Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 29th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, my main focus so far has been boosting leaseholder control over service charges by removing barriers to the right to manage. However, we must dramatically reform the law for leaseholders who cannot gain this control and who wish to stand up to their freeholder on service charges. It is positive that the Government are enforcing service charge transparency and disclosure with the new right-to-inform scheme in Part 4, Clause 55, which makes changes to the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, but I believe we need to go further and make it easier for leaseholders to challenge rip-off freeholders with their service charge.

Tribunals are very stressful: they take a long time and often do not have the power to enforce their decisions. This leaves leaseholders in a very strong predicament. Leaseholders normally have to file another application with the county court to get their money back for any overcharging, at least as they see it. My Amendment 78A is all about enforcement and giving teeth to tribunals’ decisions, where it has been determined that the service charges that the leaseholders have paid were not payable or were unreasonably incurred.

Various rules in Parliament have been passed in an attempt to regulate this behaviour of freeholders; again, I mean poor freeholders—the whole market is not like this. Often, these work only when leaseholders have the time, money and energy to enforce them at tribunal, which then is not always guaranteed when residents are up against armies of layers. Freeholders often hold many freeholds and have a big financial backing behind them and can just tire out leaseholders—they can work them into the ground and threaten them with forfeiture, for instance, should something go wrong. The Secretary of State was right to say that we need to put the squeeze on freeholders, but that means making freeholders actually fear leaseholders bringing cases against them at tribunal.

In my Second Reading speech, I mentioned that research from Hamptons has shown that leaseholders paid £7.6 billion in service charges. Many of those service charges were overcharge, and we want to create a situation where leaseholders can fight back. The annual service charge for flats in England and Wales has increased by 8.4% since the beginning quarter of 2023. Around 270,000 leaseholders are now paying more than £5,000 a year in service charges, which could quickly become a second mortgage for many leaseholders.

My Amendment 78A seeks to amend the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 regime for service charge disputes to try to make service charge tribunals against freeholders more serious by taking three important steps. One is by providing an opt-out. At the moment, leaseholders have to sign up for a case to benefit. Even if the tribunal determines that they have been overcharged, unless they have signed up their neighbour may receive a payment but they will not because they did not sign up. That is unfair in modern life: you could be elderly; you could have children; you could just be away when all these things are going on. Your neighbour would receive benefit and you would not, even though you would also have overpaid. That is why we need an opt-out, not an opt-in, to make it more serious.

Secondly, after a successful Section 27A challenge by any leaseholder in a block, the freeholder would be under a duty to account to all leaseholders within a two-month period of the decision being handed down. This means that any money overpaid would have to be paid back within two months, because leaseholders—many of them owning a place for the first time, many of them young people, many of them elderly people on fixed incomes—have paid out this money which they often could not afford. They should get it back in a speedy fashion.

Thirdly, there should be interest after a two-month period if the freeholder has not paid back money owed to the leaseholders. This is to give the sanction some bite and to make sure that a freeholder does not just wait out hapless leaseholders because they have all the power and the financial power.

I would like to see some more action in this Bill to deter and punish bad behaviour by freeholders and ensure that leaseholders can swiftly get their money back where overcharging has been determined by a tribunal. My Amendment 78A gets us closer to that position.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, Amendment 78 is about one part of service charges that sometimes gets neglected: the lack of consultation about major works that remain uncapped, opaque and difficult to challenge. This mainly affects those who have brought homes where the landlord or freeholder is a council. The amendment is also about the failed attempts by the law to help them in the past and whether we can use the Bill to rectify that.

In Committee last Wednesday it was implied that leaseholders are mainly wealthy home owners of luxury flats. These leaseholders deserve fair treatment, however wealthy they are, and they should not be ripped off, but many leaseholders do not fall into that category, with 49% of leaseholders being first-time buyers. We also have right-to-buy leaseholders who bought their own council homes, and leaseholders who bought former council homes because they were cheaper and therefore home ownership was within their grasp, rather than them being priced out of the market. I declare an interest as one of those people.

Leaseholders living in former council homes now face enormous refurbishment bills of tens of thousands of pounds, despite a legal cap being introduced 10 years ago, which is being circumvented by local authorities. The reason for major works is no doubt exacerbated by years of weak investment and cuts. Social housing estates do need to be maintained, and I understand that councils have difficulty doing that. However, neglect builds up and leaseholders end up being the ones who pay the price. The bill for entire blocks has been divided between the local authority and individual leaseholders because council tenants cannot be charged. Therefore, we end up with situations such as that of George and Alma, a couple who were suddenly landed with a £45,000 bill for windows in the roof of the estate, which do not even affect them, making them sick with worry. As has already been discussed, the disrepair that accumulates on estates ends up not just increasing service charges but coming as one large bill. George said, “I pay a service charge and I have not seen any work being done on a yearly basis—then suddenly we get this big bill”.

I am a Haringey leaseholder of a maisonette. I noted one extreme case that came to light during lockdown, when 76 leaseholders in Wood Green were told to find between £56,000 and £118,000 to cover Haringey repairs and improvements. One young woman, when she bought her maisonette in 2015, was told that major works planned would cost £15,000. Instead, after losing her job because of lockdown, she ended up with a bill of £110,000. Another couple, when buying their property, were given an estimated bill for major works of £12,500. Mid-completing buying their house, that had swelled to £25,000 with no explanation whatsoever for the increase, and they could not find out why. There was then stalling for five years, again with no explanation. Haringey then added in some other major works—roofs, windows and door replacements—so now the final bill is a whopping £108,450. To quote them, “We will be ruined”. The bill will be a third of what they paid for their home.

This is happening all over London, and councils’ responses have been complacent. Lambeth Council said: “We appreciate that major works can place a financial burden on leaseholders, which is why we offer a number of repayment options”. However, even those which break it down over five years, for example, which is one of the options available, can almost double some people’s mortgage, and this is even beyond increasing service charges.

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Certainly, if the principle of my amendment is accepted by the Government today—I hope very much that it will and they will be willing to have further discussions about it—perhaps at a later stage we could also look at a slightly different approach in respect of owner-occupied properties in such multi-tenure high-rise buildings.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, my Amendment 104 is very much part of the amendments I have—both today and on other days—that look at the way the law, as it was previously made, might not be doing what it is intended to. I am interested in restoring Section 24 management for leaseholders suffering at the hands of some predatory freeholders, suffering sky-high service charges and run-down buildings—some of the things we have been talking about.

Like many other noble Lords here, I still have the scars from scrutinising the Building Safety Bill when I first arrived here. It was the most hugely complicated piece of legislation, but it went through the House relatively quickly because of the importance of the topic. As I think we are all aware now, that speed probably led to a number of unintended consequences that have since come to light. One surely unintended consequence of the Building Safety Act is the way that its accountable person regime undermined Section 24 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987. Due to the wording of the Act’s accountable person policy, Section 24 court-appointed managers are barred from assuming their duty-holder role. Until that point, these tribunal-backed managers would be entrusted with all of the building’s management, when it was determined that the freeholder could not be trusted to remain in control of a development and leaseholder service charges.

I am not commenting in general on the accountable person policy per se, although there are problems with it. But it is odd that there is such a wide range of entities that can be the accountable person, including leaseholder-controlled resident management companies and right-to-manage companies, yet strangely, the Act prohibits a Section 24 manager from taking on the role, despite the fact that a Section 24 manager would have been appointed by a tribunal panel, which was satisfied that they had the credentials and experience needed to steward a development that had fallen foul of a poor freeholder. I do not understand how this happened, or why.

It is important to note that Section 24 has been a lifeline right for ripped-off leaseholders unable to buy their freehold or claim the right to manage because of costs or strict qualifying criteria. This is an attempt to ensure that Section 24, which is the ultimate backstop scheme, is restored in the Bill, to give leaseholders a clear route to remove freeholders and their management agents if it has been shown that they have actually been ripped off and it is the only route open to them.

This issue came to my attention in February, when Melissa York in the Times reported a devastating story of Canary Riverside in Tower Hamlets. This story really made an impact on me, because there the leaseholders have benefited from court protection, with Section 24 management, since 2016. A Section 24 manager was installed because the freeholder, a Monaco-based billionaire, John Christodoulou, had lost the confidence of the tribunal due to his company’s seeming financial mismanagement and poor estate maintenance. After years of fighting by the leaseholders, in March this year the Upper Tribunal found that the freeholder had used a related firm to overcharge the development by £1 million in secret insurance commissions—the kinds of issues we were discussing earlier today.

Yet despite this and other well-evidenced service charge abuses, and the fact that the leaseholders have benefited from independent Section 24 management, The Times reports that

“an oversight in the new Building Safety Act means the same court that removed his management company could put Christodoulou back in control of service charge moneys and safety works, including £20 million for cladding remediation”.

It seems to me that the Building Safety Act’s seemingly arbitrary exclusion of Section 24 managers from its accountable person regime did not intend to do this, but its effect is that those Canary Riverside leaseholders, among others, are faced with the prospect of their landlord staging a comeback and regaining control over block management, even though the leaseholders’ work over years, accumulating evidence to prove fault, has been accepted at tribunal level. That work is now undermined because a statutory right that leaseholders relied on for years is now blocked by the Act.

This is so frustrating, and it needs to be tackled in Parliament, as the courts are bound by the laws we make here. In December, in the first test case on this—Canary Riverside—the First-tier Tribunal confirmed that the Building Safety Act does not allow a Section 24 manager to be the accountable person. In March the Upper Tribunal agreed. Despite those tribunal decisions going against them, I commend the leaseholders at Canary Riverside, and say all power to them. They are still appealing in order to keep their Section 24 protection.

This is heroic work, which should remind us all of the real-life toll of the sort of issues leaseholders have to take on. They are ordinary people who bought leasehold flats, and who have ended up going in and out of court regularly—and there is not just the toll, but the costs. Nearly £200,000 has been committed in legal fees already. This is a sharp reminder that the unintended consequences of laws we make here can have wide-reaching, even devastating, effects on real people’s real lives.

We need to put right this wrong, here in Parliament, and to use the Bill to do so. The Section 24-accountable persons clash was raised in January with MPs on the Public Bill Committee by Free Leaseholders, End Our Cladding Scandal and Philip Rainey KC, who all drew this to our attention. As a consequence, the MPs Nickie Aiken and Barry Gardiner moved amendments on this issue in the other place. I would really appreciate it if the Minister looked into fixing this, because I do not think it is what we ever intended to do with the Building Safety Act. It is a loophole, and it has the most devastating consequences for leaseholders, which I am sure we could simply put right.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I admire the persistence of my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath in his indefatigable pursuit of the perhaps unsexy but very important issue of electrical safety defects, as evidenced in his Amendment 95A.

The first group of amendments relates to building safety—a subject that we have debated many times in this Chamber in recent years, following the tragic events of the Grenfell Tower fire. Amendments 82C to 82M, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, relate to a proposal that higher-risk buildings should have a building trustee. The trustee would be an impartial figure, whose role would be to ensure that the interests, rights and responsibilities of the landlord and leaseholders were balanced, that the building was properly maintained, and that the service charge provided value for money—a practice that exists elsewhere. We find the noble Earl’s proposal interesting, and certainly worthy of consideration in the future. However, it is quite a detailed proposal which may not have the chance to be scrutinised further in the context of the Bill.

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Moved by

[Baroness Fox of Buckley]

84: After Clause 69, insert the following new Clause—
“Marketing of residential leasehold property(1) Within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must make regulations to regulate the marketing of residential leasehold property.(2) Regulations under subsection (1) may—(a) require residential leasehold property without a share of the freehold to be marketed and sold as “lease-rental”,(b) require that residential leasehold property without a share of the freehold be advertised with a disclaimer containing the words that “leasehold is a lesser title and management and service charges at this property are controlled by a third-party entity that is not subject to democratic resident control”,(c) provide information about the rights and responsibilities of leaseholders and landlords under a long lease to be given to prospective home buyers by sellers and property agents in the form of a document produced by the Secretary of State or another person,(d) require sellers and property agents to clearly state material information, including lease length, ground rent and service charge, in the marketing of residential leasehold property,(e) define “prospective home buyers”, “sellers” and “property agents”,(f) provide that the document to be given is the version that has effect at the time the requirement applies, and(g) specify cases where the regulations do not apply.(3) Regulations under subsection (1) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would provide for a scheme to regulate the marketing of residential leasehold property. The scheme involves requiring leasehold homes without a share of the freehold to be marketed and sold as “lease-rental”, which adopts a key recommendation of the leasehold report by the House of Commons’ Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, published on 11 March 2019.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Last week, after I spoke in the debate, I received a message from someone I know quite well. It said:

“I’m currently in the final stages of trying to buy a leasehold flat and am pretty worried about what I’m getting myself into. The freeholder, a Housing Association, has increased the service charge by 27% since I had my offer accepted and there seems to be nothing to stop them doing so again. They claim they just do it to cover costs … I get the impression this is a rentier business pretending to be something else”.


The aim of the amendment, which in some ways might appear to be quite glib, is that everyone should stop pretending this is something it is not. When you become a leaseholder you are not actually buying a home, and I want to clarify that to say so is mis-selling.

Of course, I am hopeful that the Government will accept my earlier amendment for a sunset clause on leasehold and that commonhold will become the new normal, but in the meantime those buying homes on leasehold should be frankly told what they are buying into. I have noticed in this Committee, and in the wider debate on the issue, that developers and big freehold often defensively retort when we complain about treatment of leaseholders, “You knew you were buying a leasehold property. You knew the rules. Why didn’t you read the small print?” It is a form of victim blaming—“This is what leasehold is”—but it is disingenuous.

I want to tackle that by regulating the marketing of residential leasehold properties so that they are sold as lease rentals, which in fact was a key recommendation of the leasehold report by the House of Commons Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee that was published in March 2019. I stress that when you buy a leasehold property, you think you are buying a house or entering into the home-owning classes. That is how it is sold to us by politicians. For example, a DLUHC spokesperson, defending the mess that is shared ownership, stated:

“Shared ownership has a vital role to play in helping people onto the property ladder, and since 2010 we have delivered 156,800 new shared ownership homes”.


The whole idea, when you buy into shared ownership or you buy a leasehold flat, is that you are joining the property-owning classes. You think of it as the aspiration to own your own home, and all that that entails. That is what you are buying.

We need to consider the ideology of home ownership. I thought about that particularly when watching an excellent lecture entitled “Making our homes our own” by Professor Nicholas Hopkins, a Law Commissioner for property, family and trust law. When you are renting somewhere to live, there is a sense of dependence on a landlord. You have no conception that you own the property, and it is all very clear. I remember my father saying to me, “It’s time to grow up and stop renting”, and eventually I bought a flat—not until I was 40, mind. It was a leasehold flat, and I thought, “I’m all grown up now. I’m taking responsibility. No landlord—it’s up to me”. Little did I know.

When you buy a home, you think you are buying independence, autonomy and control. Yes, it provides greater security, stability and permanence, but what about what Professor Hopkins calls the “x-factor” benefits—the idea that you buy a property, make it your own and personalise it? Do noble Lords remember those symbolic new front doors that everyone put on their council flats after right to buy came in? It was like saying, “I bought mine, so I’ve got a red door”—it meant something. I am not saying that in a sniffy way; it did mean something. It was about saying, “I’m going to take pride in maintaining this. I’m going to improve it”. People were in control over their houses, how and when to dispose of them, and so on—they had taken that grown-up responsibility. The notion that there is no landlord controlling your home is very important, but it is an illusion in relation to leasehold.

When the Commons Select Committee did an inquiry into leasehold in 2018 to 2019, it

“found a system which stacked the odds in the favour of developers, freeholders and managing agents, leaving leaseholders with all the financial responsibilities and without matching safeguards to protect them. Leaseholders were too often treated not as homeowners or customers, but as a source of steady profit”.

That is exactly what it feels like, but they do not tell you that at the estate agents. They do not say that the leasehold form of home ownership means that, while you pay for the maintenance of your home, you have no control over the amount, quality or cost of work undertaken. The whole experience is disempowering. You are being done to—the object of other people’s decisions.

I will give an example. When Storm Eunice battered Britain a few years ago, the roof of one lady’s top-floor two-bedroom leasehold flat started to leak badly. She said that rain was coming down through the light sockets and switches. Most home owners would try to get someone in as soon as possible to identify the leaks and get the problem fixed urgently via a claim on their buildings insurance—there is a storm, there are leaks and it is dangerous, so you get it fixed properly. But, because Liz’s flat is leasehold, she had to rely on a managing agent to sort things out. Despite countless calls and emails, she could not get anything done. Eventually, the water stopped—they stemmed the flow—but that failed and mould started to grow in the increasingly sodden flat, so Liz had to move out. There was more pleading with the managing agent to find suitable temporary accommodation, and eventually they did, albeit to a dodgy area in which Liz said she did not feel safe.

The Minister said earlier that one reason she was nervous about giving consultation rights to leaseholders in relation to local authorities was that the leaseholders might hold up works and that, somehow, the freeholders would be rushing to get them done. Is there a historic example of that ever happening? Generally, what has happened is that leaseholders are in a rush to sort out problems in their own homes and would know how to do so, but the freeholders, or their managing agents, are less inclined to.

Mis-selling leasehold properties as property ownership is, in my opinion, a con in so many ways. People who save hard for a deposit, and who budget and work hard to get a mortgage, see their new home as a financial asset: a home to pass on. But, as Professor Hopkins explains, the effect of leasehold, in essence, is to put financial value in the landlord’s hands at the expense of the leaseholders, and

“the more a person’s home is used as a financial asset to benefit their landlord, the less it is an investment for the individual. The more a leaseholder’s money is providing an investment for their landlord, the less their money is providing an investment for their own future, their family and their next generation”.

So, for leaseholders, the question is: would they buy that flat if their home was actually a source of investment for someone else—a profit for someone else—and not even something they could easily pass on to their family?

When you look in an estate agent’s window, there are two sections: for sale and for rent. There is no mention, under “for sale”, that there is a two-tier system of property and that leaseholders do not get sold their homes outright but are tenants of a freeholder who owns the land. Would-be buyers may hear their solicitors mumble the word “leasehold”, but the implications are not spelled out. For example, Natalie Walton explained in an article that, when she bought her new-build two-bedroom flat in Wakefield for £105,000, she had no idea that, on top of her £1,600 annual service charge—uncapped—her ground rent would be increased every 20 years. She said:

“It’s not easy when you’re a first-time buyer to understand all of the implications of ground rents. I had a copy of the lease but the solicitor didn’t go through any of it with me”.


So, yes, I know that the paperwork exists, but, without signposting it, and a regulated demand for honesty and frankness through the buying and selling process, many more people will be hoodwinked until we get rid of leasehold for good.

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[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My noble friend asks for clarity. I can completely understand some of the circumstances that people face; that is something on which we share the concerns of the noble Baroness in what she is trying to do, and it is something that we will continue to look at—ways of ensuring that people are aware of the information when they are purchasing a property. We will continue to look forward to engaging with all noble Lords in this House. With that reassurance in mind, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, will agree with me that this proposed new clause is not necessary, and I respectfully ask that it is withdrawn.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the proposed new clause is totally necessary—I disagree with the Minister on that—but I understand the need to withdraw. The only thing that I would just clarify is that all the organisations that are run for leaseholders are no good to people who do not know what a leaseholder is when they buy their flat and then find out that they are leaseholders. You do not think of yourself as a leaseholder; you think that you are a home owner. The only people who call themselves leaseholders any more are activists who have discovered how awful it is to be a leaseholder, who then get a different identity. That is what I am getting at.

The Government’s information is very good, and they should make more of it. That is what the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, was saying—why do they not plaster it around a bit? It is not fair on first-time buyers, who are the people who are being sold out by this. I know that the Government do not want to do that, but they should do something about it. I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 84 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Fox of Buckley]

85: After Clause 69, insert the following new Clause—
“Prevention of leaseholder abuse in retirement housing(1) Within one year of the passing of this Act, a Minister of the Crown must publish a report assessing the state of the United Kingdom’s retirement leasehold sector with special regard to the treatment of elderly and vulnerable leaseholders.(2) The report must consider whether the government should introduce legislation on retirement housing to address consumer detriment while encouraging downsizing, a larger, healthier retirement housing sector and a better functioning property market.(3) The report must also include—(a) an assessment of the extent to which the following factors harm leaseholders in retirement housing—(i) service charges not subject to resident control;(ii) inability to easily switch managing agents to remove predatory or poorly performing service providers;(iii) license and permission fees;(iv) short leases;(v) shared ownership structures;(vi) exit and event fees;(vii) resale values, and(b) an update on the government’s implementation of the recommendations in the Law Commission report “Event Fees in Retirement Properties”, published on 30 March 2017,(c) the Older People’s Housing Taskforce report and a statement on the government’s implementation of its findings,(d) legislative options to address the significant financial loss and emotional distress of leaseholders in retirement housing and those of their families, and(e) a recommendation as to whether the housing-with-care model, license to occupy schemes and commonhold developments should be promoted by the government as preferred alternatives to leasehold tenure in the retirement sector.”Member's explanatory statement
This new Clause would require a Minister of the Crown to publish a report to establish the experience of leaseholders in retirement housing and to outline legislative options to improve consumer outcomes in this sector.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am bored of my own voice, too, so bear with me. It is just that I think that this is an important issue. Through this amendment, I am asking the Government to bring out a review of the specific leasehold property market for pensioners and the elderly, which I would have thought would be of particular interest to all of us in this House who might be looking in that market area.

To be serious about it, I became interested in the issue after watching a “Pensioners Against Leasehold” video, one excellent example in a series of investigative campaign films produced by Free Leaseholders. Jane, who presented the video, made me realise that leasehold is especially devastating for those selling their family home and downsizing into a flat then realising that, rather than doing the sensible thing, they have potentially bought into a debt trap. I have just been talking about first-time buyers, and I am now talking about buyers who are very experienced home owners but who are buying into a new type of home. For example, there is Nick from Bournemouth, who is in the film, who bought into a retirement block of 61 flats and who described having a toxic relationship with management agents.

The other reason why I raised this was that the mother of a friend of mine made that big decision to move later in life and into an Anchor property—and Anchor’s motto is “later life is for living”. All I can say is, “If only”. Having made that big decision to move into a special category of living accommodation and selling up her house, she is faced suddenly with huge service charges and the burden of worry. One resident facing all this said, “We just feel as though they’re waiting for us to die, because we’ve become a nuisance”. Somebody else made the point, “The whole point of selling up and moving into this retirement home was because I didn’t want the burden of worrying about things—and now we spend all of our time checking on our management committee, because they keep ripping us off”. So I think there is something going on.

Retirement properties in Britain are typically made up of individual flats with communal areas and access to emergency health support. They are almost always sold as leaseholds by builders, who then sell the freehold to a management company. Those companies are entitled to charge leaseholders fees for upkeep along with ground rent. They are a novel form of tenure, which I am quite enthusiastic about in some ways, but the system is open to misuse—and, over recent years, there have been a number of scandals, suggesting that we need a close look at this sector. It is taken as a given that retirement homes should be granted exemptions from leasehold reforms in a lot of the discussions, but actually a lot of the problems in this sector are created in exactly the same way as leasehold creates problems.

Newspapers have been full of tales of exploitation of those buying retirement homes. They are sometimes seen as easy targets, perhaps because they are older and suffering bereavement or illness. They certainly see these homes as appropriate for the latter part of their life, and we would be scandalised in any other circumstances if older people were being exploited.

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[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, for her Amendment 85, which seeks to commit a Minister of the Crown to publishing a report assessing the state of the UK’s retirement leasehold sector within one year of the passing of this Act.

The Government recognise that leaseholders make up a significant proportion of the retirement sector, and are committed to ensuring that older people have access to the right homes in the right places to suit their needs. That is why the independent Older People’s Housing Taskforce was established in May 2023. The task force has been asked to look at the current supply of older people’s housing, to examine enablers to increase supply and to improve housing options for older people later in life. The task force has been commissioned to run for up to 12 months, and over this period has undertaken extensive engagement with stakeholders and gathered a great deal of evidence to inform its thinking and recommendations. The task force, as we have heard, will make final recommendations to Ministers this summer. I say to noble Lords who say we already have the review that I am not aware of that.

In addition, the Government have previously agreed to implement the majority of the recommendations in the Law Commission’s leasehold retirement event fees report. This includes approving a code of practice as soon as parliamentary time allows, to make event fees fairer and more transparent. The code will set out that these fees should not be charged unexpectedly, and developers and estate agents should make all such fees clear to people before they buy, so that prospective buyers can make an informed decision before forming a financial or emotional attachment to a property.

More widely, the Bill already introduces many elements that will help leaseholders, including those who live in retirement properties. As we move forward, the Government will continue to be mindful of the needs of leaseholders in retirement properties. The Government’s aim is to make sure that older people can live in the homes that suit their needs, help them live healthier lives for longer and, crucially, preserve their independence and their connections to the communities and places they hold dear. To reiterate, we have committed to making event fees fairer and more transparent and will bring forward legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows. With these reassurances in mind, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, will agree with me that this proposed new clause is no longer necessary, and I ask that the amendment be withdrawn.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Briefly, I thank those who have spoken, as it is the last group of the day. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, has made some excellent contributions throughout, but really summed up why I tabled this amendment in the first place. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, has obviously been reflecting on this issue too, as has the Minister. Particular thanks go to the noble Lord, Lord Best, who made the speech I wish I had made and obviously understands the issue in far greater depth than I do: I appreciate it. I hope that, none the less, the amendment has been useful in raising the profile of the issue.

I want to clarify one other thing. There is always a danger when we talk about the elderly as vulnerable people who might be preyed upon. We here are in a situation in which we might notice that people who are older can be the most ferocious and active, and not remotely vulnerable. In the film from the Free Leaseholders I was talking about, it was more that the elderly people interviewed said they had made a decision to be less active in fighting for their rights and maybe relax a bit and go into a lovely flat. They then found themselves in a situation where they had to become civil liberties fighters all over again, or lawyers or whatever, and that took up all their time and drained them. I do not want to want in any way to sound patronising. I want the sector to grow, but I do not think it will with leasehold. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 85 withdrawn.