A two -stage housing market becomes the result of the semi -baked lease reform plans from Labor | His Harry Skoffin

TThe lease system in England and Wales has torn down since the medieval age. It blocks homeowners, especially those in apartments, into a exploitative, narrow-like relationship with the FreeHolder, to which the property and administrative rights belong to it.

The FreeHolder can take advantage of this power weight and forced the tenant with the support of the law to pay blackmail amounts in the areas of rent and service. The former is a payment that does not offer the leaseholders any advantage or service. It is owed as a tribute to the superior legal rights of the owner. In the past, a trivial amount of rent has been organized for rent in recent years in order to blackmail more money from individual tenants. So destructive are soil rents that Parliament passed a law in 2022 that prohibited it for new houses.

The FreeHolder also appoints a building management company for the administration of maintenance, which is financed by a service fee that is raised for flat owners. In practice, this can lead to conflicts of interest and exorbitant fees. If tenants cannot satisfy the claims for a payment of over 350 GBP, they can be repaid. The threat of expiry forces to pay tenants to pay the inflated fees – sometimes for services that have never been preserved.

I saw first -hand lease owners. My mother's employment fees for her owners have risen £ 33,000 a year, since the no-fresh building deteriorates and houses are undeserved.

Hambeptons It found that in 2023 tenants in England and Wales alone paid a punishment of 7.6 billion GBP of employee fees. A 2011 study of which? The estimated tenants were overloaded every year by inflated service fees by 700 million GBP. A recently carried out state assessment assessment considered this number to be too low due to the growth of the sector. The growing awareness of the exploitative nature of the tenant has expanded the price gap between houses and apartments. This gap is now for 30 years and buyers are not ready to become financial hostages.

The government's new white paper promises to ban lease for future apartments. New apartments would be “Commonhold”, a democratic structure, whereby every flat owner owns ownership of his unity and has a share of the country with its neighbors through a company. Community would appoint their own managing director and decide together how their money will be spent. They would be free of floor rental and the risk of expiry.

However, the government has not committed to make the Commonhold available to millions, like my mother, in leasehold apartments. The suggestions expect tenants to acquire ownership before they are converted into the Commonhold. However, buying property is blackmail and often costs tens of thousands of pounds per household. The government has proposed that this will not change and explains that “the costs will probably still be significant”. Labor has excluded loans to the conversion of common people from the government, an important recommendation from the legal commission.

In addition to the costs, many tenants are blocked by the purchase of their own business due to restrictions that the Tories have imposed in the 1990s. Labor seems to replicate these exclusions in their rules who can acquire their property and convert them into the Commonhold. This includes the lack of legal law for tenants to buy their own share retrospectively if they did not take part in the original buy-out with their neighbors, either because they could not afford it or had not bought it into development. Another exclusion damages the tenants in apartments, which are structurally connected to commercial rooms such as a shop or a mixed block of wear.

As part of the proposals, even qualified rental elements that secure the majority balance for Commonhold can not be able to convert their lease. The process currently requires 100% support from tenants, lenders and owners. Although the government is reduced to 50%and ensure that only tenants decide, Reine Commonhold is only secured if each individual tenant is correct and pays in advance.

In view of the fact that this is almost impossible, Commonhold will come together in individual buildings with a rental agreement, which may lead to expensive administration, disputes and even litigation. Why accept a policy that the government recognizes itself, “could replace itself as worse than the tenant”?

The government's semi-baked intervention is to create a new two-stage market that is divided between glossy new Commonhold apartments and the legacy shares of lease debt traps. Elsewhere in the world, also in Scotland, flat owners enjoy democratic self -government without landlords from third -party providers. It is time that we have expanded these rights to the rest of the United Kingdom – and that means for the many, not only for the new ones.