain telecoms tenancy cases in England and Wales will be dealt with by the First-tier Tribunal and the Upper Tribunal rather than the courts. That may sound like a technical shuffle, but procedure matters. If you are a landowner, a telecoms operator, a student of public law, or simply trying to understand how broadband and mobile kit ends up on buildings and land, the choice of forum can shape cost, timing and the kind of expertise brought to the case.

According to the Regulations, the change applies to proceedings under Part 2 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 where the tenancy is a subsisting agreement and the primary purpose of the tenancy is to confer code rights. It also applies to proceedings under section 34B of the 1954 Act, which deals with compensation for the exercise of code rights. In plain English, code rights are the legal rights telecoms operators use to place and keep apparatus on land. That can mean equipment on a rooftop, a mast on a site, or other communications infrastructure needed to keep networks running. So while the drafting is dense, the real-world subject is not obscure at all: it is about who can use land for telecoms equipment, on what terms, and who settles the argument when people disagree.

You might reasonably ask why a telecoms dispute is sitting inside landlord and tenant law in the first place. The answer is that some telecoms agreements are renewed through the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, and the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 changed that framework for tenancies whose main purpose is to grant code rights. The explanatory note makes clear that these 2026 Regulations are about jurisdiction. They do not invent a brand new category of dispute. They move a defined set of existing disputes into the tribunal system, which is an important distinction if you are trying to work out what has changed and what has not.

The legal move itself is straightforward once you strip away the formal language. For the cases covered by regulation 3, references in Part 2 of the 1954 Act to the 'court' must now be read as references to the First-tier Tribunal and the Upper Tribunal. **What this means:** the dispute still exists, the parties still argue their case, and a decision still has to be made. What changes is the body hearing it. That matters because specialist tribunals are often used when Parliament wants technical property or infrastructure questions heard in a more specialised setting.

There is also an important transition rule, and this is the part readers should not skip. Regulation 4 says that proceedings under Part 2 of the 1954 Act which were started before 30 July 2026 are not pulled into the new system halfway through. They stay in court and continue as if the Regulations had never been made. That may sound dry, but it is really about fairness and certainty. If a case is already under way, both sides know where they stand. The law is not asking them to restart in a different forum simply because the calendar has moved on.

The Regulations also tidy up the wider rulebook. They amend the High Court and County Courts Jurisdiction Order 1991 so that proceedings carved out by these new Regulations are no longer treated as part of the court jurisdiction that order would otherwise cover. The explanatory note adds that no full impact assessment was produced because no, or no significant, impact on the private, voluntary or public sector is expected. Read that carefully. It does not mean the reform is unimportant. It means ministers see this mainly as a transfer of jurisdiction rather than a large new burden or a sweeping change in substantive rights.

If you are learning from this story, there is a bigger lesson hiding inside it. Law often changes through quiet procedural edits rather than dramatic headlines. A new right, a new test, a new decision-maker, a new timetable: all of these can alter how a system works, even when the statute book looks, at first glance, almost unchanged. **A useful checkpoint:** this is not every dispute under the 1954 Act. The text is narrower than that. It is aimed at proceedings involving a subsisting agreement whose main purpose is to confer code rights, together with the linked compensation claims under section 34B.

For landlords and site providers, the practical question is whether the tenancy in front of you falls into this specialist category and whether proceedings began before or after 30 July 2026. For operators, the message is that telecoms law and property law continue to overlap in very direct ways. For everyone else, this is a good example of how the state tries to place specialist disputes in specialist forums. So the clearest way to read these Regulations is this: from 30 July 2026, certain telecoms tenancy renewal and compensation cases in England and Wales move from the courts to the tribunal system. Older live cases stay where they are. The official text is technical, but the practical point is simple enough: the route to a decision is changing, even where the underlying dispute remains much the same.