Interim schedules of dilapidation — how effective are they?

Almost every landlord will know from his own experience how difficult it can be to recover damages for breach of the repairing covenants contained in a lease at the end of the term of the lease. This is not simply because the tenant may disappear without trace or have insufficient assets with which to meet his landlord's claim. These may be practical considerations but in the legal sense the problem frequently arises because of the difficulty in quantifying the claim as s. 18 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 provides that a landlord's damages shall not exceed the diminution in the value of his reversion. That being so, it is clearly more difficult for a landlord to pursue a claim for damages during the currency of the lease at a time when his reversion may not fall in for a number of years. However, a claim for damages is only one of the remedies available to a landlord during the currency of a lease as he may wish to forfeit the lease and commence proceedings for possession. How, then, does he set about enforcing his remedies and what obstacles are in his way?