Vaccine passports, whether domestic or for international travel, are a contentious issue at the moment. It is easy to see the logic behind them but there are a number of issues to be ironed out, including the potential for discrimination against those unable to get vaccinated and also how they would actually be used in practice.

Turning to the practicality point, clearly users would need to have some sort of app or documentation proving that they have had a vaccine, which could be open to fraud, but that aside, how would it work in a landlord and tenant context? It seems that the government is currently against making vaccine passports a legal requirement for entering particular venues. Shops, pubs and cinemas that are standalone units would be free to decide whether or not to make entry to their premises conditional on a vaccine passport. However, what about those in shopping centres? The landlord may well decide to require tenant employees to be vaccinated and it may decide to streamline the process by introducing checks at the entry points to the shopping centre. This could also be required by the landlord’s insurance policy. Tenants often covenant to comply both with a landlord’s Centre Regulations and any insurance requirements in their lease, so that would be an easy way to introduce it.

Requiring a vaccine passport to enter a shopping centre would come with a cost. The landlord would need to station personnel at entry points (which could simply be a redeployment of the Covid Marshalls that many shopping centres have introduced) and may require additional technology to scan QR codes. Will such costs be recoverable under the service charge? The answer is “perhaps”, depending on where the requirement for vaccine passports comes from and the terms of the lease. For instance, if it is an insurance requirement and a landlord is expressly able to recover such costs under the service charge, then the answer is “yes, probably”. If it is something that the landlord decides to introduce as part of its Shopping Centre Regulations and, again, such costs are expressly recoverable, then also “yes, probably”. However, in the absence of a specific entitlement to recover such a cost under the service charge, a landlord may struggle to recover any costs.  Even if a landlord chooses not to introduce a vaccine passport for the shopping centre, individual shops in the centre could still require them. This may lead to shoppers needing to show their vaccine passport to enter individual shops several times during a visit.

It remains to be seen whether domestic vaccine passports will be introduced by the government and, if venues opt to introduce them voluntarily, how they may or may not work in practice.