Ending the Leasehold Housing Scam
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WHO AM I?
My battle began in 2017 when I found out my Mum was being held hostage by a very wealthy landlord based in an offshore tax haven using legal powers dating back to feudal times. She thought that by buying a flat, she was an owner. Instead, she is a tenant trapped in “leasehold”, an arcane system unique in the world to England and Wales that allows shadowy and unaccountable companies to take possession of your money and control your home.
Since then, I have met countless other brave leaseholders who find themselves being shaken down for cash in their own homes under a system which is perfectly legal. We all are feeling ignored by the political class.
Over the years, I have made it my mission to give a voice to those who feel powerless when standing up to deep-pocketed bullies in the leasehold sector. In the battles with our freehold-owning landlord, I realised quite quickly that the only meaningful change for leaseholders in my development was to ensure security for all leaseholders through law reform from Parliament. My dream is to make homeownership great again and to finally ensure that an English person’s home is their castle when it’s a flat, not a feudal one controlled by mighty land barons.
WHAT WAS I DOING LAST YEAR?
Throughout 2023, I campaigned ferociously to force the government to deliver its 2019 manifesto commitment to implement leasehold reform by way of a Bill in the King’s Speech. Supported by a network of super talented volunteers, I achieved this in November 2023. As of March 2024, a Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill has gone through the House of Commons and is with the House of Lords. The Bill falls far short of the reform needed to turn leasehold tenants into the fully paid-up members of the property-owning democracy they thought they were buying into in the first place. The Bill is the product of a just handful of the 350 Law Commission recommendations, which had been extensively researched and consulted upon 2017-2020. The Bill fails to liberate leaseholders en masse. Ministers have acknowledged elements of the package can be improved before it becomes law.
There is no doubt in my mind that the salience of the leasehold scandal is the highest it has been for decades, in no small part thanks to our creative campaigning. Our truth-telling, quirky homemade videos are achieving as many as 150,000 views on X, formerly Twitter, shared widely across Westminster and Whitehall and driving the news agenda. The campaign has also seen allies emerge from the think-tank world and parliamentary champions coming forward, too. The logic of our arguments and the style with which they are being made have scored a few notable hits without any funding source behind us, but we still have a long way to go.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
A recent report in The Times highlights the intensive lobbying efforts by well-financed sector interests to derail even this modest leasehold reform Bill. Their objective, as with past leasehold legislation, is to bring in amendments to neuter some of its key provisions at the last minute, when government is most under pressure to deliver eagerly anticipated homeownership policies. These special interests are using bullying tactics to keep their rent-seeking and predatory business model going, even threatening Ministers with a lawsuit against the government at the European Court of Human Rights.
For generations now, freehold-owning landlords have benefited from a legal regime of bewildering complexity that has made them immune from the forces of competition and denies consumer homeowners control of their costs. This needs to end. It is high time England and Wales finally join the rest of the world with how they organise flat living using commonhold systems, where residents are in the driving seat and there are no Lords of the Manor calling the shots and dictating what they must pay in order to keep living in their homes.
WHERE NEXT?
Longer term, our campaign, Free Leaseholders, seeks to free leaseholders via a wholesale move to commonhold, in the next Parliament. Commonhold can help rebalance our economy by making flat living popular and affordable and urban densification successful. We have the second lowest proportion of flats of any country in Europe and toxic leasehold tenure plays a key role in that. We also have set our sights on boosting homebuyer awareness of the pitfalls of leasehold.
However, to make residential leasehold tenure history, we need to better counter this sordid multibillion pound industry in other people’s homes. But that means we need to put serious financial punch behind this campaign, which is up against very powerful interests, including in the legal profession, which of course earns its profits by representing freehold-owning landlords.
We are appealing to grassroots supporters of our work and anyone who cares about the UK housing crisis to donate today. Any money that is being donated will go towards the reasonable costs of running the Free Leaseholders campaign, including transportation, polling, research, content creation and communication.
Organizer
Harry Scoffin
Organizer