This has been done before, including next door.
Right to manage isn't a theory. Since the law came into force in 2003, leaseholders across the country have used it to take control of the management of their buildings, including estates larger and more complicated than ours, and including one a short walk along the river. Here are three stories worth knowing: two where neighbours succeeded, and one that shows exactly why our plan is shaped the way it is. None of them is a promise about our outcome. All of them are a matter of public record.
Chelsea Bridge Wharf, London SW11, the largest RTM in the country, one bridge away.
If you want proof that an estate like ours can do this, you can see it from the riverbank. Chelsea Bridge Wharf is a Thames-side Berkeley development of ten interconnected blocks and more than 1,100 flats, mixed-use, with a hotel, offices and housing association homes on site. In 2024 its leaseholders served a right to manage claim; in January 2025 the First-tier Tribunal confirmed they were entitled to take over, making it the largest right to manage site in the UK. The freeholder initially raised the standard technical objections, then withdrew them and let the tribunal decide. The leaseholders' new managing agent took over the day-to-day running of the estate in May 2025, roughly a year after the claim was served, and about four years after residents first began organising seriously.
What it took. This was not a form-filling exercise. The leaseholders had to prove, with a structural engineer's evidence and a tribunal site inspection, that their ten blocks qualified under the Act, and their tribunal bundle ran to more than 900 pages. That professional work costs real money, which is exactly what our RTM Fund exists to pay for.
What to take from it. Two things, honestly stated. First: scale is not a barrier. A ten-block, billion-pound riverside estate qualified. Second: winning RTM is the beginning, not the end. At Chelsea Bridge Wharf, leaseholders have since pressed their own RTM company hard on director elections and transparency. One of its directors was candid after the ruling that immediate savings were uncertain and that the real prize was becoming the client, the agent answering to residents rather than the freeholder. We agree on both counts, and it's why our Governance & Financial Charter commits to elected directors, open accounts and published contracts from day one. Control without accountability just moves the problem.
Century Wharf, Cardiff, 19 buildings, three RTM companies, still resident-run a decade later.
Century Wharf is a waterside estate of more than 900 flats and houses across 19 buildings, for years the largest RTM in the country until Chelsea Bridge Wharf overtook it. Its residents organised in 2011, incorporated three RTM companies in late 2012, served 19 claim notices in March 2013, faced counter-notices from the incumbent managing agent challenging the claims on several grounds, and acquired the right to manage in August 2014. In other words: roughly three years from first organising to handover, with a contested process in the middle. More than a decade on, the estate is still run by its RTM companies, with unpaid directors elected from among the leaseholders, appointing and supervising a professional managing agent.
Independent corroboration: the Right to Manage Federation (RTMF), which acted on the Century Wharf claim, describes it as the largest RTM completed at the time. We link to them as a neutral public source, not as an adviser to our campaign.
What to take from it. Century Wharf is the closest structural match to our plan: a large multi-building estate that could not be taken over in one go, and instead ran the claim building by building through more than one RTM company, coordinated by a residents' organisation. That is now the only lawful way to do it on a multi-block estate, the courts confirmed in 2015 that a single RTM company can only manage a single self-contained building. Our building-by-building plan isn't caution; it's the legally required route, and Century Wharf shows it works at scale and lasts. It also shows the realistic tempo. Their claim took three years against determined opposition. Our "12+ months" estimate assumes things go reasonably smoothly; this is what it looks like when they don't.
Settlers Court, Virginia Quay, London E14, the hard lesson our plan is built around.
We promised to show you an RTM that struggled, so here it is, and it's the case that shaped our own approach more than any other. Settlers Court is one block of 76 flats on Virginia Quay, a 778-home riverside estate in east London with ten blocks, freehold houses, and shared estate facilities: accessways, gardens, grounds, a river wall. Its leaseholders won the right to manage their block in November 2014. Then came a seven-year dispute over whether their RTM company had also taken over the shared estate areas, through the First-tier Tribunal, the Upper Tribunal, and finally the Supreme Court, which ruled in January 2022 that it had not. The right to manage covers your building; the shared estate facilities stay with the estate's existing manager, and leaseholders keep paying the estate charge for them.
What to take from it. Settlers Court still manages its own block today, the RTM itself was never undone. What the leaseholders lost, after years of litigation, was the argument that block RTM extends to the wider estate. That is precisely why we have told you from the start, in plain terms, that the cinema, gyms, pool and other shared facilities would remain estate-managed and recharged even after RTM. It isn't pessimism, and it isn't small print. It's the settled law of the land since 2022, and any campaign that tells you otherwise is setting you up for a Settlers Court of your own. We would rather you joined this knowing exactly what RTM does, and doesn't, deliver. How our plan is drawn inside that boundary →
No guarantees. A right that works when properly funded and honestly run.
None of these estates got a guarantee, and neither will we. What they got was the legal right to try, a process that works when it's properly funded and honestly run, and, in two cases out of three, control of their buildings that they still hold today. The third kept its building too; it just learned the boundary of the right the hard way. We've drawn our plan inside that boundary from the start.
They organised. So can we.
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