Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 11th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

There are real issues with that, which I was going to address later, but I will do so now. It is important to strengthen the right to manage, both for leaseholders and for freeholders in these estates who own the freehold of their house but not of the communal areas. I said earlier that in all property purchases where common areas remain in private ownership, there should be, at the point of purchase, a clear understanding of the agreement between the local authority and the developer about who is responsible for those common areas. In many circumstances it is simply opaque. Often, purchasers do not know who is responsible and are sent on a wild goose chase to find out once they have bought their property.

Returning to onerous ground rents, the Select Committee took counsel’s opinion, which was quite interesting, and made recommendations in paragraphs 114 to 116 of our report. There were two clear arguments why removing onerous ground rents from leases retrospectively was completely compatible with the European convention on human rights. The first, which most of us may not have thought about, is that controlling or changing rent is not confiscation of property but control of its use, so it does not conflict with the article on removing people’s property rights. Secondly, the convention includes a justification where the proposal has a wider beneficial impact on society, which can be offset against any impact on the property owner. Counsel’s opinion was that it was therefore perfectly justifiable under the European convention to remove onerous ground rents on existing properties.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will remember that when the Labour Government overturned the case of Custins v. Hearts of Oak in 1967, they used exactly those grounds to justify doing so.

[Mr Betts]

I do remember that far back. Many will not remember the Labour Government’s ’67 reforms, but they were quite important on those grounds—absolutely.

Other good aspects of the Bill include its reducing the price of enfranchisement and trying to make it simpler. Now, I am not sure that it makes it simpler; it is still a bit complicated. In the end, it partly depends on the capitalisation rates that the Government introduce, which will determine the price. But a lot of my constituents who are leaseholders live in houses, and they often face enormous barriers to carry through the enfranchisement process. I have referred to Coppen Estates in my constituency, which is notorious for simply not replying to letters. I once got it to reply to a recorded letter at the third time of asking. Normally, it ignores everything. That is just its way of trying to hang on to its ground rents and its income from leases. How will we deal with those sorts of individuals and companies, and the fact that they transfer ownership around from one company to another?

Why is there no right of first refusal for leaseholders in the Bill? I was pleased that, some years ago, Sheffield Council agreed that when it sold freeholds, the right of first refusal would go to the leaseholder. That would be a simple reform, and I hope the Secretary of State will consider it. The improvement of the enfranchisement process to make it simpler and reduce the cost is right, but I would like further improvements to ensure that it will work.

I welcome the standardisation of service charges. One big complaint to the Committee was that leaseholders often simply do not know what they are paying and why. They cannot work out which services are supposed to be provided and which are not. That is an important step forward.

On commission fees, we heard about the £150 to change a doorbell and the £3,000 to put up a conservatory—complete rip-offs. There is no justification for them in houses in particular, and very little justification in flats. I am pleased that freeholders will now have to provide a schedule of rates that will be charged. We called for a cap on rates, which might have taken reform a little further, but at least there now has to be clarity and transparency. I also welcome the clause that means leaseholders will not end up paying for the legal and other costs of freeholders where there is any conflict or dispute.

A number of other measures have been omitted from the Bill, but they could be included very easily. The Secretary of State mentioned forfeiture. If leasehold is a feudal tenure, then forfeiture is prehistoric—it really is. If a leaseholder in a very small way fails to comply with an element of their lease, they could have the property taken off them. That is just unacceptable and unjustifiable. The Secretary of State was right in what he said. Forfeiture is not necessarily something that gets used, but the threat of its being used puts the onus on leaseholders to “behave” or do what the freeholder wants them to do. The removal of that with a simple clause would be really welcome.

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[Rachel Maclean]

That is an excellent suggestion from my hon. Friend the Father of the House, with which I strongly agree—as I do with everything he says about this issue.

Despite the theatrics we heard from the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), who spoke for the Opposition, it is the Conservatives who are finally bringing in sweeping reforms. It is right that we note that Labour ducked the issue while they were in office. They could have fixed it then. They could have saved millions from misery—nearly 5 million homes, accounting for 20% of the entire housing market, are owned on a leasehold basis across the UK—but it appears they bowed to pressure from freeholders. We will never know why, but thankfully things will now change.

[Barry Gardiner]

The hon. Lady may not remember—but I do—that before the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 was passed, a great deal of pressure had been applied since 1999. At that stage, however, their lordships down at the other end of the building threatened to block all of Labour’s legislation if we insisted on putting through some of the measures that were ultimately taken out of that Bill. The hon. Lady is right; those measures should have been included. I lobbied and campaigned for them to be included, and made my speech in the House accordingly, but their lordships were in the majority—and, at the time, 66% of their lordships had declared in the Register of Interests that they derived most of their income from the management of land.

[Rachel Maclean]

I thank the hon. Member for the history lesson but, regardless, we are determined to fix this now.

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[Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), the former Housing Minister, and I congratulate her on her work in this regard. I was disappointed that she chose to adopt a rather partisan tone in some of her remarks—unnecessarily, I thought—but I was grateful for the more generous tone taken by the Secretary of State. I especially welcomed his generous and appropriate tribute to our former colleague, Jim Fitzpatrick, for his work in the all-party parliamentary group—I am glad that he was mentioned.

Let me begin by identifying a specific concern that the Bill has raised. I am aware of it because of the work that the Work and Pensions Committee has done on asbestos. Under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, premises can be sold while containing asbestos; ownership can be transferred. Asbestos management is regulated in relation to workplaces, where it is the responsibility of the Health and Safety Executive, but not in domestic properties. In a lot of shared dwellings, such as flats and conversions, the landlord or freeholder has regulated duties under the existing regulations to manage asbestos in the shared areas in those developments. This legislation, as I understand it, may well give rise to the transfer of those obligations to domestic owners.

The existence and extent of asbestos in a building might not be known, leaving homeowners taking on these responsibilities with a hidden liability and, potentially, a life-threatening risk to handle as well. Homeowners are unlikely to have the wherewithal to manage asbestos in situ effectively, and this could leave a complex set of responsibilities and liabilities between owners in shared properties or where the nominal landlord no longer exists. At the moment, there is tax relief for businesses removing asbestos from a workplace—they can offset it against corporation tax—but there is no support for homeowners to remove or manage asbestos.

It has been suggested to me—this is something I am looking at—that there should be an amendment proposing that change in ownership of a property in the circumstances envisaged in the Bill, or a change in the extent of landlord control, should be a trigger for removing asbestos. Otherwise, more asbestos will move outside effective control under this legislation, meaning that nobody will be responsible for managing it and potentially creating a significant public health risk.

I will focus the rest of my remarks on part 3 of the Bill and draw attention to some particular instances that have arisen in my constituency. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), in opening the debate, rightly expressed the disappointment of many that the more radical ambitions for the Bill have been dropped, at least for the time being, but there are lots of practical problems for our constituents that need addressing and that the Bill can potentially help with.

The Minister for Housing, Planning and Building Safety, who is in his place, is aware of Barrier Point in my constituency, which comprises eight towers and 257 apartments. Tower 8, the largest of the towers, has 50 apartments and a flammable cladding problem. In 2017, buildings insurance for the whole of Barrier Point cost £104,000. Last year, Aviva, which insured the block previously, refused to quote, so this year residents have ended up paying £443,547 for insurance, and Tower 8 residents have shouldered that huge increase at a cost of between £6,000 and £12,000 each. I am grateful both to Aviva and to Barratt, which built the development, for meeting residents to try to find a way forward. I am also grateful to the Minister for the interest he has shown in this and for his agreeing to visit—I hope we will have a date for that soon.

I can see that the Bill could go some way towards tackling those problems. I particularly welcome clauses 27, 28 and 29, which increase transparency around service charges and give occupants the right to obtain information about service charges and costs on request. Clauses 30, 34 and 35 will help tenants to enforce those rights and rebalance the costs of litigation in their favour. The Financial Conduct Authority’s 2020 report on insurance for multi-occupancy buildings found that commission was often at least 30% on a transaction, and it found one case where it was over 60%. The FCA was worried that insurance commissions lacked transparency and it feared the conflict of interest that stemmed from brokers regularly sharing half their commission with the freeholder or managing agent. Replacing commission with transparent handling fees, as clauses 31 and 32 envisage, should certainly help.

[Barry Gardiner]

I appreciate everything that my right hon. Friend is saying. He will be aware, though, that many companies holding freeholds will also set up an arm’s-length company that is the broker, thus taking a double take in terms of the commission. It is not just that they get cut from the broker; they are the broker.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend makes an important point and I welcome his work in this area over a long period.

The changes in the Bill are not likely to do much to help the residents of Barrier Point who have exercised their right to manage. The FCA has argued that

“the intervention most likely to reduce prices for the minority of multi-occupancy buildings with the most substantial price increases would be cross-industry risk pooling”.

I was pleased to hear from the Secretary of State, in answer to my intervention, that he will be meeting representatives of the Association of British Insurers this week. The ABI initiative on this issue appears, up to now, to have stalled. The FCA recommended that the ABI should work with it and with the Government to introduce a risk pooling scheme in 2022. The scheme was expected to come forward last summer, but we are still waiting. I am hoping that, as a result of the meeting this week that the Secretary of State has told us about, things will get moving.

I checked with the FCA last week about this. It said that the ABI plan is

“credible and capable of delivering savings to those worst affected buildings”,

but it went on to add that the plan is delayed with “no firm launch date” because the ABI is struggling to secure “the reinsurance capacity required”. That seems to be the obstacle. I very much hope that the Secretary of State can find a way to push this forward at his meeting. The ABI urged the Government to increase capacity by backing catastrophic losses in the scheme. It did that most recently in June. Can the Minister tell us whether that appeal has been considered by the Department and whether that might be taken forward at the meeting with the Secretary of State later this week? When does he think risk pooling will commence?

On remediation, there is a power imbalance between leaseholders and freeholders. That has been highlighted to me by Barrier Point residents. The Bill does not really address that. Section 72 of the Building Safety Act 2022 makes a right-to-manage company the “accountable person” for a high-risk multi-occupancy building, making the directors criminally liable if negligence can be proved. The same Act, however, requires only that freeholders “co-operate” with accountable persons, without any enforcement mechanism in place at all. The freeholder at Barrier Point has held up remediation works for several months and is refusing to sign off on them. The directors of the right-to-manage company desperately want to fulfil their legal obligations but they are left liable because of the refusal of the freeholder to say okay, and there is no comparable liability on the freeholder. That seems wrong, and I wonder whether that imbalance can be addressed in the course of the Bill’s passage through the House.

The Minister said in oral questions just last week that the Government plan to make changes to the Bill as it goes through Parliament, and I hope he will consider how that imbalance can be addressed to ensure that remediation work can go ahead in a case such as that, which I suspect is by no means unique. The residents of Barrier Point want to purchase their freehold. To do so, they need to get at least 50% of all the leaseholders to agree to, and be able to afford, a freehold purchase. That is very difficult in a building with 257 households. I do not think the Bill does anything to make that process easier, so I very much hope that Ministers will be open to further improvements as it progresses through the House.

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[Gareth Johnson]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, and it highlights how management fees undermine the whole housing sector. We will end up in a situation where people do not want to buy nice homes because of the management companies that operate on these estates.

It undermines freehold, because people living on these estates have to go to the management company to get an information pack in order to sell their home. Of course, the information pack does not come free. On most estates in my constituency, people have to pay the management company £350 effectively to ask for permission to sell their house.

A lady contacted me and, apart from the cost, some of the information in her information pack was wrong. When she contacted the management company to ask some questions about the information it had provided, she was told that each question would be charged at £60 plus VAT, but this was the management company’s fault, not hers. That is just one example—I could give thousands—of just how horrifically some management companies behave. The Bill needs to deal with these organisations.

[Barry Gardiner]

The hon. Gentleman is making some excellent points. Is he aware that some companies managing residential properties for the elderly charge 10% of the property’s sale price, which they take to themselves for the privilege of allowing it to be sold?

[Gareth Johnson]

I have heard of those kinds of things. The same happens with park homes, and we are also trying to tackle that. It is only right that we tackle this issue with management companies, because it totally undermines the concept of freehold. The Secretary of State rightly says that he supports home ownership, yet we have a system that undermines the principle of home ownership.

People bought these houses in my constituency because they are nice homes in a nice area, and they often bought them in a seller’s market. They were literally standing in a queue, with other people waiting behind them to buy the same property. If they had not signed on the dotted line there and then, there were plenty of people behind them who would have. They signed without a full appreciation of the terms of the contract, which effectively said that the management company can put up its management fees way beyond inflation, and there is nothing that can be done about it.

I echo the Father of the House. As we consider the Bill throughout its passage, Members have to decide which side we are on. Are we on the side of the management companies, or are we on the side of local residents? It should be a no-brainer for every Member of the House, and I hope we will come together. After the Bill gets its Second Reading, I am sure we would all like to see some amendments in Committee.

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[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova). Let me start by paying tribute to the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), who has been campaigning on this issue for many years, to great success, eventually. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), who is no longer in her place, for all the work she has done in the preparation of this Bill. I welcome the principle of the Bill. Some Opposition Members may say it is too timid, but with 58 pages of detailed legislation and equations, which remind me of my time studying physics and maths at university, it can hardly be said to be less than complex. The key issue is: have the Government gone far enough in what they intended to do?

Our manifesto commitment was clear: to promote fairness and transparency for leaseholders, and ensure that consumers are protected from abuse and poor service. Clearly, that is a fundamental requirement. The Law Commission’s 2017 review of leasehold law represented it, and it is has taken us six years to get to this point in dealing with some of the abuses. We have to remember that 94% of people who have bought leasehold properties regret buying them and 70% of leaseholders are worried that they will not be able to sell their homes because they are leasehold. That is one fundamental thing we need to answer. We also need this leasehold reform to reform and support the housing market, because almost half of leaseholders are first-time buyers and 28% are under 35. At a time when fewer and fewer people are buying their first home at such an age, it is vital that we not only encourage people to buy their first home, but simplify the system.

So I welcome the overarching aims of the Bill to modernise this complex system, but clearly there is still a lot of work to do. Obviously, making it cheaper and easier for existing leaseholders in houses and flats to extend their lease and buy their freehold is a key point. The so-called “marriage rates” make it almost impossible for leaseholders to buy properties with fewer than 80 years left on the lease and to extend that lease to 990 years, which is what we are now going to be looking at. Having that as the standard position for houses and flats has to be the right thing to do. We should remember that the original position on extensions was 90 years for flats and 50 years for houses, so we are introducing a massive change and it is extremely welcome.

[Barry Gardiner]

I thank my constituency neighbour for giving way; if he is fortunate at the next election, he may inherit some more leasehold flats. As he will know, in this country a freeholder holds their freehold for a period of 999 years from the Crown and that may run out before any new leasehold is able to conclude its 999 years. Does he understand what the Government propose to do in that situation?

[Bob Blackman]

Longevity may run in my family, but not to the extent of 1,000 years. The hon. Gentleman makes a good point and I am sure the Minister will seek to answer it in his summing up.

Introducing new rights for long leaseholders to buy out the ground rent without needing to extend the term of the lease is another extremely welcome move, as is removing the requirement for a new leaseholder to have owned their house for two years before they can benefit from the changes. The new right to require the freeholder to take a leaseback of non-participating units when a collective enfranchisement claim is made is also vital. We do not want to get to a position where people are deterred from enfranchisement because they cannot take on those who do not take on enfranchisement.

A new costs regime for enfranchisement and right-to-manage claims so that each party bears their own costs is vital. Far too often, the freeholder has sought to obtain their costs from the purchaser, which is clearly unfair and unjust. Moving jurisdiction for enfranchisement and right-to-manage disputes to the first tier tribunal and the leasehold valuation tribunal in Wales makes it much easier for parties to identify how they can bring about a dispute. I note the point the Chair of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), raised when he said that freeholders often make it as difficult as possible for enfranchisement to take place.

The issue of transparency of service charges is vital. One of the benefits of serving on a Select Committee for a long time is being able to remember the reports the Committee was involved in, and I well remember an inquiry into this issue. We wanted all service charges to be transparent and fixed to the cost of providing that service, as opposed to a figure plucked out of the air and then passed on to the person supposedly receiving the service. It is welcome to see that the Bill contains measures for minimum key financial and non-financial information to be supplied to those receiving the service on a regular basis, including through a standardised service charge and an annual report. That means leaseholders can scrutinise and better challenge costs if they are unreasonable.

Equally, replacing buildings insurance commissions for managing agents, landlords and freeholders with transparent administration fees stops leaseholders from being charged exorbitant, opaque commissions on top of their premiums, an issue that has already been raised in the debate. I welcome scrapping the presumption for leaseholders to pay their freeholders’ legal costs, which in my opinion is outrageous, as well as granting freehold owners on private and mixed-tenure estates the same rights of redress as leaseholders, by extending their equivalent rights to transparency over their estate charges and to challenge the charges they pay by taking a case to a tribunal.

All these measures are welcome, but there are many other areas where we need to go further. The promise to do away with leasehold—or fleecehold—completely was clear in the manifesto; in my view, that promise should be honoured, particularly on the sale of new-build flats. In London, they are now the most common property type; almost all flats are sold on leasehold basis, compared to just 6% of houses.

On the individual building firms, we have heard about Persimmon, but we should also remember Bellway, whose chief executive came in front of our Select Committee and told us—I repeat what they said almost word for word—that it was the company’s policy not to offer the freehold to leaseholders at the first opportunity. Instead, six months after building the properties and selling the leaseholds, it would transfer them to a finance company, which would go through the detail of all the charges it could make and then really leverage up those charges, and the finance company would refuse to allow the leaseholder to even consider buying the freehold. That was the policy of that company. I think Permission admitted that that was its policy too, and other building companies do exactly the same. That is a scandal and it should be stopped, and we should legislate for that.

Clearly, we all want to see the promotion of commonhold. However, as the Chairman of the Committee said, we need more education for individuals, so they understand not only their rights but the responsibilities they would take on with commonhold.

One concern that has been raised with me on several occasions is about what will happen, once this welcome Bill is on the statute book—we look forward to the amendments that are made—to existing leaseholders who bought their leaseholds in good faith but are not being dealt with properly or effectively. We need to ensure that squeezing out the bad practices of freeholders and managing agents, which are unfair to individuals, is part and parcel of the legislation.

There is also the issue of conveyancing. Most people who buy their first property pay the minimum legal costs they can get away with. As a result, they often are not given proper advice about the consequences of their decisions. We need to ensure that individuals are given the opportunity to understand the responsibilities they are taking on and, more importantly, what will happen to them in the future if there are service charges involved.

Local authorities hold a huge number of properties under lease conditions and, if they want to sell the freehold to leaseholders, they are often among the worst sets of people to deal with across the country. I agree that a leaseholder should have the right of first refusal if a freehold is being offered. Will my hon. Friend the Minister give a commitment that, after we have engaged in consultations on service charges, the results of those consultations will be reflected in Committee so that we can strengthen the Bill?

Finally, I want to refer to a particular building in a constituency that neighbours mine. It has 13 floors and still has the old, Grenfell-style cladding. We all know the tragedy of Grenfell, but the owners of the building are refusing point blank to remove the cladding unless and until they are given planning permission to build on top of the building, so that they can sell more property to pay for the cost of remediating the cladding. The self-same company, Ballymore, although it has yet to submit a planning application, wants to build 29 blocks of flats, the tallest of which will be 29 storeys and the majority of which will be more than 20 storeys, at a density greater than Manhattan, Singapore or any other place in the world. That is a scandal. When the Secretary of State named certain building companies, he promised that if they refused to carry out the work that they should do, they would not be given planning permission to enable the development of more leasehold flats. I call on him to ensure that they are not given planning permission until such time as they are putting right what they have put wrong.

I pay tribute to all those who have fought for so long and so hard to achieve this limited reform. I will support the Bill, and I look forward to us taking forward further measures so that we can end the feudal system of leasehold once and for all.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (First sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Richard Fuller]

There is nothing that leaps out at this stage.

Mr Martin Boyd: Nothing leaps out.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Q Mr Boyd, you just spoke about the accounting of funds. At the moment, there is no requirement to show any separation between sinking or reserve funds and the normal service charges for managing the property. Many leaseholders have suggested that that is a problem, and that they are not clear what is happening with their sinking fund. Sometimes they believe that the moneys that were there for future capital works on the property are being raided. Would it be a good idea for the Bill to contain something that enabled leaseholders to see precisely what was happening to those reserve or sinking funds?

Mr Martin Boyd: There were proposals in sections 152 to 156 of the 2002 Act to help to improve protection for leaseholders’ funds. Currently, we are left with a set of voluntary codes. One is applied by the Association of Residential Managing Agents—the Property Institute, as it is now called—and sets out that managing agents should hold separate bank accounts for each of the sites that they manage. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ code does not require that. I am aware from experience of my and other sites that, in the recent period of higher inflation, some managing agents used consolidation accounts, accrued the interest in the service charge funds to themselves and passed very little on to the leaseholders. So yes, I think it would be very helpful if we had greater transparency and protection.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Indeed. You nicely lead me to my other question, which concerns something else that was in the 2002 Act but was never brought into effect: the provision that, if the landlord had not complied with the rules around service charges and the charges were unfair, leaseholders should be able to withhold their service charge. I have no idea why that was never brought into effect, but would it be a good idea? The Bill sets out extensive obligations that have to be followed in relation to service charges. If those are not followed, should leaseholders have the right to withhold the service charge?

Mr Martin Boyd: I can tell you why it did not move forward. One of the reasons it did not move forward is that, when there was a consultation, the organisation that I now chair argued very strongly against the implementation of that section. That was one of the things that annoyed me when I found out about it over a decade ago. It is not something that we would argue for now.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q So you would agree that it would be a good provision to insert into the Bill.

Mr Martin Boyd: It was a very good provision, yes.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

Q Mr Boyd, it is good to see you. You have talked about commonhold. Would you mind just being quite succinct and clear on your view about commonhold? There are proposals from various groups who are active in the sector to make it mandatory to sell all new leasehold flats as commonhold. Would that be a good idea, and if not, why not?

Mr Martin Boyd: I am proud to say that it was LKP that restarted the whole commonhold project in 2014. At the time, we were told, “The market doesn’t want commonhold.” The market very clearly told us that it did want commonhold; it was just that the legislation had problems in 2002. One of our trustees, who is now unfortunately no longer with us, was part of a very big commonhold project in Milton Keynes that had to be converted back to leasehold when they found problems with the law.

I think the Government have been making it very clear for several years that they accept that leasehold’s time is really over. I do not see any reason why we cannot move to a mandatory commonhold system quite quickly. What the developers had always said to us—I think they are possibly right—is that they worry that the Government might get the legislation wrong again, and they would therefore want a bedding-in period where they could test the market to ensure that commonhold was working, and they would agree to a sunset clause. They had fundamentally opposed that in 2002, and we managed to get them in 2014 to agree that, if commonhold could be shown to work, they would agree to a sunset clause that would say, “You cannot build leasehold properties after x date in the future.” I think that that is a viable system.

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[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Spender, I want to ask you about what I find to be one of the more complicated aspects of the Bill: the leaseback arrangements. Nominee purchasers can require a landlord to take a leaseback on certain units. Those are the units that, in an enfranchisement process, are not participating in the enfranchisement. You might have a block of 100 units, and 30 of them do not go in with the leaseholders who want to enfranchise. At the moment, they are then, in perpetuity, leaseholders, are they not? They cannot ever enfranchise because the others have already enfranchised. Should there not be a provision in the Bill to enable those locked-in leaseholders—if they have the money in future, because many times it will be because they did not have the money available at the time to participate—to buy their share of the enfranchisement?

Liam Spender: I agree; you have summarised it very well. To borrow a loose analogy from company law, there is something called a tag-along right. If someone comes along and buys a certain proportion of shares in a company, the other shareholders can exercise the right to tag along to join the purchase. That could be adapted to those who do not participate in an initial enfranchisement to address exactly the issue that you raise.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Grand. If I can pursue that area, at the moment, the lease is granted to the demoted freeholder—so they become the head leaseholder, perhaps, and the other leaseholders are now subject to the head leaseholder. Their contract was always with the previous freeholder, who is now the head leaseholder. Should there not be some provision in the Bill that requires those minority leaseholders, who are still in a relationship with the former freeholder, to actually pay their service charge to the new freeholder? But there is not, is there?

Liam Spender: I think the provisions introduce a degree of complexity into buildings because, exactly as you say, you are creating a new class of landlord. That could be solved by—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q But the specific question I want to probe with you is whether there is any provision in the Bill to require the minority leaseholders who did not enfranchise to pay their service charge to the new freeholder, namely the majority who enfranchised. I cannot see where that contractual obligation lies in the Bill. All I can see is that they will continue to have a relationship with the previous freeholder.

Liam Spender: That is right: there is no statutory mechanism to transfer to the newly enfranchised freeholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q So you think the Committee should look at that very carefully.

Liam Spender: The Bill creates a lot of new areas of complexity, and that is certainly one that would merit detailed attention.

[The Chair]

Well, gentlemen, I think that is it. Thank you very much.

Examination of Witnesses

Katie Kendrick, Jo Derbyshire and Cath Williams gave evidence.

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[Richard Fuller]

Q On the change in pension funds and investments, you may have different views about how important that is and my colleague asked you that question. However, putting yourself in the place of the people who own the freehold—some may be large overseas entities, some may be members of the peerage of the realm and there may be others—what is your view and what assessment have you made of the impact on them?

Jo Derbyshire: From my perspective, it is just about how all investment carries risk. This is no different. This is about rebalancing the scales in terms of leaseholders and freeholders. For me, it is about fairness for leaseholders. That is what the Law Commission was tasked with a few years ago, it is what we have been fighting for over the last however many years and that is what this does.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I apologise because I came in slightly late today, Chair, so I do not know if people have declared their interest. I should say that I am a freeholder; I am not a leaseholder. I have been a leaseholder in the past, but always with a share of the freehold.

Ms Kendrick, you said that there were things that the Law Commission report had talked about that have not been included in the Bill. One of those is in relation to shared services. Often, in a mixed development, if there is a commercial element to the block of flats, with flats above, you will find that there is a common plant room or a common car park. I welcome the provisions in the Bill that say that you can go from 25% commercial to 50%; that is a good move. However, the Law Commission actually said something specific about whether you should be allowed, if there are shared services such as the car park or the plant room, to be able to take over control, because the flats—the leaseholders—would only have control over the plant room as it related to their block. Is that a provision that you think should be introduced? Otherwise, it makes a mockery, to a certain extent, of increasing from 25% to 50% if you are still going to be precluded from gaining control of your block because of the plant room or shared services.

Katie Kendrick: Yes, there are clever ways in which they exclude people from being able to do that. We welcome the increase to 50%, but they are very creative when they design these buildings, with the underground car parks and stuff, as to what they can do to exclude the leaseholders from taking back control of their blocks. It is all about trying to have control over people’s homes. We should be able to control our homes—what is spent. No one is saying that you should not have to pay service charges, but it is about being in control of who provides those services. At the moment, leaseholders have no control. They just pay the bills.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q And the residents having the right to manage that themselves.

Katie Kendrick: Absolutely, yes.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q If commonhold will not be in the Bill, would you support a principle that all future leasehold flats should have to be sold with a share of the freehold?

Katie Kendrick: Absolutely.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q And that any residents’ association should be able to have the management of the block?

Katie Kendrick: Absolutely. If they are saying that commonhold is not ready to rock and roll, to have a share of freehold to mandate, a share of freehold for new flats moving forward would be a good step closer.

[Andy Carter]

Q I hope you do not mind if I start by congratulating you on the work you have done with the National Leasehold Campaign. I know that my constituents in Warrington South have greatly valued the assistance and knowledge you have managed to secure through bringing people together. Thank you for the work you have done there. May we just go back a little bit? Can you tell the Committee what sort of problems leaseholders have when they go to buy their freehold?

Katie Kendrick: All three of us have now successfully bought our freehold. Yes, we are still here.

Jo Derbyshire: There are a number of things. The first is that most leaseholders do not understand the difference between the informal way and the statutory way to do that. The more unscrupulous freeholders will write to leaseholders with a “Get it while it’s hot” type of offer, which can be quite poor value for money. So, there is understanding the process in the first place. Then, regardless of which way you go—if you go the statutory way, currently you pay your own fees and the freeholder’s fees. There is an element of gamesmanship that goes on at the moment, which is why the online calculator is so important. Your valuer and the freeholder’s valuer will argue about the rate used to calculate the amount and then you will try and have some kind of an agreement. It is not a straightforward process at all. Cath will tell you what happened with her transfer, because they leave things in the transfer documents.

Cath Williams: Yes, they did. In my case, it took 15 months and £15,000 to get my freehold.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q Some of them will not have a choice, will they?

Katie Kendrick: No, some people do not have a choice. People’s lives are literally on hold, and have been for many years, waiting for the outcome of the legislation. If we need further legislation to enact the Bill, people cannot sell. Housing and flat sales are falling through every single day because of the lease terms and service charges. It is horrendous. It will grind the buying and selling process to a halt.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I want to ask you about this whole business of people being unable to sell, and, in effect, the interaction between what the Government have tried to tackle in the Building Safety Act 2022 and what we have in this Bill.

Under the Building Safety Act, the provision is to appoint a designated person—an agent—to deal with the safety of the building. Often it will be the developer who is responsible for the remediation of a building that has fire safety defects and so on, which the Government are quite rightly trying to address, but they will argue that it is not possible to do that unless they have control over the management of the block as a whole. Therefore, there is a conflict between the Building Safety Act and the provisions in this Bill to help leaseholders gain the right to manage.

You might have just enfranchised and got the right to manage your own block, yet there is now an appointed person who will be told by the court that they have the right to manage the block. Very often, it will be the person you have just liberated yourself from. You will have just enfranchised yourself from that freeholder, only to find that they are now back in control. Do you feel there is a way in which the Committee should try to remediate and address that problem when it is looking at the Bill, and do you have any ideas as to how we should go about it?

Cath Williams: First of all, the situation that flat leaseholders are in at the moment, where they have building safety issues and leasehold issues, is so complex. It is horrendous. We hear daily in the National Leasehold Campaign about these poor leaseholders. It is really heartbreaking.

[Barry Gardiner]

It is awful.

Cath Williams: People are at breaking point.

[Barry Gardiner]

People have committed suicide, have they not?

Cath Williams: People have committed suicide, yes. That is worth noting.

They ask for advice. We have never been flat leaseholders; that is the first thing, but there is a lot of support in the group to try to help people navigate their way through the Building Safety Act first of all, and now we have this Bill as well. In principle, I think they would really welcome some sort of cohesion between the two. I don’t know what that would be; it is really hard.

Katie Kendrick: It is really difficult because we are encouraging people to take control, but by doing that they are liable for more of the building’s safety. The two Bills have to work together.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q There is a real tension here, is there not?

Katie Kendrick: There is.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q You have talked extensively about ground rent and, Ms Derbyshire, your situation with it doubling. We all know the story about the inventor of chess, who asked for a grain of rice on the first square as his reward as long as it doubled until the last square, and then there was not enough rice in the world to provide it. This is clearly inequitable. You said that you welcome the provision in the Bill to be able to get rid of ground rent—to take it down to a peppercorn. Given that we have the consultation at the moment, would it not better if the Government just did that rather than you having to pay for it, which is what is recommended in the Bill? You should not have to pay to get out of a situation that is unjust. It was unjust in the first place, and it would be much better if the Government simply moved the consultation onwards and got rid of it.

Cath Williams: Yes.

Jo Derbyshire: The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 has essentially created a two-tier system where you have new builds without ground rent. As Cath mentioned, we are concerned that clause 21 and schedule 7 of the Bill seem to say a qualifying lease for buying out to a peppercorn rent must have a term of 150 years. We have seen lots of examples in the National Leasehold Campaign of new build properties—flats in particular—where the lease is 99, 125 or 150 years from the start, so a whole swathe of properties would be automatically excluded.

However, for us, because ground rent is a charge for no service, peppercorn is the answer. We also fear that, in terms of the timetable for legislation and getting this through, the sector will fight intensively and try to tie this up in the courts for years. It has nothing to lose; why wouldn’t it?

[Andy Carter]

Q Katie, can I just go back to your earlier point about how lots of sales are falling through? Can you just explain why that is? What is causing sales to fall through on leasehold properties?

Katie Kendrick: Because an escalating ground rent worries mortgage lenders and buyers are unable to get mortgages because of an escalating ground rent. Where that is because of the £250 assured shorthold tenancy issue, my understanding is that that will be sorted through the Renters (Reform) Bill, so that will close that loophole, but lenders do not like—for most leases now, the doubling has half-heartedly been addressed and a lot of leases are now on RPI—the retail price index.

However, with RPI being the way that it is—it has been really high in the last couple of years—some of those ground rents are coming up to their review periods and are actually doubling. Therefore, RPI, as Jo said many years ago, is not the answer. Converting to RPI is not the answer because an escalating ground rent is still unmortgageable, and it takes it over the 0.1% of property value, which, again, mortgage lenders will not lend on.

Therefore, a lot of mortgage lenders are asking leaseholders to go to the freeholder and ask them to do a cap on ground rent, which is then costing the leaseholder more money to get a deed of variation from their freeholder. That is if the freeholder agrees at all, because the freeholder does not have to agree to do a deed of variation to cap the ground rent. That is coming at a massive cost if someone wants to sell, but without that people are losing three, four or five sales, and people have given up because their properties are literally unsellable.

Cath Williams: There is a house on my estate where sales have fallen through twice already. It is a townhouse; it is worth about £220,000. The ground rent currently—it is on an RPI lease—is £400, which takes it over the 0.1% of property value. Two sets of buyers have had problems getting a lender to lend in that situation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean]

Q I just want to clarify your understanding of something that Mr Gardiner said earlier. I might need to put this to the Minister later, but Mr Gardiner said that if the new provisions on ground rent go through and ground rent goes to peppercorn or zero—I might be misquoting him.

[Barry Gardiner]

You have been spot on so far.

[Rachel Maclean]

You mentioned that in the new Bill leaseholders will have to pay to get their ground rent to zero. Can you set out what that provision is? Where is that in the Bill?

Cath Williams: I don’t think we know. That was one of our questions. There is a process in the Bill about how a leaseholder can acquire the peppercorn ground rent, but who pays for that is not clear. I think that was raised before. I do not think leaseholders should pay, because it should not have been there in the first place.

Katie Kendrick: Or there should be a prescribed cost—“apply for your peppercorn now”—with a simple process. Otherwise it will be exploited, and lawyer will charge different amounts to convert. You can see what will happen, so it needs to be streamlined. Whatever we go for, it needs to be streamlined.

Cath Williams: And we need an online system that cuts out everybody in the middle, so that there is no confusion or discussion about what it should cost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dehenna Davison]

Q What would you consider a reasonable time? I mean, 24 hours would be great, but—

Amanda Gourlay: Twenty-four hours would be great, but that would probably sow total panic at the receiving end—I know that it would if I received that and I was doing something else. It will depend very much on the nature of the property. There are some very complex developments over in the east end of London. On the other hand, there are Victorian houses that are only two or three flats, and that should be much more straightforward.

I am aware that people have been able to pay for, say, a seven-day or five-day service, and there has been an uplift in the price for that. I am not the best person to ask about what the price should be. What I would say is that if a managing agent to whom this request would normally go is keeping their records up to date, one would hope that with the progress we have in software nowadays, that should very much just be the pressing of a button.

On work that is going to be carried out in the future, I have heard talk about, for example, mandatory planned maintenance plans. I have not seen those in the Bill. If a building or property is being well managed, one would expect there to be a plan for the next five or 10 years—what is needed to be done in terms of decorating, lift replacement and so on. Again, if that is in place, I would anticipate that it should be relatively straightforward to produce the information. I cannot give a specific answer; what I would say is that if we are all keeping our records up to date, that should be a relatively speedy process.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I understand that you were involved in the Canary Riverside judgment just before Christmas.

Amanda Gourlay: That is correct—yes. Forgive me; I was involved in Canary Riverside between 2016 and 2017. My involvement finished in June 2017.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you. But you are aware of the judgment that came through just before Christmas in the case.

Amanda Gourlay: I am not sure that I am—no.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Were you involved in relation to the uncovering of the £1.6 million commission for insurance?

Amanda Gourlay: No, I was not involved in that element of it.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q In that case, I am probably better putting those questions to a later witness.

In relation to that case, and on the accountable person provisions and section 24 amendments in the Building Safety Act—this relates to a question I asked earlier—the tribunal decided in the Canary Riverside case that the section 24 manager cannot be the accountable person, and that risks the section 24 management order failing, and the failed freeholder coming back to take control of the leaseholders and their service charge moneys. The implications of that decision really are quite dramatic. It means that the lifeline of the section 24 court-appointed manager provision from the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987 has been removed from leaseholders, particularly those who cannot afford to buy their freehold or do not qualify for the right to manage. How should we address that problem in the structure of the Bill?

Amanda Gourlay: I do not think you need to do that in the structure of the Bill. Casting my mind back to the Building Safety Act, which is now in second place to the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill in my mind, my understanding is that there is provision for a special measures manager in that Act. If that were brought into force, one would have a recourse. I am very happy to open my computer and look at the Act, but I do seem to recall that there is provision for a special measures manager to take over the building safety or the accountable person role in a manner of speaking. I say that in the loosest terms, without having checked the law.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I am sure Ms Maclean will have details from her past life. Thank you for that—it is extremely helpful. You referred to clauses 27 and 28 and said that the word “arising” was one that troubled you. Could you point us to which clause that is in, so that we can be clear about it? You will have heard the question I put to another witness about making provision in the Bill, as there had been, although it was never brought into play, in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, for leaseholders to be able to withhold their service charges if all that is set out in proposed new sections 21D and 21E has not been complied with?

Amanda Gourlay: There is always a concern looking forward as to how things might play out. I will deal your question on “arising” first, then come to your other point. Clause 28(2) inserts proposed new section 21D, “Service charge accounts”. Subsection (2)(a)(i) talks about the variable service charges “arising in the period”.

[Barry Gardiner]

Ah, “arising in the period”. Gotcha.

Amanda Gourlay: Turning to the second part of your question, one of the very big difficulties with the reform of leasehold is that good and bad—to put it in very binary terms—do not sit on one side or the other. While it seems to me that in an appropriate situation it would be entirely reasonable for a leaseholder to be able to withhold their service charges, there may equally be leaseholders who consider that this is an opportunity not to pay, for different reasons. There is always that risk. If one does not pay one’s service charge and is obliged to do so—for example, by going to tribunal and the tribunal says that actually £2,000 is payable—one is at risk of legal costs, which I am sure we will come on to in relation to the risk of forfeiture.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I was thinking not so much about where there is a dispute over reasonableness but more about whether the process that is set out in proposed new section 21D had been followed—for example, someone had not laid the accounts within six months and had not gone through all the set requirements in the Bill. Rather than it being a dispute about substance, the charge would be withheld on the basis of a failure of process by the freeholder.

Amanda Gourlay: Yes, and I understood your question that way. I think my concern is that if there is a minor breach, is that simply a situation where we withhold service charges entirely? The question is the nature of the breach and whether it is or is not a breach. In principle, I would agree that it would be a sensible form of enforcement, because it is the absolute. It is the most draconian form of enforcement. One should always bear in mind, however, that if a third-party management company—a residents management company—is obliged to insure a building and has absolutely no wherewithal to insure it, there is that risk. Things may need to be done that simply cannot wait but, in principle, I see no reason why that should not be a remedy for failure to follow the process.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Although I said at the outset that I would not pursue the insurance costs with you, I think we can probably agree that the £1.6 million commission that was ruled illegal will take out the idea of commission—but that will move to fees instead. Given what you said about “arising”, do you have similar fears that fees for work charged might also open that up to a multitude of sins in the Bill?

Amanda Gourlay: Do you mean generally, or in relation to insurance?

[Barry Gardiner]

In relation to insurance—because it will no longer be possible to charge commission, but it will be possible to charge a fee.

Amanda Gourlay: That is always a risk. In fact, that is a risk across the whole Bill where more obligations are imposed on a landlord. If the costs of those obligations are recoverable under the terms of the lease as part of the management, it is almost inevitable that charges will go up. They will have to: I am going to have to do more work, so I would like to be paid more.” The only control of those that we have at the moment is under section 19 of the Leasehold Reform Act 1967, which is whether the costs are reasonable in amount for the standard of work that is provided. One would hope that there would be degrees of transparency, but of course there is no obligation to account necessarily for the fees, save for the limitation of administration charges and the obligation to publish a schedule of fees of administration charges.

Again, however—I am sorry that I am providing such long answers—where it comes to publishing a schedule of administration charges, that is quite straightforward for most cases, but clearly if someone wants to carry out a significant change to a flat on the 15th floor of a building, the costs will be difficult to quantify in advance. There is still wriggle room, I think, in the administration charge limitations for costs to be higher.

[Barry Gardiner]

Finally, proposed new section 21E of the 1985 Act talks about annual reports, while proposed new section 21D sets out the basis of the accounts and when they must be presented. What is your understanding of the difference between the report—as set out,

“before the report date for an accounting period, provide the tenant with a report”—

and the accounts, which have to be presented at the end of the sixth month after the period? Is there any requirement in the Bill as drafted to ensure that the information available in the accounts is greater or more detailed—indeed, in any way different—from the report?

Amanda Gourlay: That is a question with which I have battled for a number of hours. The conclusion I reached was that proposed new section 21D very plainly envisages the involvement of a chartered accountant—a qualified accountant; proposed new section 21E is different because it would appear to be more narrative, a more general description of the information that has to be provided.

If you look at the Bill, subsection 21E(3), which entitles the appropriate authority to make provision about information to be contained in the report, is extremely broad. It refers only to

“matters which…are likely to be of interest to a tenant”.

That is a very wide scope. The information in effect has to be provided within a month of the service charge year-end, whereas the service charge accounts must be provided within six months.

While I am on that point, proposed new section 21E is enforceable under the enforcement provision, which I think is clause 30; rather peculiarly, however, proposed new section 21D is not. I invite the Committee to consider whether that new section 21D should be brought within the scope of clause 30.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you. That is extremely helpful.

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q I just wanted to follow up on something, so that I am clear in my own mind in relation to Mr Gardiner’s question about the provisions in the 2002 Act that have not been brought into force, and it directly relates to what you have just said about proposed new section 21D.

In some senses, many of the new requirements in this section are covered by the enforcement measures in clause 30. Is proposed new section 21D the only example, or are there other examples, of where that power in the 2002 Act might be considered necessary for a leaseholder to use, because the enforcement provisions do not cover the full gamut, if you like? I suppose that I am trying to get to where the enforcement clause is lacking. Is Mr Gardiner correct in specifying that there are circumstances in which you would want to withhold because the non-payable enforcement clauses do not bite in the relevant way?

Amanda Gourlay: I am instinctively nervous about withholding, even if it is simply a question of process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean]

Q Have you ever acted for freeholders against leaseholders? Have you ever found that the leaseholders have been egregious, rather than the other way round?

Amanda Gourlay: I believe I have acted for freeholders against leaseholders on occasion.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q You referenced the damages under proposed new section 25A of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, which “may not exceed £5,000”. The tribunal does not have to award £5,000; it is a ceiling, rather than a floor. Often a single leaseholder will go to the tribunal and get an award, but they are representative of problems that all the other leaseholders have. Rather than saying that damages under the proposed new section may not exceed £5,000, would it make sense to say that damages to each leaseholder may not exceed £5,000?

Amanda Gourlay: That would make sense, but damages are not an appropriate remedy in this particular situation. It is very rare that a leaseholder will suffer financial loss. It is more about encouraging good behaviour.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you. Will you send me a full report on the details that you did not get a chance to share?

Amanda Gourlay: I will, yes. I had no intention of making a speech, and I am sorry if I trespassed on people’s patience.

[The Chair]

That is fine. Do not worry.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned.—(Mr Mohindra.)

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Second sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Rachel Maclean]

Q Thank you for that clarification. As a follow-up, if any Government adopted a policy on commonhold such as has been talked about sometimes, but without doing the legal fixes, what would be the risk?

Professor Hopkins: The risk at the moment is that the legal regime that governs commonhold is too rigid. It does not apply effectively in larger, mixed-use developments, because they were not envisaged at the time. The risk is that you mandate a legal regime that does not work. You need a legal regime that works, which could then be mandated if that is what the Government chose to do.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Q First of all, let me thank you for the Law Commission’s work, which was extensive and hugely helpful. I am conscious that the recommendations on structural dependency rules have not been adopted by the Government in the drafting of the Bill. Even those leaseholders who are going to benefit from the uplift of 25% to 50% of the non-residential limit in the Bill may still be disqualified, because of the shared plant room in underground car parks and so on. Do you believe it would be preferable and helpful to introduce into the Bill at Committee stage some of the recommendations that you made on that?

Professor Hopkins: I do not think I would like to comment on whether specific amendments or recommendations could be introduced. They would have to be seen in the light of what they would do to the scheme that is in the Bill and how the provisions interrelate. That basic uplift from 25% to 50% is significant and will enable many more leaseholders to exercise their rights. There are perhaps things around the edges, but what is there is beneficial.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I totally agree. It is certainly beneficial that there is the uplift from 25% to 50%. However, if one were to adopt the view that the commission take on structural dependency and those shared services, some groups would be prevented from benefiting unless we adopt the terms that you have recommended.

Professor Hopkins: Yes, although you have to look at what impact that would have in terms of what is in the Bill as it stands.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Of course, commonhold is not within the scope of the Bill. Indeed, the way in which the Government framed your remit meant that your report was closely constrained in what it could say about recommending that as a tenure. Following on from what the hon. Member for Redditch said, do you think it would be helpful to move to a system where all new build flats had a share of freehold and that that was the only tenure going forward? In effect, that would give us a foretaste, and all the caveats that you outlined to the hon. Member for Redditch could gradually be put in place around that.

Professor Hopkins: It is certainly the case that it is easier to do things with new builds than it is for existing leasehold blocks. Our report includes recommendations on the conversion of existing blocks, which is undeniably more complex than building a commonhold block from the start.

We concluded in our report that commonhold was the preferred tenure because it gives the advantages of freehold; leasehold is really performing a job it was never designed to do. When I gave evidence to the Select Committee on the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, as it then was, I said that if commonhold works, you do not need leasehold. But whether you then mandate commonhold is not just a legal question; there is a political question there.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Indeed. Currently, a leaseholder who has three or more flats in a development is instantly disqualified from participating in an enfranchisement claim. The Law Commission concluded that that regulation should be scrapped because it is hard to enforce and can be easily gamed by what I think you called sophisticated investors. You said that the practical effect of that 1993-era policy is to deprive leaseholders of the ability to buy out the freehold and to enfranchise. Are the proposals we are talking about ones you would be pleased to see introduced in Committee to get rid of that barrier?

Professor Hopkins: Again, all these things are Law Commission recommendations, and I am always going to say that the Law Commission would like to see our recommendations implemented—

[Barry Gardiner]

I am delighted; that is what I wanted you to say.

Professor Hopkins: But I cannot say whether they are the right things or the most impactful things to add to the Bill. What is there is great and is going to be hugely beneficial. There are lots of other things in our recommendations that would benefit leaseholders—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Improve the lot of leaseholders, yes. At one point slightly earlier, you seemed to give the impression that we were—I think this is the polite way of saying it—polishing an excrescence in this Bill. Is that broadly your view, and should we just get on with commonhold eventually?

Professor Hopkins: No, that is absolutely not my view. Whatever happens with commonhold, leasehold is going to be with us for a long time. There are people who own 999-year leases. The system has to work. When we published our reports, we published a summary of what they were seeking to do. We identified them as having two distinct aims. One is to make leasehold work, and work better, for those who now own the leasehold and who will own it in future. Secondly, it is to pave the way for commonhold to be available so that everyone can enjoy the benefit of freehold ownership in future. But we always saw those as two entirely legitimate aims that legislation would need to pursue.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q One way of tackling this would surely be to enable all leaseholders ultimately to gain the benefits that freeholders, or people who have a share of the freehold, currently have, by enabling them to convert to commonhold.

Professor Hopkins: Yes. Conversion is always going to be more difficult than building from the start. We have recommendations that would enable conversion and enable more people to convert than can at the moment, where unanimity is required, but leasehold is going to be with us for a very long time.

[Barry Gardiner]

Well, it has been with us for a very long time, hasn’t it?

Professor Hopkins: Yes. So the system has to work, and that is what the Bill achieves in relation to leasehold.

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Q Can we talk a little about discount rates? I think there are two, but there may be more. There is the capitalisation rate and the deferment rate. Could you explain how, if at all, the Bill changes either of those discount rates and what the rationale for that change is?

Professor Hopkins: The Bill ensures that those rates will be prescribed by the Secretary of State. At the moment, on every enfranchisement claim—whether it is the lease extension or the purchase of the freehold—the rate used to capitalise a ground rent and to determine the price paid for the reversion has to be agreed for the individual transaction. That is a significant source of dispute, and it is a dispute where there is a real inequality of arms.

The leaseholder is only interested in what they have to pay for their home and the landlords have an eye not only to that particular property, but also to what it would mean for their portfolio of investments—so they agree a particular rate on one flat in a block, for example. The Bill ensures that those rates are fixed by the Secretary of State and mandated, so there is then no argument about what rate applies in an individual case. It takes away that whole dispute and ensures that the same rates are applied in all claims.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Carter]

No, that is helpful. Thank you very much.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Brewis, I think we all welcome the FCA’s work to try and make things more equitable for leaseholders, so thank you for your endeavours there. I am sure you will be familiar with the Riverside case from before Christmas, in which it was discovered that an FCA-regulated broker could not provide a written contract of the insurance to the first-tier tribunal. Do you find that strange?

Matt Brewis: I cannot talk about individual cases. However—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Okay. Should there be a case in which an FCA broker is unable to provide a written contract to a first-tier tribunal, would you find that strange?

Matt Brewis: Yes.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you. After a three-year campaign, that poor leaseholder managed to find out, through the leasehold tribunal, that £1.6 million had been paid to her landlord for the insurance services. You will be aware that this Bill outlaws commission as a permitted charge for landlords to charge. However, you will also be aware that, in that first-tier tribunal case, it was not regarded as a commission. In fact, it was accounted for as a fee, which is chargeable under this proposed legislation. How will that leaseholder know that this legislation does not allow her to be ripped off in exactly the same way as she was ripped off before?

Matt Brewis: The value assessments I talked about require firms to approve what value they are providing, for there to be transparency to a leaseholder around—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q How do you do that if you cannot get a written contract?

Matt Brewis: Under our new rules, which came into force at the start of this year, that needs to be provided.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q But that is not actually here in the Bill, is it? Would it be helpful if, under clause 31 or at another appropriate place, we were to say that a written copy of any insurance contract must be provided to all leaseholders? Then they can at least see what it is they are supposed to be benefitting from.

Matt Brewis: The new Financial Conduct Authority rules around this do provide that, in a way that was not the case previously.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q But the Bill does not.

Matt Brewis: I believe that would be duplication of a clause that is already in the new rules from the regulator, which require a broker to provide that information.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q No, sorry; there is a distinction here. You are talking about the broker providing it to the landlord; I am talking about the landlord providing it to the leaseholder. If you want transparency here, surely that also has to be part of that transparency? Ultimately, we know that it is not the landlord paying for the insurance services—it is the leaseholder. Indeed, in the case that you cannot particularly talk about, it was the landlord getting £1.6 million of a kickback for the privilege.

Matt Brewis: In the event that the freeholder is not forthcoming with the contract, it is incumbent on the insurer to provide a copy of the contract to the leaseholder directly. It is in our rules that the leaseholder has the option of going directly to the insurer now, in order to get a copy of that contract, in a way that was not previously possible.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q To be absolutely clear: a leaseholder can write to the insurer—the insurance company—to obtain a copy of the contract that their landlord has, which insures their property?

Matt Brewis: Yes, and they will be in breach of the FCA rules if they do not provide it.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Does that rely on the landlord telling the leaseholder who the contract is with?

Matt Brewis: Which insurer it is?

[Barry Gardiner]

Yes.

Matt Brewis: Oh, goodness.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Because at the moment, there is no compulsion on the landlord to do that, is there? It is certainly not in this Bill.

Matt Brewis: If you follow that chain of events, when they do not know who the broker is and they do not know who the insurer is, and the landlord refuses to provide the documentation—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Then the leaseholder has no access to the contract.

Matt Brewis: One would hope—expect—that it is a very low-likelihood situation, but that would be the case.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q We have made legislation on the basis of optimism before, and it has not proved successful.

Matt Brewis: For some buildings that have material issues around fire safety or other issues, it can be very difficult to place insurance. It is about time and cost. There is value in the services that brokers provide, and sometimes some of that work is outsourced to property-managing agents. Assuming that is done appropriately—itemised and billed—I have no issue with the payment of commission or brokerage, where it is for services that have been rendered effectively. Where it is a blanket case, in the way that you described—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Of course, those fees for insurance services are chargeable under clause 31, in proposed new section 20G of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, but there is nothing in the Bill that says they have to be reasonable. The Bill says that excluded insurance costs have to be

“not attributable to a permitted insurance payment”,

but not that they have to be costs that are reasonable. There is a difference between a permitted insurance payment and a reasonable permitted insurance payment, is there not?

Matt Brewis: My understanding is that the secondary legislation that will follow will set out what those are.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q God bless the Secretary of State! So we are waiting to see whether the Secretary of State introduces the word “reasonable”—or would it not be better to have the word on the face of the primary legislation?

Matt Brewis: One would still need to define reasonable.

[Barry Gardiner]

I think the law has done a pretty good job of that over the years.

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q To further explore Mr Gardiner’s point about fees, not commissions, what is your understanding of proposed new section 20G of the 1985 Act, which defines these excluded insurance costs? What would that cover? Or is that something for the secondary legislation as well? In which case, what should it cover, to fully protect leaseholders from all types of insurance costs that might be passed on unreasonably?

Matt Brewis: It is quite a significant list. The question effectively is: what are the reasonable costs of writing an insurance policy, and then the appropriate checks to be carried out to ensure that that policy is enforceable? From my perspective, that is focused on providing the information to the insurer or the broker that allows them to appropriately price the insurance—to understand the risk factors of that building, to determine the likelihood of escape of water, the quality of its fire defences and other things, all of which in sum add up to whatever the risk price is. There are different methods for determining what is an appropriate brokerage fee. We have seen some firms come out to suggest that it should be a maximum of, say, 10% of the cost. Others take a time-and-costs-incurred approach, based on how much work they have done. Being clear about things that are directly relevant to the pricing of the insurance is the best starting point for what should be allowed to be charged.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Carter]

Q The problem we will find, if we are not careful, in putting through legislation that allows the right to manage is that there is still no route to get somebody to make things happen if you have a council that does not want to get involved. Who is the ultimate person that you can say—

Halima Ali: It has to be central Government. They need to regulate that councils need to start adopting all new build estates going forward and in the situation that we are stuck in.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Halima and then Cathy, let me pick up this business of the fleecehold estates, as you refer to them. They are a relatively new thing in leasehold; they were not there in the same way 20-odd years ago when we were passing the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002. They have been seen as a revenue stream for developers. Do you think that it would make sense for local councils, when they sell public land for housing development, to insist that that public land should not be used for a private estate model in this way? Developers can of course build the homes and you can buy them, and they can make their profit from the payments that you make to buy those homes, but they should not then have an ongoing source of revenue from the substandard management, as you described it, of the estate.

I have one estate in my constituency where they were charging residents for the management of land that they did not even own. It took us months to get the documentation to prove that they did not own that land. The fence that they had mended had actually been mended by the council. Other things like that are going on, but if that restriction were put in place in the first place, they would not be able to do it, would they?

Cathy Priestley: Our understanding is that the land belongs to the developer. It is not public until it is made public through section 106 agreements with the council.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I understand what you are saying, but I am referring specifically to when a council makes available land that has been publicly owned by it to developers for development and puts that restriction in place.

Cathy Priestley: Well, yes, you would not want more and more privatisation, would you? I do not think any policy is in place that is pushing for privatisation of the management of public open spaces, is there?

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Scoffin, you talked about this issue having wasted six years of your life; I think it has only wasted about 25 years of mine, since before the 2002 Act. You spoke about future development. What would actually make it better for existing leaseholders? There are things in the Bill that I think do improve the lot of existing leaseholders, but how can we make it even better?

Harry Scoffin: There are a number of quick wins. One is to get rid of forfeiture, because that allows these freeholder overlords to extort money from ordinary people. It is not like mortgage foreclosure, where if you cannot keep up with the mortgage payments you get the difference back less the debt; with forfeiture, in theory, a freeholder could take back a £500,000 flat on a £5,000 bill. Now, what the freeholder lobby will say when they come on later is, “There are only about 80 to 90 cases a year.” That is potentially 80 to 90 homeless families a year. More important, in a way, is that it is the threat of forfeiture that gets leaseholders to go, “Oh my God, I’m going to pay that bill.”

My mum is on £33,000 a year, for a three-bed with no swimming pool, no gym and no garden. The freeholder is one of Britain’s richest men, sheltering in a tax haven in Monaco—a billionaire. Everyone who is not a leaseholder says, “Why would you pay that? That’s more than someone’s salary.” She says, “If I don’t pay it, I’ll lose the property.” So get rid of forfeiture.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Was forfeiture not part of the 2002 Act?

Harry Scoffin: Yes. They draw it out. There is a process now in the courts, where you can go, “Oh, I forgot to pay it” or “Here’s the money.” The point is that it does not give leaseholders the confidence to challenge unreasonable bills. They have the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads—they are being treated almost like criminals. The Law Commission recommended in 1985, in 1994 and more recently in 2006 getting rid of this iniquitous element, arguably the most feudal element of leasehold. It has not been done. The Government recently asked the Law Commission to update its 2006 report, so we know work has been done, but it is not in this Bill.

I think you spoke earlier today about this section 24 business. That is a really important issue that many Members may not be aware of. Since the Building Safety Act came in, there has been a very interesting regime about the accountable person, trying to make developers and freeholders take responsibility for their buildings. This was heard in tribunal in December—I was there—and I understand that Michael Gove has taken a personal interest in this, but there is again no guarantee that we can get the fix.

The problem is that, at the moment, any building over 18 metres cannot have a court-appointed manager, because the court-appointed manager cannot be the accountable person. It is like an aeroplane being flown with two pilots flying in completely different directions. The freeholder, who has been stripped of his management rights—because, basically, he has defrauded leaseholders or been absentee, is not doing remediation works in a timely manner, or is not giving information—will now be the accountable person. But the manager cannot manage the building, because you will have two managers for one property.

The tribunal for Canary Riverside—I add a disclaimer that this is my sister estate; we have the same freeholder, so I was there at the tribunal—said that, as much as we would like to help the leaseholders at Canary Riverside, Parliament has made it very clear that, while a non-freehold owning right to manage company or a non-freehold owning resident management company can be the accountable person, a court-appointed manager specially vetted by the tribunal is no longer allowed to be one.

What is happening at Canary Riverside is that the freeholder—the same one that we have—is looking at getting back a building that he was removed from controlling in 2016. There was even a letter from the Secretary of State to the leaseholders, which they cleverly submitted to the tribunal, saying that he was the man who passed this Act and he genuinely, honourably, had no idea that that was the implication. That is another thing, because many blocks are not going to be able to buy the freehold or be able to get right to manage. They are in a monopolistic position with these freeholders. If there is no ability to buy the freehold, you are trapped.

In our building, we cannot sell the flats. We cannot even give them away at auction. It needs to be allowed that a manager appointed under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987 can be the principal accountable person where a tribunal deems it appropriate.

There is one other major point. At the moment, many people may stand to benefit from getting the right to manage or buying the freehold, with the 25% rule going up to 50%. I know that because I have campaigned for it for the last six years. Nick Hopkins at the Law Commission used to have a joke that he would probably have to take out a restraining order against me, because I really pushed on this issue. The problem is that there are so many people who would benefit from that, but if they have that plant room or that underground car park, they still will never be free. They will never be able to get the freehold or right to manage. That is something that the Law Commission already recommended. We can get that into the Bill.

Another point to note is that if you cannot participate, for whatever reason, in buying the freehold—you do not have the money to join your neighbours—in perpetuity, you will never be able to buy that share of the freehold ever again. If you cannot get the money together, you are out. That needs to be sorted. The right to participate was very popular with the Law Commission consultees. That absolutely needs to happen.

There is one last thing. Nickie Aiken MP and other MPs, such as Stephen Timms, have been pushing on this point. At the moment, to buy the freehold or get right to manage, you have to get 50%. In our building, which is 20 years old, we are very lucky that we have managed to get 82% of the leaseholders. Do you know how much work that has involved? It is cornering people in lifts, paying the £3 to the Land Registry, doing some weird investigations. It is Herculean. You have to go back to 1931 in this country to find a political party that has won a general election with 50% of the vote, so why is it fair for residents who are being ripped off to be told, “You need to get 50%”? That should come down, because most big blocks, particularly the newer ones, will never hit 50%, and given that the Government are talking about a long-term housing plan and about building up in the cities, we have to make flat living work. We have the second lowest proportion of flats of any country in Europe, after Ireland—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Sorry, can I just ask you to amplify what you were saying about the 50%? I understand the difficulty, if you have 900 people in a high-rise block, to co-ordinate to get 450 plus one to do it, but surely many of those apartments will be buy to let, so you may not ever be able to meet or get in touch with the actual leaseholder. You are going to be able to do that only through a subtenant, and that makes it almost impossible, doesn’t it?

Harry Scoffin: Some leaseholder advocates say, “We do not touch the 50%,” and I do not understand them for it, but the fact is that they just say, “Give leaseholders more information.” I have to be honest: even once you have got in touch with guys from Singapore, Hong Kong, the middle east and all the rest of it, when you try to explain what leasehold is, it goes over their head; when you say “right to manage”, it goes over their head. They say, “Well, I’ve bought the flat. I don’t need to get involved.” And then you say, “It’s £2,000 or £3,000. We all need to do it—each—to club together.” These guys are mean—some of them—and they are not going to get involved. So the fact is that at least on right to manage, where you are not compulsorily acquiring the freehold interest, it should at least come down to 35%, in line with the suggestion from Philip Rainey KC, whom you will be hearing from on Thursday. The London housing and planning committee also said that 50% is very, very difficult in large developments, particularly in London. So that does need to be thought about at least—it coming down on right to manage.

[Barry Gardiner]

Ms Ali wants to come in.

Halima Ali: I just want to make this specific point. It is clear that rules and regulations regarding leasehold and RTM are not working. It is very—what is the word, Cathy?

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Unfair? Unjust? Inequitable?

Halima Ali: It is very unfair and inadequate, and it makes no logical sense for freeholders on a private estate to be given the same rules and regulations when it is not working for leaseholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q It is the imbalance of power.

Halima Ali: Yes.

[Rachel Maclean]

Q Harry, can I just ask you a couple of things? On the forfeiture point, is it your view that there is absolutely nothing in the Bill to prevent the forfeiture issue?

Harry Scoffin: There are not specific provisions to improve the position on forfeiture. I would love it to be abolished, but if we have to have some form of mechanism that is still going to be called “forfeiture”, at least say that if it happens, the equity is returned to the departing leaseholder when the flat is sold and it is just the debt that the freeholder gets back. The idea that he gets a windfall is obscene. That has to go. At the moment, forfeiture can kick in at £350, so what some law firms are doing is, for a breach of lease, a 350-quid charge, so forfeiture already kicks in there. So bring that up. Some people have suggested £5,000. I would go even higher—£5,000 is the figure for personal bankruptcy proceedings—and bring it up to £10,000.

There will be these freeloading freeholders that will come before you today or on Thursday and say, “Well, if these leaseholders are not paying, the whole building is going to fall to rack and ruin. It’ll be like this country in the 1970s where the bins weren’t getting collected and bodies were piling up. You’ve got to keep the lights on in a block of flats.” What you say to them is, “Sue for a money judgment.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Rimmer]

Q Could you speak up a little, please?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: Sorry—yes. I am afraid that I do not have a voice that projects, but I will do my best.

We warmly welcome regulation of managed estates; it is an anomaly that the management of those estates is unregulated. I was in the room earlier and I heard some eloquent discourse around the fact that some of these estates exist at all as managed areas and that those common areas are not adopted. I have personal experience of managing estates where there are two grass strips, a couple of gullies and a little piece of road, for which you need to set up a limited company, find directors, get them insured, do a health and safety risk assessment and a whole load of other stuff—a whole load of on-costs—for what amounts to, as I say, two strips of grass and a couple of gullies. Clearly, for that kind of small estate, that is utterly disproportionate and I strongly recommend that those areas are adopted by the council. There has to be a way through it, through planning legislation, section 106 agreements, commuted sums and so forth. I would strongly make that point.

On the regulation of those estates that either exist and cannot be adopted or alternatively perhaps are part of a much more complicated scheme and it is therefore inevitable that they will be managed areas, then, yes, absolutely bring them in. I would recommend that you align the regulations and the processes for reporting and service charge accounts, or charge accounts, as closely as you possibly can to the reformed leasehold regime so that there is consistency.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Bulmer, would it not be easier for your members to just pursue a claim in the county court, rather than go through the whole business of forfeiture in order to recover what are sometimes actually quite trivial sums?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: Would it be easier? I am not entirely sure. A substantive point was well made earlier. At the very minimum, there was a call for the equity that is left in a forfeited property to be returned to the leaseholder.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Just so that the public and everybody is absolutely clear on this, at the moment, for a debt to your freeholder in excess of £350, you could lose the entire property, valued at several hundred thousand pounds, and the difference is not given to you. Is that correct?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: As I understand it, that is absolutely correct. Yes, the freeholder takes a lot.

Just to be clear, it might just be worth saying that we represent only managing agents. We do not have freeholders as members and we do not represent freeholders. That is sometimes misunderstood and, while I am clarifying, probably 50% or thereabouts of the estates that my members manage are RMC controlled. We also have members in Scotland who are freehold entirely, so we are very comfortable with freehold, commonhold and resident control.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Your members do come in for a lot of flak, I know, and I just want to put it on record that I do not think that they are only the agents doing wicked freeholders’ biddings. They have a difficult job to do and many of them do it well. Do you find that your members’ mental health improves when they are dealing with tenants who are in a right-to-manage block, where they have that sense that it is they that are in ultimate control, as opposed to dealing with people on behalf of a freeholder who has that control?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: We do a mental health survey of our members. We have done it now for, I think, three years. I am sad to report that the answers of property managers to the question of “Is your life worthwhile?” are in the bottom 17% of the UK population, which is certainly a cause for concern. We ask for the sources of stress, and they include the cost of living and things external to their work, but it is roughly equally balanced between freeholders and leaseholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q So people can be equally bloody minded whatever they are.

Mr Andrew Bulmer: I think it rightly places property managers roughly in the middle of all this. Shall we say that?

[Barry Gardiner]

Q In terms of sinking funds and reserve funds, do you believe that there should be a separation and an accountability for income and expenditure in and out of those funds to the tenants?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: I would go further than that and say that we have been calling for a standardised chart of accounts for quite some time and that standardised chart of accounts would be able to separate out and highlight the various funds. It is important that each individual leaseholders’ funds can be readily identifiable in terms of their own account.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you. That is extremely helpful and I am sure the Minister has taken very good note of it. You will remember that this was something in the 2002 Act, and the British Property Federation have lobbied for it. Would you agree that there should be separate trust accounts to make sure that there is no financial mismanagement by the freeholder?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: Yes. The Property Institute standard, the old ARMA standard for member firms, requires separate accounts for each development and for those to be trust accounts—it is leaseholders’ money held on trust.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q You mentioned the code of conduct for your members. ARMA also had a code of conduct, did it not? It introduced a code of conduct back in the early noughties. What went wrong?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: First of all, it still does have that code of conduct. We are in the middle of rebranding from ARMA to TPI. Just to be clear, the legal entity is The Property Institute, but we are still running on the ARMA and IRPM brands for the next few weeks, when the branding will finally change. I am not quite sure what the phrase, “What went wrong?”—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Let me put it this way: what does the new code of conduct specify that you consider to be a great improvement on the old one?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: There is a plethora of codes. I am good with this: when I was residential director at RICS, I project managed the delivery of the third edition of the RICS code. There is a fourth edition of the code, which I think sits with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities at the moment. Separately from that, Baroness Hayter’s overarching code of practice, inspired by RoPA, is in draft form and goes across all agents. There is then the ARMA standard. There is a plethora of codes. It is the RICS code that the Secretary of State adopted, so again I would love to answer your question, but I do not quite understand it yet. How can I help you?

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I want to know how you feel that the latest code of practice you have instigated has helped to tighten probity and ensure that the transparency and probity of the dealings between a freeholder and a leaseholder have been improved by what you have done.

Mr Andrew Bulmer: We are not a regulator. For firms to join us, they volunteer to do so. It is to their credit that they do so, but there is a limit to what we are able to enforce. We can embrace standards, and our job is to raise standards by pulling—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q You can throw somebody out of the institute, can you not?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: And we have done so. We can raise standards by pulling firms and members along. We can have adventurous conversations, we can set standards and, in extremis, we can remove agents from the institute. We have done that for both individuals and firms. But, ultimately, we are not a regulator, and if you are truly to drive standards you need both pull and push. The role of the regulator would be to push.

[Barry Gardiner]

I think you have given a very eloquent explanation of why, try as you might, we need to ensure that within the primary legislation we have the adequate safeguards, because they cannot be done by voluntary effort outside in a complete and effective way. Thank you.

[The Chair]

Are there any further questions from Members? No? Okay, in which case I thank the witnesses for attending today. We will move on to the next panel.

Examination of Witnesses

Kate Faulkner OBE and Beth Rudolf gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We have a very enthusiastic witness. I call Barry Gardiner.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you. I make it 296.91, actually, but please correct me if Google thinks I am wrong.

Professor Leunig: May I ask whether you used a calculator to work that out?

[Barry Gardiner]

Of course.

Professor Leunig: Phew! I was once involved in setting a question for Carol Vorderman on “Who Do You Think You Are?”. They wanted her to work out something like that, and I said, “You’ve got to give her a calculator.” They said, “No, she’s Carol Vorderman.” No one can work out 1.027⁹⁴ in their head, not even Carol Vorderman. They finally agreed to put a calculator to hand, which she used, I believe.

[Barry Gardiner]

So she didn’t do it in her head.

Professor Leunig: Even Carol Vorderman cannot do that in her head. If you had said that you had done it in your head, I would have put you above Carol Vorderman.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q No, no—on my calculator.

Back to the Bill. There is an argument put forward for ground rent—the Government’s proposal is to take it down to a peppercorn or indeed abolish it entirely—that these are inalienable property rights, so there must be compensation and there must be proportionality. Could you elaborate for the Committee on whether the same argument was used when we compensated slave owners for the loss of their property, and whether you think that there is an analogy there?

Professor Leunig: Property rights are never sacred in the sense of being inviolable, because a property right is over and above the right to be compensated for the loss of property, so a properly inviolable property right would ban the emancipation of slaves, ban compulsory purchase and so forth.

But the Government often take actions that, de facto, end someone’s business. One of the saddest things I did in Government when I was economic adviser to the Chancellor was meeting a group of people affected by Brexit. One of them was a seed potato exporter. Under EU law, seed potatoes cannot be imported into the EU, so on the day that we left, this person’s business was completely kaput. He asked for compensation, but it was not granted. We can argue the rights and wrongs of that, and we can argue the rights and wrongs of Brexit, but it seems to me that the fundamental sovereign right of Parliament is to make decisions that some people like and some people do not like. If people are really unhappy, they can judicially review it. A lot of rich people own ground rents, and they may well be judicially reviewed. Sometimes almost anything is reviewed, certainly in the world of property.

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that there is a plausible case for Parliament to stand up and say, “We believe there are social advantages to doing this, and we have therefore done it.” That is the standard defence in law, and we did this at the end of covid. I was involved in the compulsory arbitration for a commercial rent scheme; indeed, it was one of the things I came up with as an idea in my time as a civil servant. At the end of covid, just about every restaurant had a huge accumulated rent debt. The standard commercial clause says that on any day you are behind with your rent, the landlord can go in, occupy the property and seize everything that is in it. We put that into abeyance for covid, without compensation, because we had a public policy reason for wanting restaurants shut.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Indeed, we actually did it after the Custins v . Hearts of Oak Benefit Society legal decision in 1967, which had reversed the Government’s decision on marriage value. We then legislated to make it absolutely clear that marriage value should not be counted.

Professor Leunig: There we are.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q In 1993, that was turned over. But it is public policy that trumps those property rights.

Professor Leunig: Correct, and that was what we decided at the end of covid, when restaurants, particularly those that served fine wine, came to us to say, “As soon as we restock our cellar, the landlord will turn up, reoccupy the property, seize all the wine and sell it for the back debt.” They said, “We are literally not willing to bring wine on to the premises.” It was clear that that was an inefficient outcome that risked undermining the high street, risked undermining the future of hospitality and risked undermining a sector that is the biggest employer of young people. We therefore created a compulsory arbitration scheme to prevent that from happening. Nobody judicially reviewed that, even though there were some unhappy landlords, because they understood that we had a public policy purpose for doing so. The weight of evidence that you have heard today suggests that there is a public policy purpose here but, as I say, I am no lawyer.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you. That is extremely helpful. Please do refuse to answer if this is outwith your bandwidth, but in terms of the way in which leasehold in particular enables the freeholder to extract a revenue stream and the way in which developers develop properties precisely to extract that revenue stream, do you believe that that has had any bearing on the value of land in the UK and the fact that it appears to be at a higher price—obviously there are density and population issues, but on the whole it seems to be of a higher value—than land elsewhere in comparable populations?

Professor Leunig: Let us be clear: land for housing is of higher value and agricultural land is of slightly higher value, but industrial land is often not.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q And there is a huge premium when land is transferred from agricultural to construction use, is there not?

Professor Leunig: Gobsmackingly. The field with three horses next to Heathrow airport that I go past if I ever go to Heathrow is a tragedy. It is a really dreadful little bit of land. It is used for nothing other than three horses, but its value is constrained, because it is zoned for agriculture. I think the answer is: very little. Most of the large developers are not in this in order to make a fast buck out of ground rent and so on. Indeed, from memory, I think I can put on record that Taylor Wimpey behaved very honourably, having inadvertently had doubling rents in the north-west—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q You would say that of Persimmon and FirstPort.

Professor Leunig: Hang on; I will exercise my right to finish the sentence. It actually bought them back from the people to whom it had sold them, and it had not sold them at a particularly high price. It was just a local convention in the north-west that houses were sold on leasehold. The national companies hired solicitors, who did the normal thing in their area. Just as there is in government, there is often a lot more cock-up than conspiracy in the private sector. I am much more worried about the people who buy the leases later on with a view to finding the loopholes and exploiting them, just as people buy up medicines that are not quite out of patent to force the prices up. That is why I think it is good to set up a legal system that prevents the sharks from sharking, or whatever the verb is, but I would not want to tar all developers with that brush. In terms of property prices, I should say that I think it is overwhelmingly the planning system—we can see that if you look at somewhere like Manchester, which has lots of flats where land prices are not that high. Land prices are high in London and the south-east because we do not release enough land for housing.

[Barry Gardiner]

I will exercise my right to interrupt.

Professor Leunig: Absolutely.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I think you are looking at this from a historical point of view. Your example of the north-west was perfectly apt, but there have been modern developers and companies—and I would cite Persimmon and FirstPort—that deliberately go about creating this as an extractive opportunity. Yes, it is much more modern, but surely it then has an impact, if it is allowed to continue, on land value.

Professor Leunig: It could do for sure, yes. If you can extract more money for the product that you are able to sell, you are willing to pay more for the constituent parts. However, I would not want anybody here to think that if we move from leasehold to commonhold, houses will suddenly become affordable in the south-east. That would not be a credible economic prediction.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you.

Professor Leunig: For that, you need to build more houses.

[The Minister for Housing, Planning and Building Safety (Lee Rowley)]

Q I am trying to keep my interventions very brief, because I will be speaking a lot next week, but I could not resist asking you a couple of questions given your history, knowledge and background that is much more than my own. You have emphasised very clearly and articulately the rights of the people sat around this horseshoe to make decisions that will have economic impacts. Can I get your understanding of what you think the economic impact of the Bill as it stands broadly is?

Professor Leunig: First of all, I repeat what I said earlier, namely that it seems to me that a lot of it is up to the secondary legislation. In particular, I think that issues of compensation are entirely in secondary legislation and regulation. As I say, I am not a lawyer; I find it very hard to read a Bill. It is not my skillset at all. I would not like to have your job.

I think that the biggest effect is the dynamic effect of creating a much cleaner and clearer property market. We have a rather ossified property market in Britain; it has become more ossified over time. There are all sort of reasons for that, including the fact that far more people are now under stamp duty, as well as the effect of financial regulations that mean someone needs a relatively large deposit to get on the housing market. There is a bunch of other costs that we really could simplify and get rid of. Take searches, for example. You can buy a house that is two years old and you have to do a completely clean set of searches. Why? When did we last find a mine in central London? We know this stuff pretty well.

I think this is part of clearing up the housing market and if we do so it can have quite big dynamic effects—for example, facilitating the better movement of people in response to opportunity. Such opportunities may be economic. I do not want to sound too Norman Tebbit and say, “Get on your bike.” However, there can be opportunities to go and live next to an aged parent who has suddenly fallen ill, in order to provide better care for them, or opportunities to move nearer to better schooling. Whatever the opportunity is, a more flexible housing market allows people to move to a house that is better suited to their needs.

All those things are good dynamic effects that in the medium term are strongly pro-growth and I see this Bill being part of it, but it is a small step forward. A move to commonhold would be a better step forward to a nice, clean system, where everybody knows exactly what they are buying and nobody is left wondering, “What sort of freeholder is this? Are they an exploitative one? Are they a reasonable one?” Many freeholders are perfectly reasonable.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

I am quite keen to wrap this up before the Minister concludes speaking in the Chamber, because otherwise we will have to keep the witness for at least an hour during votes, and I do not really want to inconvenience him that much. Can we have very quick questions and swift answers if possible, please?

[Barry Gardiner]

Q The Norwegian example that you have cited related to land that, I understand, did have a rental value because it was agricultural land, whereas you cannot rent out a piece of land that already has a building on it, obviously, except to the tenants. I think there is a relevant difference. Have you made a study of elsewhere in the world, such as Australia, Hong Kong and America—the British empire led us to seed leasehold around the world—and what they do?

Dr Maxwell: In relation to your first point on the Norwegian case, yes, as I said, it was different. It is about agricultural land value. The value was equivalent to several thousand euros. As for what happened with the adoption of, say, strata title in Australia and so on, that is not within my knowledge. What I know or have studied in detail is—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I just found it a strange example to choose Norwegian agricultural land, rather than where we know it has actually happened—where these payments were not made, the courts did not find that huge payments needed to be made, and there were no huge court cases. If we look at where else in the world this has happened, actually, it has happened without that sort of thing. I understand you are a lawyer, and no lawyer I have ever known has wanted to refuse a client the opportunity to go to court. But it seems odd that we are not talking about where we know it has happened in an exactly parallel situation. Our leasehold system was introduced in those countries, transformed into strata title or condominium structures, and no great crisis resulted.

Dr Maxwell: The very short answer to that is that we are dealing with article 1 of the first protocol to the European convention on human rights. Countries such as Australia, and particularly places such as Hong Kong now, are not signatories to the convention, nor do they have a domestic law-giving effect to it. That is why we are dealing with article 1 of the first protocol, and that is why we are dealing with case law from other jurisdictions that is, perhaps, not directly analogous.

As for the sorts of cases, or whether any cases were brought in those jurisdictions when that system was adopted, that is not something I am aware of or can comment on, unfortunately.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair]

And then, very succinctly, Andy Carter.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Third sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Does anyone have anything to add? Do not feel that you have to; I am not putting you on the spot.

Ms Paula Higgins: There is one thing I would add. I am so pleased that Sue is here; she has done amazing work on shared ownership. I am not a legal expert, but I wonder whether you will be hearing from people from the retirement housing sector as well. That is a very complicated form of tenure, with exit fees and whatnot. Can they actually have the same rights to challenge fees and things like that? I am not sure if that is covered in some of your evidence sessions, but retirement housing is notoriously known for quite scandalous fees and charges.

Bob Smytherman: Certainly, we have seen a massive increase in shared ownership memberships coming to us for membership of residents’ associations. Obviously, we are helping them through that. In terms of quick wins, I really hope the Government will finally implement an independent statutory regulator for property managers. That would be a really quick win to help leaseholders. It is very disappointing that we have not got there yet, so I really hope there will be an independent regulator for these management companies that hold large amounts of leaseholders’ money.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Q Ms Phillips, shared owners, under the Renters (Reform) Bill passing through Parliament, will get forfeiture: an improvement on mandatory grounds of possession for which relief cannot be sought in the court. Do you support, in this Bill, the right to abolish forfeiture? At the moment, I believe a shared owner has less security of tenure than a private leaseholder. Perhaps you could explain what, for example, a housing association that owns the other part of a shared ownership apartment can do to someone in circumstances where there is a dispute over a service charge and non-payment?

Sue Phillips: One of the things I would want from this Bill is for shared owners to have all the rights that other leaseholders have. Of course, as your question flags up, they face problems over and beyond the problems faced by leaseholders. The problem for shared owners is that if they—I will not speak to the specific technicalities of this—fall behind with payments, they are liable to possession with no reimbursement of the equity they have invested in their property. This is because they sit more as a tenant than as a homeowner. I would certainly like to see that addressed.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q It really is an equity trap, isn’t it?

Sue Phillips: It is. Housing associations will say that they will do their utmost to prevent this scenario playing out, and that numbers are low. While that may be true, I do not think it is an argument against shared owners having the same protections in law as other leaseholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q If the Bill were to introduce a provision that forfeiture were abolished, so that with a debt of, say, £5,000 or £10,000, you could not lose the entire value that you have in the property as a leaseholder, should that right similarly apply to shared ownership leaseholders?

Sue Phillips: Shared owners should have the same right as other leaseholders and they should not be liable to lose their investment in their home due to a relatively small debt—absolutely.

I would add that it is a hugely important issue, but it is probably an issue that affects a fairly small minority of people at the moment and that there are other issues arising from this reform process that affect a great many more shared owners or all shared owners. It is an important issue, but I would not like for it to take up a disproportionate amount of time in this session.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Okay. As shared owners, you pay service charges as well as rent and you are disadvantaged if there is poor maintenance of your buildings. Do you agree that shared owners should be allowed to claim the right to manage, as confirmed in the recent Canary Gateway case?

Sue Phillips: My expertise does not lie so much with right-to-manage claims; what I would reiterate is that they should have the same rights as any other leaseholder.

What is more important—what is specific to shared owners—is that they are liable for 100% of the costs of repair and maintenance, and I think there are two separate issues within that. One is the issue relating to the model. In previous sessions—

[Barry Gardiner]

Sorry, I couldn’t hear what you said there.

Sue Phillips: Sorry. One is to do with the model and one is to do with the transparency around the model. On the model itself, in the previous sessions on Tuesday people talked about the unfairness of generating income streams from leaseholders after the profit made on the sale of the initial share, and I think that the 100% liability for service charges that shared owners have falls within those kinds of questions. It should certainly be looked at to see whether it is proportionate for shared owners to pay 100% of charges. Again, there is a great deal more that I could say, but I am aware of the limits on time.

The second issue is transparency. In evidence submitted to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee inquiry into shared ownership, one of the themes that has come out of the published responses from shared owners is that people do not seem to be aware at the point of sale of their liabilities in this respect. Therefore, if we cannot tackle that 100% liability in this Bill, given time constraints, at the very least regulators should pay more attention to the nature of marketing and whether it is fair, transparent and compliant with consumer protection regulations.

You asked me earlier for a quick fix. I certainly have a quick fix around transparency and it is that the relevant regulators should look more closely at transparency about the model as it stands, up until we have meaningful reform of the areas that are problematic.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q In conversation with my colleague, Matt Pennycook, you talked about the lack of statutory lease extension provision. The Law Commission said that shared owners should have the right to extend. Do you consider that that would be a welcome amendment to the Bill?

Sue Phillips: I think it is essential, and this relates to the marketing that I have talked about. Shared owners come into shared ownership believing that they are a leaseholder like any other leaseholder; they have no reason to think differently. Often, there is a caveat emptor attitude and I think that is reprehensible, to be honest, when you are talking about provision of social housing to households that by definition are financially vulnerable compared with people who can afford to buy outright. It is not a failure of their due diligence; it is a failure of the Government, the housing sector and their agencies to spell out the difference between assured tenancy and leasehold.

There is a moral compass argument that they should have the statutory right to lease extension, because of the manner in which they have been sold those short leases. I think there are separate debates to be had about whether 99-year leases were mis-sold. A recent ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority outlined that it is likely to be misleading not to provide material information about the costs of lease extension. That suggests that there certainly is an argument that those short leases have been mis-sold.

We cannot change that. Most of those shared owners will be outside any scope of limitations for redress. The least we can do is ensure that lease extension is available not only to future buyers, but current shared owners, who have been left with a lease that does not actually give this right. Can they afford to take up the right? They should have a right to lease extension, but that right should be made affordable. If you are sitting there with a 50, 60 or 70-year lease, even if you have got that right to statutory lease extension, it might not be affordable to take up that right. So there is a basketful of issues to look at here, and I encourage collaboration with other regulators and with the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee to resolve those other issues.

[The Chair]

Just one last question, Barry, because I want to get other people in. I might have the time to come back to you if you have more, but—

[Barry Gardiner]

No, I will leave it there.

[Andy Carter]

Q Paula, your organisation, the HomeOwners Alliance, has described the Bill as a huge missed opportunity, because including flats in the changes was not done in this Bill. Would you like to elaborate a bit on that?

Ms Paula Higgins: I feel strongly about that. This is really going to be a missed opportunity. These types of Bills will come once every 20 years, so you must finish the job that you start. We saw that in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, where we had the commonhold and it did not happen. If we cannot get commonhold sorted, why do we not have all flats being built having to be share of freehold—having to be sold share of freehold within five years—and have a sunset clause saying that there will be no new leasehold flats after a certain time? If you do not do it now, the next opportunity is not going to arise. I feel very strongly. We have lots of people who are waiting. We have people coming to us every day saying, “I am waiting for my lease extension. The Government are going to do something about it.” We have been waiting for years; we put out our report in 2017 showing that 43% of leaseholders did not even know how much time was left on their lease. They are not expected to be experts in this; they are buying a flat to live in. So it is a real missed opportunity if we do not do something on this and it will come back to bite us.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller]

Q When you say “regulated”, do you mean they should have a qualification—that they can tick a box to say, “I was qualified to do this”—or redress, as in, there is a regulatory body above them?

Ms Paula Higgins: That is a really good point. I know the RoPA stuff—the regulation of property agents working group; in fact, we gave evidence to it. A tick box is probably not the right thing. Perhaps it is more about a proper single place for redress, but as I think Andrew Bulmer mentioned, that is the ambulance at the bottom, and what matters is what is at the top.

What we don’t want is people doing online qualifications and getting a tick, and then they can jump up as an estate agent and come back down again. So I appreciate the complexities and I look forward to seeing what your deliberations will be.

Sue Phillips: I do not have the expertise to speak directly to the regulation of property management, but I would like to pick up on a couple of related issues from a shared-ownership perspective. The first is that the evidence submitted to the Advertising Standards Authority’s inquiry into Black Friday marketing highlighted the fact that industry sector standards for the marketing of shared ownership are lower than other standards that are out there. For example, shared ownership is currently excluded from the New Homes Quality Board’s code of practice. That simultaneously reflects the complexity of shared ownership but also the fact that shared owners do not have access to the same level of protections as other homebuyers in relation to new build codes. That is slightly off to one side.

I also wanted to pick up on the matter of transparency of service charges. Transparency is clearly essential: people should know what they are paying for. However, shared owners and other leaseholders should not have to effectively take on an audit function where it falls upon them to scrutinise accounts. They should be able to place some degree of reliance on the accuracy and proportionality of the accounts that they receive. I cannot speak to how that will be achieved, but I think that the onus should be on the providers of services and service charge accounts to be better, rather than leaseholders and shared owners having more and more obligations to scrutinise and take whatever action is required if problems are identified in those accounts.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Ms Higgins, do you agree that it would be appropriate to allow leaseholders to withhold service charges where there has not been compliance with the very extensive requirements in the Bill to provide accounts no later than six months after, and so on? Is that an appropriate and proportionate way for leaseholders to be permitted to respond?

Ms Paula Higgins: I fully agree with that. It is a bit like the situation where, if you are getting building work done in your home and the building work is not completed or whatever, you withhold money. That happens in all of the construction industry. The stuff in relation to the forfeiture is very disproportionate, is it not?

[Barry Gardiner]

Indeed, yes.

Ms Paula Higgins: I fully support something like that.

[The Chair]

This needs to be very brief.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you also for what you said about wanting all new apartments to be leasehold with a share of freehold, Ms Higgins. That was echoed by Mr Smytherman.

In so far as new apartments are going to have a share of freehold, Mr Smytherman, you indicated that you felt that you had got the best of both worlds as a director of a freehold franchise company.

Bob Smytherman: Yes. Ours is a tripartite lease. A ground freeholder owns the land and there is a separate middle lease, which is the limited company—limited by shares—of which we are shareholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q As a leaseholder with a share of freehold, if commonhold were to become available, do you think that it would be equitable and fair to charge you for the privilege of transferring to commonhold, or do you think that more people would take the opportunity to transfer to commonhold if that came?

[The Chair]

A one-word answer, please, because I have to get to the end.

Bob Smytherman: That is difficult. It depends. If you have a difficult freeholder, then that would clearly be an advantageous thing to do. Then there is a scenario like ours, where you have a democratic limited company with shareholders.

Sorry, I cannot do a one-word answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q Professor Steven, do you have anything to add?

Professor Steven: No, I agree with my colleague. From a Scottish perspective, I would be more in favour of commonhold.

[Barry Gardiner]

Professor Steven, my question is to you. Last week, in the House of Lords, the Government indicated that they were looking at the Scottish system of tenements. Could you perhaps explain that to the Committee? My understanding is that the Scottish Law Commission has been looking to review tenement structure and actually make it more like commonhold. Is it correct that there is a lack of standardisation and no ability to ensure those share costs are split proportionately under the tenement structure, and therefore that would not be a quick cut-and-paste for the Government if they are considering what to move forward to?

Professor Steven: Yes, I absolutely agree. The legislation in Scotland is the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004, which is 20 years old and is fairly basic. It does not have owners associations, for example, so it is less sophisticated than the commonhold proposals that the Law Commission for England and Wales made. But we have problems in Scotland too. There are always problems, no matter what the law says.

There are two particular problems. The first is where money comes from to make repairs to flatted properties—we typically call them tenements in Scotland. The second, sadly, is apathy. I was watching the earlier session, and I saw how engaged your witness in Worthing was, but sadly in other cases the owners are not so engaged. Even if you have an owners association regime, which the Scottish Law Commission is now looking at, it still depends on people being engaged. There are no easy solutions. I favour commonhold, but it will not be a magic wand.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Nothing takes away the capacity of people to disagree with each other. I want to ask you a further question, which Professor Hodges may also have a view on. In the early 2000s in Scotland, the Government did away with feu duty in one fell swoop. You got rid of the inefficiencies of that system. Is it not unfair that we are going through all these inefficient qualifying criteria to ensure that enfranchisement happens only on a development-by-development basis? Could we not do this in one fell swoop in England too? I see Professor Hodges is smiling from ear to ear, but I will allow you to come in first, Professor Steven.

Professor Steven: As a former law commissioner in Scotland, I am reluctant to disagree with the Law Commission for England and Wales, given the amount of work it has done on this. It is clearly very complicated.

You said that we got rid of our feudal system in one fell swoop in 2004. That is broadly true, but in 1974—50 years ago—we banned new feudal payments, which are like ground rents. There was a system whereby the existing feudal payments had to be paid off when the property was sold, so by 2004 there was not much left. My impression is that in England there is quite a lot left, in terms of ground rents. Because there was not so much left in Scotland, the compensation issues and the European convention on human rights issues that Dr Maxwell spoke about on Tuesday were not so prominent. Although we had the feudal system till 2004, it was a shell of what it originally was. In a certain way, it would be much simpler just to change leasehold into commonhold, but I fear that it would lead to all sorts of unforeseen consequences.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Just to make you feel a little better about disagreeing with your Law Commission counterparts in England, of course they were constrained in what they could do by the parameters the Government set them.

Professor Hodges: Very briefly: modernise, because we are still living in the past; simplify, because we can easily do that on a comprehensive basis; and get it done so that people can plan, retrain and know what they have to do. You then get good behaviour throughout the system. I am very tempted to repeat facetiously the “Get it done” slogan, which crops up a lot.

[Richard Fuller]

Q My questions are for Professor Hodges. We have to deal with the Bill as it is—on the commonhold thing—so, “Get it done” is not particularly helpful, if I may say. It might be a good indication, but not particularly detailed, so help us on the detail of that. Often in Parliament, we regulate and think that that is the solution. I do not know whether you have had a chance to look at some of the regulatory details in the Bill, but what would be your guidance be to us about where it is pointing in the right direction, where it might be going wrong, and the pitfalls that we should look out for?

Professor Hodges: As far as the detail of the Bill is concerned, looking technically at what is in there without expressing a view as whether it is a good or a bad idea substantively, it seems to me to be fine. You asked a wider regulatory question earlier on—

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q To be clear, I agree with you on managing agents; I am talking about the regulation of private estates. The Bill provides for a new regulatory regime for private estates, which are not currently regulated. It is separate from the service charge regime. I am just wondering whether your simplification point works in this case too.

Professor Hodges: Everyone should be in and under the same regime—absolutely everyone in the system.

Professor Steven: I do not have a strong view on this.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Professor Hodges, my colleague Richard Fuller sought to make a point about caveat emptor to you. Is it your experience that the inequity of power and information between developers or freeholders and the potential purchaser—the leaseholder—is so great that caveat emptor is inappropriate and that you need the power of regulation to sort out that inequity? I think it was the Law Commission that concluded that

“any financial gain for the landlord”—

or freeholder—

“will be at the expense of the leaseholder…Their interests are diametrically opposed, and consensus will be impossible to achieve.”

Professor Hodges: In any consumer or property—certainly social housing—dispute system, there is an obvious imbalance of power. People do not have the money to do things. I have chaired the Post Office Horizon compensation board advising Ministers in the past few weeks. The whole reason why Parliament needs to step in is to correct a massive imbalance of power. Private litigation did not work, or it only half worked. There have been many stories about people being traumatised, and not just unable to enforce their rights. That is why we have invented things like legal aid, Citizens Advice and an ombudsman, and we are still moving—we are still improving that one—because of the ongoing imbalance of power between the little people and larger organisations.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Indeed. Thank you for that, and I think everyone will also want to thank you for your work on the Post Office inquiry.

I want to ask you about introducing insurance commission. I do not know whether you heard what the witnesses said on Tuesday, but you may know of the Canary Riverside case, in which £1.6 million in commission was given to a freeholder by the insurer—in a kickback—which was deemed to be inadmissible, and that is what the tribunal, mercifully, found. Although the Bill is outlawing commission, it is introducing fees for insurance services. In the Canary Riverside case, that is precisely what that £1.6 million was called. Do you fear that the Bill appears to dispense with commission, but actually reintroduces it by the back door?

Professor Hodges: Possibly, but that is why you need regulation. That is an obvious example of an imbalance of power and lack of transparency, for which you need external people to get involved. Exactly what the final result ought to be, I would leave to a regulator—for them to say that so much commission is either allowable or not allowable, or indeed not at all. It depends on the circumstances.

[Barry Gardiner]

We will hear about—

[The Chair]

Can I just interject and ask whether Professor Steven has anything to add to what you have asked so far?

Professor Steven: Very briefly, insurance law is UK-wide, but in Scotland insurance of blocks would normally be handled by managing agents because we do not have the freeholder. Since 2011, we have had legislation in Scotland that regulates managing agents. I know that that is being considered in England as well, but that might be of interest.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you very much, Professor Steven.

Turning to the value of the building and property rights, we heard from an eminent lawyer on Tuesday about property rights in relation to ground rent. Looking at enfranchisement, I think it was the Residential Freehold Association, which is charged with guarding the property rights of freeholders, that said that their share in the value of the building was only 2.5%. The corollary of that, of course, is that the leaseholders’ share in the value of the building is 97.5%. Do you feel that the way in which the costs of enfranchisement look at the total value of the building is therefore unjust?

[The Chair]

We have less than a minute left.

Professor Hodges: I would need to know an awful lot more to be able to answer that question, as a non-property expert. It is a very interesting question, and my answer would be that it is one for Parliament and the regulatory system to engage with.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you very much. Professor Steven?

Professor Steven: I have nothing to add.

[The Chair]

I thank the two witnesses for taking the time to give evidence to us today. Thank you for beaming in, Professor Steven, and thank you for attending, Professor Hodges. We will now move to our next witness—Paul Broadhead, come on down.

Examination of Witness

Paul Broadhead gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

They can be far more punitive.

Paul Broadhead: They can be, absolutely, with where RPI is. It is really difficult to predict. Some ground rents can grow very rapidly, which puts people in financial difficulty. From the lenders’ perspective, when underwriting a mortgage, they need to consider whether the mortgage is affordable on the face of it not only today, but in the future, and to take account of any foreseeable increases in expenditure. That is one of the areas they will take into account.

In terms of the peppercorn ground rent, yes, I do believe that that will resolve this going forward. The important thing to consider is that there is still a separate consultation, which just closed yesterday, on capping ground rent for existing leaseholders. It is really important that that is brought forward to prevent this two-tier system from developing.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Broadhead, I do not know how long you have been working in your present capacity, but I suspect it is since 1984. In 1984, your organisation’s report “Leaseholds—Time for a change?” said that the “leasehold system is incompatible with home ownership” and that an Englishman’s leasehold home “is his landlord’s castle”. I thought that was a very elegant way of expressing what many of us think. Is that still your organisation’s view?

Paul Broadhead: You are absolutely right. We have been advocating for the reform of leasehold since 1984. As you kindly point out, it was not me that made that comment at the time.

[Barry Gardiner]

That elegant comment.

Paul Broadhead: Absolutely—I wish I could be as elegant, and I will try to be throughout this questioning. Our position is that leasehold does require reform. If you were going to design the property tenure today, it is not what you would come up with. However, there are 4 million-plus leasehold properties in this country. Undoing that and replacing it overnight with a new, perhaps more just, system will take time.

The first thing we need to concentrate on is reform, to make the system fair, predictable and equitable, so that people have the security of owner-occupation. In a sense, yes, they do not own the land on which their home sits, but they have the security of tenure that they would not have in other sectors. But it is important that we ensure that that is fair.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Let me ask you perhaps a more difficult question: how many of the mortgages that are lent to shared equity owners default compared with normal freehold owners?

Paul Broadhead: Are you talking particularly about shared equity or shared ownership?

[Barry Gardiner]

Sorry, shared ownership—where you have shared ownership in the property.

Paul Broadhead: I have not got those figures to hand, but we can certainly send those through to the Committee. From speaking to our membership, I think it is fairly comparable. Our sector punches above its weight in shared ownership because it is very keen on affordable housing, and we have some big shared-ownership lenders. One thing I would say about shared ownership is that underwriting and managing those cases are slightly different from managing a traditional mortgage, because you have the housing association interest and some potential staircasing—although, of course, many do not. The arrears levels tend to be higher, but the default levels, I think, are comparable. We can confirm that in writing.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Interesting. Why do you think the arrears levels tend to be higher?

Paul Broadhead: There are two things. One is the housing association rent aspect. Affordability tends to be more stretched by people owning shared ownership properties in any event, as most people land in shared ownership as an intermediate tenure because they are not able to buy their whole home. That, therefore, means their incomes are often less predictable. They do not necessarily always understand—

[Barry Gardiner]

Or that property prices are too high, of course.

Paul Broadhead: Well, property prices are too high irrespective of tenure, even if you are buying as a freeholder.

[Barry Gardiner]

Their income may be stable and reasonable—being in shared ownership does not mean that your income is unstable in any way.

Paul Broadhead: No, not at all.

[Andy Carter]

Q I want to pick up on some of the comments we heard on Tuesday around mis-selling. You mentioned the work the building societies—your members—would do to understand the affordability and the ability of a purchaser. What steps do your members go through to ensure that the person taking out the mortgage fully understands what they are buying? I am conscious that you will not necessarily always know all the things that they know. Could you just talk us through that area?

Paul Broadhead: Certainly. The first thing to remember is that mortgage lenders are experts in mortgage lending, not in property law—it is down to the conveyancer to advise the borrower of the requirements of the lease and the purchase of the property they are buying. The way I would describe it is that the conveyancer and the surveyor, to an extent, are the lender’s eyes and ears on the ground to ensure all of that is clear to the borrower, and that they are entering into that transaction with their eyes open.

What we have seen from a mortgage lender’s perspective, particularly when the escalating ground rent issue started to come to a head, was lenders taking a much more proactive approach on new developments to understand the terms of some of those leases, and actually refusing to lend on those new developments. Of course, there are a whole range of mortgage lenders that will lend on a new development, but the fact is that a new development without some of those large lenders—because they will not lend against that leasehold—drives change. That is what we have seen. We have seen the effect of that with the escalating ground rent—with the reduction of that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

I am not sure that I would accept that, but I will take that up with you and your members separately.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I will pick up briefly on what you said to Mr Carter about the way in which sometimes your members were advising people, “Actually, this is leasehold, and there are these additional costs, and service charges are so expensive that we are not prepared to lend to you.” Are there any particular freeholders who have a reputation in the industry for doing that? I am thinking of people such as the Freshwater or Persimmon Homes, or any who seem to be known for their excessive service charges. Is there an automatic flag for them in the industry? Sitting where you are, you would have parliamentary privilege to name them.

Paul Broadhead: Parliamentary privilege notwithstanding, no, we do not have individual organisations I could point to. I certainly do not get reports from my members.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q In that case, my question to you is: why not? You know very well that there are “fleeceholders” out there: freeholders who fleece their leaseholders. They have a reputation for doing it over many, many years. Should your industry not be advising somebody who approaches you for a mortgage about that, when you know full well that if they have a mortgage with that particular freeholder, the likelihood is that over the years those services charges will rack up and be abused in precisely the way that we have talked about with previous witnesses, about the inequity of power in this relationship? Indeed, these are the very issues that we are seeking to amend in this Bill. Why does your association not have those flags so that when it sees names such as Freshwater, it says to the person, “Look, we need to tell you a thing or two here”?

Paul Broadhead: In terms of coming back to me as an association, that is a level of detail that is about individual organisations. It is not really part of my role to represent that. That does not mean they ignore that, just to be clear.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q But you rightly said, Mr Broadhead, that your members would advise a prospective purchaser not to engage in a mortgage where it was leasehold, if they felt that the service charges would rack up and they would then be put into financial penury. Why do you not do it when you know that it will be the case?

Paul Broadhead: Our members will not advise; they will refuse that mortgage, because it does not meet with their policy. In terms of other service charges, they all have a panel of conveyancers that they approve to act for them, and that is for the consumer purchasing that property. The terms of those panels change as some of these practices have come to light, and they will be nipped in the bud at that point.

[The Chair]

Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions and, indeed, for this morning’s sitting. I thank all our witnesses on behalf of the Committee for their evidence. The Committee will meet again at 2 pm this afternoon here in the Boothroyd Room to continue taking oral evidence.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Fourth sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you. A very quick question with a very quick answer, please. Barry Gardiner.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Q In your leasehold update report 2020, you adumbrated numerous complaints and you said:

“It is a real concern that homeowners who have entered into a lease are captive consumers with very little influence over the costs incurred by landlords or their managing agents that will in due course be passed on to them.”

Do you believe that the Bill will give them control or simply greater transparency and access to understand their own exploitation, and has the CMA come across any comparable part of the economy where those paying the bills have no control over the bill or the standard of service?

George Lusty: It is worth saying at the outset that we approached our leasehold investigation primarily from the framework of consumer protection law, looking at instances of mis-selling and unfair contract terms. We cannot use consumer law—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q But you are concerned with the competition, and you have rightly pointed out that these are captive consumers.

Simon Jones: You are absolutely right. We think the captive consumer problem is a real problem. We spoke to a lot of people about what the solution might be. There was not an obvious solution, but we did think that if there were better redress mechanisms, that would at least help.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q So this is not a free market as it stands.

Simon Jones: You have choice about the property you buy, but if you buy a leasehold property—

[The Chair]

Order. I do apologise, but that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. I thank our witnesses very much on behalf of the Committee.

Examination of Witness

James Vitali gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Carter]

Could you expand on that?

James Vitali: Of course. There are a couple of things in particular. One has been raised already by Mr Gardiner in the evidence sessions and concerns mixed-use buildings. I think it is great that the threshold is being increased to 50%. That will bring a lot of leaseholders into the scope of potential enfranchisement. But as it stands, there is a provision in the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 concerning structural dependency rules—shared plant rooms and things like that.

Effectively, as it stands, the provisions in that Act disqualify people who get to the threshold but share service and plant rooms with a commercial unit in the building. That section in the 1993 Act should just be removed. There is already a framework for co-operation between commercial units and residential units in mixed buildings when it comes to services. It should be relatively straightforward to create a framework for co-operation with the Bill.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Policy Exchange describes itself as a conservative think-tank, so you and I might find ourselves rather strange bedfellows on this, but I welcome what you said about shared services. This whole section is really about competition and free markets and so on. Would you not agree that the leasehold system has all the hallmarks of monopolistic practices and market failure? It has a lack of choice, uncompetitive prices and high barriers to entry, and there is an inability to substitute a service, all of which are the standard accusations that a conservative think-tank might make of an unfree market, and it is against consumer interest. All credit to you, that is what Policy Exchange is supposed to be promoting: the free market and the interests of the consumer. Leasehold itself and the exploitation we have been discussing over the past few days are really embedded in a non-capitalistic structure, are they not?

James Vitali: Yes, I quite agree. One of the cases I make in the paper I mentioned is that not only is ownership becoming more concentrated in a narrow stratum of society, but the type of ownership we are offering the aspirant is being thinned out. You were just listening to the suggestion that leasehold is almost mis-sold to consumers. I think aspirant property owners are being mis-sold when it comes to leasehold. They think they are buying into a genuine form of property ownership, but in many ways, as I said at the start, they lack the rights and responsibilities that should come with an ownership tenure, so I completely agree.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you. Freeholders, in that sense—particularly in relation to ground rent—are really a rentier class because they are not providing a service in return for the revenue stream they are cashing in on.

James Vitali: Yes, charges should be connected to the provision of a service, so I think ground rents should be reduced to a peppercorn. Charges should be made through this new and very sensible regime that is being proposed in the Bill for how charges are requested and demanded.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I cannot believe we are agreeing quite as much as this—this is wonderful stuff. That rentier class often says, “Well, we do provide a service,” but of course that is to conflate and confuse what they do with the service provided by a managing agent, which of course could be equally well performed by an enfranchised community that has the right to manage their own block. The domain of the freeholder is actually simply the accumulation of the ground rent, is it not?

James Vitali: I think the key here is whether the leaseholder has a choice in who is providing the service and what service they are providing. Any functioning free market is based on strong property rights and competition. The key here is giving existing leaseholders greater choice over who is managing their building and how it is being maintained, and increasingly giving them the chance to take on those responsibilities themselves.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you very much. In order to preserve both our reputations, I will not say that you agreed with me and I trust that you will not say that I agreed with you.

[Richard Fuller]

Q Let me attempt to get back on to Conservative territory, rather than Barry’s territory. There are many experts in this field, and campaigners have done some fantastic work. I am not one of them—I do not know about this—so allow me some naivety in the questions I pose. Is marriage value a real thing?

James Vitali: I think a lot of the reforms proposed in this Bill are an attempt to reflect better the fact that when the leaseholder purchases the leasehold, they are acquiring the majority value of the asset. In market terms, sure, I suppose marriage value is significant and substantive, but as it stands it seems to me that a leaseholder acquires the majority of the value of an asset when they acquire the leasehold, and that is slowly eroded. I think that is the thing that is wrong in the process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller]

Exactly.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q On the point of marriage value, Mr Vitali, let us go back to free market principles. You and I would agree that a free market is one in which properties are sold between a willing seller and a willing buyer—would you not?

James Vitali indicated assent.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Of course, the argument that Mr Fuller sought to put forward to you was based on the old cup and saucer analogy, or the pair of vases being more valuable than the one. In this situation, we do not quite have a willing seller and a willing buyer. We have an encumbered buyer, because they are trammelled by the fact that they have lived in that property for the past 30 years, and they now see it becoming worthless. When the Custins v. Hearts of Oak decision in 1967 went through, the Government immediately came back in primary legislation, and legislated to abolish marriage value precisely because of that purpose. If I might impair my socialist credentials even further, it was Margaret Thatcher who sought to abolish it outright, and it was only the foolishness of the subsequent Prime Minister, John Major, that brought it back in for flats in 1993. Is that not your understanding of how a free market should actually work, between a willing buyer and a willing seller?

James Vitali: I will deflect and answer a slightly different question. It is interesting that the leaseholder enfranchisement process is kind of redolent of and similar to right to buy, in that it is a no-fault compulsory purchase of an asset. The difference with right to buy is that compensating the state is a different consideration from private citizens who have property rights. All I would say is I think it is important that the compensation mechanisms in the Bill are such that it does not feel like the things we are trying to spread more equitably—property rights—are being diluted by the state.

[Barry Gardiner]

We will agree on that one.

[Andy Carter]

Q James, we are fortunate to have you here, as somebody who thinks a lot about the property sector. We are legislating in one area; quite often, there will be implications in the broader sector. Have you put any thought into that? Could you share any views on unintended consequences that we might need to watch out for elsewhere in the property market?

James Vitali: Delighted to. That is probably the thing that I have been thinking about the most in terms of the implications of the Bill. I understand that there is an intention for a ban on leasehold houses to come forward on Report. One thing that I am really worried about is that what will effectively be created is a two-tier system of housing or tenure types in this country, between the countryside and our cities. It is very possible, if we deal with houses and not the tenures for flats, that we will create secure, authentic property rights outside of our urban areas and create in our urban areas a slightly more precarious, maybe outdated type of tenure.

As it stands, that has not been given enough consideration, because it also does not conform with the Government’s wider strategy on housing, which, broadly speaking, is to densify our urban areas and increase housing supply in our cities. There are political considerations around why they are doing that—it is a lot more deliverable to focus on the densification of cities—but there are very good economic reasons for that too: the agglomeration effects of building housing supply in a city are greater than elsewhere. We need to incentivise people living in flats in dense cities, and if we deal with leasehold as it pertains to houses, not flats, it will work against the Government’s quite legitimate and justified broader housing strategy.

[The Chair]

Barry, very quickly.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q On mixed use, you made a very good case about the reasons for looking at the shared services previously. Would you be in favour of seeing the Bill say that the threshold should increase not simply from 25% to 50%, but maybe to 75%?

James Vitali: I have not given that too much thought, I must say; 50% seems absolutely reasonable. I think there are some practical issues in getting to that 50% threshold in itself. I have heard stories about the process by which leaseholders whip around the building trying to get together enough—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Sorry—this is not about the number of people for an enfranchisement; this is on the shared services point that we discussed earlier. It is about if it should be where the actual commercial element of the building is more than 50%. The limit was 25%; now it is proposed to be 50%. Actually, given that the right to manage would apply only to the leasehold part of the building, it would seem fair that that should be as high as, say, 75% commercial and 25% leasehold, because at the moment it is one person—the freeholder—who is the counterparty for the shared services. In this case, it would be the managing agent of the right to manage leaseholders.

James Vitali: I must say that I have not given that a lot of thought. I think increasing it to 50% will have a significant effect itself, but you may wish to go further.

[The Chair]

Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. I thank the witness very much on the Committee’s behalf.

Examination of Witnesses

Philip Freedman CBE KC (Hon) and Philip Rainey KC gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller]

You are a lawyer.

Philip Rainey: Yes, and one tends to avoid the philosophical points. Clearly, from a legal perspective the Bill interferes in an extremely significant way with property rights. Whether that is the right thing to do is a value judgment.

One thing that is sometimes overlooked—I am not defending the leasehold system; I am on record as being in favour of commonhold, which is inherently a more satisfactory system for holding flats—is that a lot of people will be disappointed when commonhold comes in. They will still find that they are not allowed to remove the supporting walls in their flat or to have a noisy party on a Friday night, because their neighbours do not want that. A lot of the things you find in leases and the restrictions when living in flats are because, if you live communally in a block of flats, you owe duties to your neighbours. There are responsibilities, in communal living, that do not apply if you live in a small house in a field, 500 yards from your neighbours. The restrictions in the leasehold system are not as unique to leasehold as you might think; I would suggest otherwise. To go back to your basic point, clearly the Bill alters property rights. It is a value judgment as to whether that is the right thing to do.

Philip Freedman: I have heard a number of cases where the property industry is concerned about the transfer of value that will be effected by capping ground rents, removing marriage value and so on, in relation not just to the benefit to leaseholders but to the burden on those landlords that are pension funds and other organisations that will find that they are deprived of rental income that they have banked on and have thought will be reliable income over many years. They bought leases that were perfectly lawful, were not, so far as one can tell, entered into under any mis-selling, and the provisions for the ground rent are not necessarily unconscionable; the ground rents were invested in in good faith.

We must not lose sight of the fact that if there are winners, there are always losers. Some provisions of the Bill, which are fine, are to say that if the tenants are enfranchising, they do not have to buy the commercial bits of the building. Those can be left with the landlord under a leaseback, and therefore the value remains with the landlord. Both parties win: the landlord keeps the value and the tenants do not have to pay as much money. But where you are transferring value, there is always a loser, and there are lots of investors who appear to have bought in good faith and were not expecting retrospective legislation. Lawyers always do not like retrospective legislation. It is up to Parliament to decide whether the social benefit is sufficient to outweigh the concern about pension funds, and so on, that have invested in ground rents. The Law Society does not take sides between landlords and tenants, or different types of clients. We just want to make sure that Parliament focuses on the issue and makes the decision in the public interest.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Rainey, first, thank you for what you said about the preferability of commonhold to leasehold. Is it your view, therefore, that it would be good if the Bill were to make all new flats that are constructed leasehold with a share of freehold, as a staging post, in effect?

Philip Rainey: Yes. In a sense, that is the downside. It is possible to create what you might call commonhold-lite. It is a leasehold system—it is so encrusted with restrictions and requirements, although you own the freehold, that it is very similar. It would be only a staging post, because one of the problems with the current system is that it creates a “them and us” situation. You see it even when tenants own the freehold. Somehow they still think, “Well, it’s ‘my’ lease and it’s ‘them’”, which is them under another hat as the freeholder. Commonhold should eliminate that.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Yes, I was taken by your remarks earlier about the disputes that can go on even where you have an enfranchised situation.

Philip Rainey: If you go to Australia and look at the websites, you find “I hate my strata” websites. Neighbours will be neighbours.

[Barry Gardiner]

Unfortunately, legislation cannot make your neighbours more considerate. I often wish it could.

Philip Rainey: I think I would be inclined to agree that it would be a reasonable step forward to say that there should be a share of freehold with—

[Barry Gardiner]

Any new build.

Philip Rainey: With new build. You would have to have rules.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I want to probe your thoughts on what I find a very tricky part of the way in which the pieces of legislation are now interacting with each other. One of the great freedoms for leaseholders who either cannot afford or do not wish to enfranchise themselves, but where the building has deteriorated to a terrible state under the existing freeholder, is the provision for a court-appointed manager under section 24 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987.

That is something that I hope we very much want to protect, because these leaseholders really require the protection of a court-appointed manager. However, the Building Safety Act 2022 bars the court-appointed manager from being an accountable person and from taking full responsibility for the necessary safety remediation works. That responsibility under the BSA ’22 regulations is now being given, in effect, to the one person whose track record shows that they are incapable and not to be trusted to perform the obligations of managing that building—namely, the freeholder who let it go to rack and ruin in the first place. The leaseholders, whom the courts sort to protect, will have that former, negligent freeholder back in charge. I do not know, but I am looking to you to tell us, how one might draft an amendment to the Bill to preserve the protection for leaseholders who find themselves in an incredibly invidious position.

Philip Rainey: The first thing to say is that—as you may know—there is an ongoing piece of litigation, in which I am involved, where that question of whether a manager can be an accountable person is yet to be finally decided. The current position is that the first-tier tribunal has decided that the manager cannot be an accountable person. I therefore cannot comment on that outcome.

[Barry Gardiner]

I was aware that you were involved in the case, but I did not want to drag you into the specific—I wanted to keep you at the general.

Philip Rainey: If, hypothetically speaking, the law is that a manager cannot be an accountable person; if, hypothetically speaking, that restricts what a manager can do; and if you, as Parliament, wished to alter that position, then you would amend the definition of a relevant repairing obligation in section 72 of the Building Safety Act 2022. That amendment would make it clear that a relevant repairing obligation includes an obligation under a manager order under section 24 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Right. You think faster than I can even listen. Are you saying that we could introduce an amendment to this Bill that amended the Building Safety Act 2022 in such a way that we could ensure that those protections continue?

Philip Rainey: The obvious answer is that you are Parliament—you can change any law.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I suppose my real question is, would you care to write to the Committee framing such an amendment?

Philip Rainey: I could, if asked. As I say, you can amend section 72 to change a particular definition. Arguably at least, subject to the regulations, it is not actually necessary for Parliament to do it, because section 72 has a power for the Secretary of State to amend it—it is a Henry VIII clause, which I am not very much in favour of, but that probably could be done by secondary legislation.

[Barry Gardiner]

I have no doubt that the Secretary of State could do that, but I always feel more comfortable if things are on the face of the Bill.

Philip Rainey: I respectfully agree.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q If I can prevail on you for just a little longer, could you explain the just and convenient test, and how the BSA has affected that?

Philip Rainey: The just and convenient test is effectively an equitable test. It is a very flexible test intended to allow the first-tier tribunal to take into account all of the circumstances and, in layman’s terms, to decide whether something is just, fair, convenient and going to work—the rights and wrongs and the practicalities of it. Because of the ongoing case, I do not think I can answer the second part of the question, as to how the Building Safety Act 2022 might have affected that.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am sure hon. Members can ponder on your words and work it out from there. Thank you; that is really helpful.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

Q Mr Freedman, you represent developers and investors as part of your job. You just referenced the possible impact on pension funds. How significant is that? I am hearing, on the one hand, that people have very diverse portfolios, so although it would be a big number, it would be broadly distributed, nobody would actually feel any real impact and this is just a bit of shroud waving by people who would rather be very rich instead of quite rich. However, there are other people who say, “Hang on a sec, this is not very Conservative, is it?” or, as has been said, that we are talking about transferring wealth from one bunch of people to another. Clearly, Parliament can do that, but the impact might be greater on one than the other. I just wondered about your thoughts on that.

Philip Freedman: I am afraid that I cannot give you the answer to that. because I am not directly acting for those particular clients. I am afraid I know no more—

--- Later in debate ---

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I want to pick up on what Mr Carter said and your insistence that capping rents was sending the wrong signal to pension funds. I trust you are aware of the statement from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association that said that pension funds aggregate allocation to all types of property—commercial as well as residential—and that accounts for 4% of all pension holdings, and that none of their members have expressed any concerns with them about proposed changes to rules affecting leasehold and ground rents. Were you aware of that?

Jack Spearman: Yes, I know where that came from.

[Barry Gardiner]

Well, it came from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association.

Jack Spearman: I would advise you to go and ask them again, because the pension funds we are talking about have made representations directly to the Government.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q If we are talking about, “Directly to the Government”, the Government’s own statement noted that the pension funds held less than 1% of assets in residential property, and added that any hit to pension funds would be within normal investment and depreciation tolerances. They said:

“We do not think it is fair that many leaseholders face unregulated ground rents for no guaranteed service in return.”

So the idea that you seemed to put out—“My goodness, the housing market was going to collapse because pension funds were not going to invest in property any more because they weren’t going to be able to extract the ground rents”—is a nonsense, is it not? You talked about £100 ground rent, but you know what is being done here. Your members are not limiting to £25 or £100 ground rents or peppercorn rents. Over the past 15 years, they have created a rentier structure wherein they can extract revenues from the ground rent that are exorbitant—in some cases, £8,000 a year for no service. Is that not true?

Jack Spearman: You make a couple of points there. First, you seem to be suggesting that it is okay to steal the chocolate bar from the shop because it is only 1% or 2% of the stock—it is still not okay. The second thing I would say is that—

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Nonsense. Justify the word “steal”. I would say the word “steal” is justified when there is no service being provided, and yet you are charging for it, even if it is only a chocolate bar.

Jack Spearman: I can come on to the service provided. Ground rent is a consideration as part of the lease and the premium. You are right to say that, technically—legally—the ground rent does not afford service. But we would say that, through our members, a huge amount of work gets done as a result of that ground rent and as a result of pension funds having invested in it. Take the Building Safety Act 2022, for example—remediation, fire safety audits and building safety audits are all undertaken at no cost.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Remediation—because the freeholder did not ensure the proper safety of the building in the first place.

Jack Spearman: I disagree with that.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Spearman, since we have limited time, let me turn to what you are saying to the members of the public. You have engaged in a number of polling operations. You have told people that only 1 in 4 people in a block would be able to agree with each other about how to manage that block. The implication is that many leaseholders do not want to take on the burden of management and, actually, some of them are incapable of taking on that burden of management—almost as if you are providing them with this wonderful service that they would not want to get rid of. But the figure of 1 in 4 people that you quoted in your survey was 1 in 4 people in the United Kingdom, and not leaseholders at all, was it not? It included people in Scotland who are not involved in the provisions of leasehold in England and Wales. So you went out to people who had no connection as leaseholders and surveyed them, and then claimed that was an argument.

[Richard Fuller]

On a point of order, Dame Caroline. I am wondering whether my colleague, Mr Gardiner, is getting to a question rather than just expressing a view.

[Barry Gardiner]

I just did, but you interrupted.

[The Chair]

We do have very limited time, Barry, and other people want to ask questions, so can you bring it to a question swiftly?

[Barry Gardiner]

Indeed. Mr Spearman, you have misled people in the polling surveys and the conclusions you have drawn from them, have you not? Your own members—Consensus Business, Long Harbour and Wallace Estates—did surveying in which they found that 67% of residential leaseholders said that they would wish to take control of their building and get out from under you, but you suppressed that, did you not?

Jack Spearman: We have never said that people are incapable of managing their building—absolutely not. The desire to do so diminishes with the complexity of the building. I am sure you have seen the Government’s own survey on living in shared buildings. You heard from Professor Steven this morning in Scotland about the issues with the system in Scotland—

[Barry Gardiner]

A manager who works for a freeholder can be no different from a manager who works for an enfranchised set of leaseholders, can it? So the idea that the complexity is beyond the leaseholders is simply not a fair comparison.

[The Chair]

Order. We have time for only one more question, Barry. Can I move on to Richard Fuller, please?

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q Giles, thank you for giving up your time to come and speak to us. I want to follow up on Mike’s and Andy’s questions. You may have said everything you can say about what you would like the legislation to do, but if you have some more detail it would be useful.

Mike and I tabled new clauses 27 and 28 to address some of the “in principle” issues we have been pushing for a long time on—qualifying and non-qualifying leaseholders and building height. Specifically, in terms of what the Government might feasibly bring forward, what is your experience from cases across the country of the operational elements of the Building Safety Act that are not working effectively? I am just trying to get from you a more realistic sense of what you might expect the Government to bring forward, in terms of extending this Bill to ensure the Building Safety Act operates as intended. What tweaks to the Building Safety Act are required, in as much detail as you can in the time you have?

Giles Grover: One of the major tweaks is on an issue we were first made aware of in November 2022 due to the residents of a building in Greater Manchester being forced to pay for interim measures. The council is now paying for those interim measures but it has been told that it cannot recover them through the Building Safety Act because the legislation is not in place. That is a simple one that could help.

You could ensure that resident management companies and right to manage companies can raise the legal costs where they might be needed in respect of building safety and relevant defects. There are some wider elements that are already in the Bill, in terms of stopping freeholders re-charging their legal fees. Our concern is whether that will protect non-qualifying leaseholders who are still being forced to pay fees.

This is where I can get into the specifics. I am no lawyer as such—you have had a lot of very intelligent people on before me—but I say this from the campaigning aspect of it. We need to see a fair bit more detail about exactly what happens when a freeholder is avoiding their liabilities and not giving a landlord certificate within the stated time period. The Government may tell us, “Oh, don’t worry. That means they can’t pass the costs on,” but theoretically I cannot sell my flat without that certificate because the conveyancer is asking for it, so why not have an express duty for them to provide it? To be completely frank, the whole landlord certificate/leaseholder certificate process is an absolute quagmire and a nightmare on the ground. I would personally prefer it if the Government did away with that.

There are lots of issues like that. There are points about court-appointed managers, which cannot be the accountable person, which seems quite strange to me. We have been told that there is another route through the Building Safety Regulator, but that would require the special measures manager legislation to be enforced. There are issues with shared owners in complex tenures where you have a housing association as the head leaseholder. Will they be protected from all costs? Will they have the same rights as all leaseholders?

Philosophically, the simplistic approach should be that you have the full protection. New clauses 27 and 28 would be a massive relief. It is then a case of whether legislation is needed or whether you can use the current measures. With the developer scheme, where it is for over 11-metre buildings—could that be extended to under 11-metre buildings? The cladding safety scheme is now for mid-rise buildings; could that be extended for low-rise buildings? Could the cladding safety scheme be extended to become a building safety scheme?

For a lot of this the pushback will be, “There is not enough money,” but there is money out there. There is money that can be got from industry. There are further parties, such as construction product manufacturers and providers, and the Secretary of State said they would make them pay two years ago; they have not paid yet. There are a lot more parties that could be brought into the pool. So operationally there is more they could do by saying, “We’ve got seven different funding schemes;” —or however many it is—“where is the oversight of all of them? Who is talking to each other? Are these regulators? How does DLUHC talk to the recovery strategy unit? Are they talking to the Building Safety Regulator? Is Homes England involved? The local regulators now have new money to take action; are they taking action?”

So, arguably, a lot of it is already in place; but what is needed is the comprehensive oversight and the proper grip to say, “Right: all these buildings—10,000 of them—are going to get fixed. This is how—this is where the money is coming from. Cladding costs are here. Non-cladding costs will come from there.” What you really need to do is put the money up front, recover it. The Government say that their leaseholder protections mean that the majority of leaseholders won’t have to pay. If they have got the confidence in their legislation then they can take over the burden from leaseholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q First, may I declare an interest? I am not sure whether it is necessary, but our witness Mr Grover participated in a documentary that I am making about leaseholds, so we have a knowledge of each other. First, Mr Grover, thank you for all the campaigning that you and your colleagues in End Our Cladding Scandal have done; it has been magnificent over the past few years.

You raised the issue, in response to Matthew Pennycook’s questions, of section 24 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987 and applying for an officer of the court to be installed to do the works and turn around a building. Clearly, it would be something much to be wished, for many people who found themselves involved a building safety issue, if they were able to do that. Related to that, I know you are aware of the Building Safety Act 2022 ban on section 24 managers being the accountable person.

This is a matter we have discussed with a number of witnesses such as yourself. Are you aware that at one development, the management control regarding safety and remediation was given back to a freeholder who was the one who took, the tribunal found, £1.6 million in insurance commissions unreasonably? They will now be handed £20 million because of that BSA anomaly, by the Government. So the very people who could not be trusted with money are now being given £20 million to remedy the defects that they were responsible for in that building.

Giles Grover: I am very aware of it. I have watched some of the sessions, and I was made aware of it last year by one of the leaseholders at that building. I have looked into this. I have had various conversations with various lawyers. It still just seems bizarre that the manager who has been appointed by the court cannot be the accountable person. I am just a simple man: I do not understand why that cannot happen—why the Government, or the judge, based upon the legislation that is out there, think it is a reasonable or positive outcome for that money to go back to that rogue landlord, shall we say. I do not get it, to be honest.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Have you come across cases like one that I have in my constituency? It was a co-development between St Modwen and Soucrest, but when the provisions that the Government put in place came into force, they changed to Wembley Central Apartments Ltd. That name was then changed to Wembley Residential Ltd, and they now have their offices at, I think, Cricket Square, Grand Cayman in the Cayman islands. Do you have other examples of the ways in which freeholders are using company law to avoid their obligations under this Act and in fact relocating to jurisdictions outwith the UK?

Giles Grover: Yes. I only have 20 minutes, so I will try to be brief. I could spend all day talking about that. I have had personal experience of that in my building. Our developer sold the freehold out from under us to an offshore freeholder who, one year before the building safety crisis took effect, said they did not want to sell the freehold because they were long-term investors. A year or so later they said, “Okay. We are transferring it to another company. Do you want to buy the freehold off us?” Because they saw—

[The Chair]

Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the allotted time for the Committee to ask questions, and indeed for this afternoon’s sitting. I do apologise to the witness, but I thank him very much on behalf of the Committee. The Committee will meet again on Tuesday to begin line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Mr Mohindra.)

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Fifth sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I rise to support amendment 1. My hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich made an excellent speech in favour of it, and he is right to distinguish between this clause, dealing with enfranchisement, and later clauses on which we will look at the issues from the point of view of right to manage. Given the amount of reference to the Secretary of State in the Bill and that so much is left to him to decide afterwards, it is reasonable to ask the Minister why that has not been applied to this clause—otherwise, it looks as if the Government have considered the matter and ruled out any change in this area, which, as my hon. Friend suggests, is reasonable.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

I, too, rise to support this very generous amendment from my hon. Friend the shadow Minister. It is pragmatic, and it would power up the Secretary of State, whoever that might be, to ensure that leaseholders are able to take control in hopefully larger numbers through extended enfranchisement. I hope the Minister will give the amendment very strong consideration.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

First, on the Minister’s response, I am slightly reassured but not wholly convinced. I would like the opportunity to go away, look carefully at his remarks and consider whether we need to come back to this, and I reserve that right, Mr Efford.

On amendment 1, I am frankly not convinced by the arguments made by the Minister and the hon. Member for Walsall North. We well understand the concerns that they have both drawn attention to. As I have said, it is an inherently subjective decision as to where that threshold is drawn. We also accept that, when it comes to existing buildings, the number of leaseholders who are potentially excluded will be small in number. But we want to avoid a situation where our constituents are coming to us in buildings with a 51% or 52% rate and saying, “We can’t collectively enfranchise as you intended. We are frustrated by the powers in the Bill.” On the basis of the Minister’s argument, we will have to say to them, “You have to wait a good few years for another leasehold Bill—maybe many years based on the history of leasehold reform—for such a change to come forward.” It is a continuum; this a substantial change, and we are trying to build some flexibility into that change.

[Barry Gardiner]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this will probably affect the little people a lot more than the big, because of the likelihood of achieving 50% commercial within a leasehold block? Many of our town and city centres have buildings with commercial below and very few flats above. Therefore, it is much more likely that it will be a group of people—yes, a small group—living in that situation, rather than in the Shard, coming to us complaining.

[Matthew Pennycook]

My hon. Friend makes a good point: it is not just the number but the type of leaseholder who we are potentially excluding. All we are saying, as I argued in great detail, is that Ministers should have flexibility to change, if there is sufficient evidence to suggest that large numbers are being excluded or—I refer to the gaming point—we see developers building with a 51% area just to escape the threshold. We do not propose that the 50% change; we think it is an appropriate and fair starting point, but surely the Government need some flexibility in this area.

I must say to the Minister that this is the first time I have heard a Government Minister say no to Henry VIII powers, but I am afraid that his argument for saying no to them was, from my point of view, entirely expedient and not particularly well justified. I urge the Government to think again. I am minded, purely because of the way in which the Minister has responded, to push the amendment to a vote. If the Government are flatly refusing to look at the issue, we must make clear that we feel strongly about it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

I rise briefly to speak to these four Government amendments and to make a wider comment on them and the other 116 amendments that have been tabled in the Minister’s name over recent days.

Having scrutinised these amendments as carefully as we could in the time available, we are as confident as we can be that none is problematic. Indeed, we very much welcomed the exemption provided for community-led housing.

As confirmed to the Committee by Professor Nick Hopkins, 18 of the 120 Government amendments tabled in Committee implement Law Commission policy that was not in the Bill as introduced and on which Law Commission staff have been involved in instructing parliamentary counsel. The vast majority of the other 102 amendments are merely technical in nature. Providing that the Minister sets out clearly their effect and rationale, as he just has in relation to this group of amendments, we do not intend to detain the Committee over the coming sessions by exploring the finer points of each.

However, I feel I must put on record our intense frustration at the fact that so many detailed Government amendments were tabled just days before commencement of line-by-line scrutiny began. The practice of significantly amending Bills as they progress through the House has become common practice for this Government and in our view it is not acceptable. Other Governments have done it, but it has become the norm under this Government. It impedes hon. Members in effectively scrutinising legislation and increases the likelihood that Acts of Parliament contain errors that subsequently need to be remedied, as happened with the Building Safety Act 2022; as the Minister will know, we have had to pass a number of regulations making technical corrections to that Act.

When it comes to this Bill, the Government have had the Law Commission’s recommendations for almost four years and access to Law Commission staff to aid parliamentary counsel with drafting. There really is no excuse for eleventh-hour amendments introducing Law Commission policy or technical amendments designed to clarify, correct mistakes, or ensure consistency across provisions.

[Barry Gardiner]

Is my hon. Friend as surprised as I was to find that a 133-page Bill has a 102-page amendment paper? As he says, this came late. It is not just Opposition Members who mind; it is hon. Members of all parties who want to adequately scrutinise the Bill. It makes life very difficult to go through detailed amendments, often amending previous legislation—therefore, we have to get that legislation and see what the impact of the changes is—and it impedes the work of Parliament in that respect. The Minister should explain why many of these amendments were tabled so late in the day.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I think I am justified in saying that it is frankly laughable that this has happened. We have an amendment paper that is almost—and may be, in due course—larger than the Bill itself. It reeks of a Government in disarray. Though I know that the Minister has picked up this Bill part-way through its development, I urge him not only to do what he can to ensure that when the Government publish any Bill it is broadly in the format they wish it to proceed in and see passed, but also to table any further amendments to this Bill in good time so that we can give them the level of scrutiny that leaseholders across the country rightfully expect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

My response is short. I will happily write to the hon. Gentleman and to the Committee in due course on the technicalities to ensure that is correct.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 5 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 6

Right to require leaseback by freeholder after collective enfranchisement

[Barry Gardiner]

I beg to move amendment 127, in clause 6, page 9, line 42, at end insert—

“(3A) Any lease granted to the freeholder under paragraph 7A must contain a provision that any sub-lease created by the freeholder under their leaseback must contain a provision requiring the sub-lessee to contribute to the service charges reasonably incurred by the managing agent directly or indirectly appointed by the nominee purchaser.

(3B) The provision mentioned in subsection (3A) is implied into all pre-existing subordinate leases to a leaseback granted to a freeholder under paragraph 7A.”

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss clause stand part.

[Barry Gardiner]

It is helpful to the Committee that we had the evidence session, because Liam Spender, the lawyer from Velitor Law, spoke directly about this matter.

We welcome leaseback because it is an important part of enabling tenants in commercial, or partly commercial, buildings to enfranchise. However, imagine that a person has just newly enfranchised, and some of the residents in that block have not participated in the enfranchisement process. It has been quite an acrimonious job debating and arguing with the landlord to get the enfranchisement to happen, but they finally have it. However, the landlord, or the former landlord, may not be happy about it. His capacity, now as the tenant, to cause problems is enhanced by the existing lease that those who have not enfranchised have with him. The moneys that need to be collected for the new landlord’s service charge do not come directly to them.

The whole point of the clause is to minimise those problems. There should be a condition in the leaseback to make it clear that any sub-lease that the former landlord gives, or retains, must contain a provision to say that the service charge is payable to the new landlord. Otherwise, we have a very torturous process in which those sums, which are required for the servicing of the building, may be delayed by a former landlord who feels aggrieved that he has lost control.

--- Later in debate ---

I think I have dealt with the second question from the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, which was about 999-year leases and peppercorn rents. I am happy to write to him on the specifics of intermediate leaseholders if that is helpful. I commend the clause to the Committee.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to the Minister for his remarks. It is clear that the Government do not feel that the amendment is necessary and that there will not be a problem with the newly enfranchised freeholder being able to obtain the service charge from all the leaseholders. If that is the case, I will be happy to withdraw the amendment.

I would, however, like the Minister to set out in writing to me and the Committee precisely why he believes that there is not a problem. If we still disagree, we can then bring the amendment back on Report and discuss it further. It would be really helpful to be clear about why the Government are confident that problems will not arise. We have made legislation on the basis of optimism before, and unfortunately our experience is that freeholders can often be quite vindictive.

[Lee Rowley]

I am happy to give the hon. Gentleman that assurance, and I will be happy to write to him.

[Barry Gardiner]

On that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 6 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 7

Longer lease extensions

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss clause 8 stand part.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean]

I rise briefly to add my support for some of the comments and, most importantly, for the ability of leaseholders to extend their leases. As we know, this is one of the most egregious features of the current system: people buy properties that they then find have short leases, after which they are whacked with massive charges coming out of the blue; they do not understand how those charges are calculated, and they end up having to pay them because they have no choice. They are completely over a barrel. I know that leaseholders will massively welcome this change, which is one of the most important parts of the whole Bill.

Having said that, it is vital that we understand when we will see the Government’s response on the ground rent consultation, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire and the shadow spokesperson, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, have said. It will, of course, affect the calculations.

I also want to raise with the Committee the number of people who have sat in front of me and asked, “When will you bring this forward? I don’t know whether to extend my lease now or wait another year or for another consultation”. It is a huge number of people. I want to make this point to everybody: if we get this right, it will affect a lot of people very beneficially.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am glad that co-operation is breaking out across the aisle. It seems that this change is one of the really big issues of the Bill. Looking through the Bill, yes, there was disappointment that it does not go far enough and there is no commonhold, but this is a real change. It is something that Members on both sides of the Committee have welcomed, and we heard evidence from our witnesses about just how important it is. It is strange, therefore, that we do not now see the meat of it in the Bill. I will not go so far as to say that it is more than strange, as my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich suggested, but we do need it.

This provision will liberate a whole group of people who fear what we call the ground rent grazers. They are the ones—the freeholders—who have created a rentier structure over the past 15 years. It did not even exist 25 years ago. What people used to do 25 years ago, when the ground rent was payable, was write a cheque to the freeholder, and the freeholder would bin it. Then, three weeks later, the freeholder would send a lawyer’s letter to the tenant, saying that because they had not paid their ground rent on time, they were now being charged £625 for their legal fees in having to chase it, including the £25 ground rent. That is a bad practice that has evolved and the Government need to clamp down on it and get it sorted.

[Lee Rowley]

I thank hon. Members for their questions and comments, which I will try to address. There is obviously a desire to understand the interaction of the two clauses with the outcome of the consultation that closed last week. We saw to some extent in our deliberations last week, on the first two days in Committee, when we took evidence, that this is a contested area. As a result and notwithstanding the fact that by convention in this place we have the ability to speak freely, I hope the Committee will understand that I will limit my remarks.

I understand the eagerness, enthusiasm and legitimate desire of the Committee to understand the position that we will seek to provide. We will provide that to the Committee, and publicly, as soon as possible. It will not be possible for me to answer all the questions that were asked today. I accept the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire that there is a difference between process and decision, but some elements of the process could be impacted by the decision and it will therefore be difficult to engage in hypotheticals at this stage. However, we will respond to the legitimate points that the Committee has made as soon as we are able to do so.

I agree with the points made by the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich and by my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch about the importance of clarifying how quickly the provisions will come into force. Again, that is a difficult one to answer because we need to get through this process. We have no idea what the other place might or might not do or how quickly the process will go. Although we are all grateful for the confirmation from my Labour colleagues that we are seeking to move this as quickly as possible, it is difficult to be able to answer the question at this stage, but I hope to say more in due course.

On the fourth question posed by the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, about the competent landlord, my understanding is that we are not changing the law in that regard.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

I absolutely accept the potential significance of the quantum involved, which is why we all seek to be as clear as we can at the earliest opportunity.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am conscious that we are talking about the transfer of value as if it were neutral, but leaseholders have been telling us for a long time that this value has been unjustly acquired from them in the first place. The Government seek simply to remediate the position that the law has got itself into. When we consider this, we must understand the injustice that has been perpetrated on people who live in leasehold houses, and have been paying ground rents that have been racked up in an unconscionable way for far too long.

[Lee Rowley]

The hon. Gentleman is articulating his argument with passion, as he did last week on a similar point in some of the witness sessions. I reconfirm to the Committee that we seek to process the outcome of that consultation as quickly as we are able, and to provide hon. Members and the public with clarity at the earliest opportunity. None the less, while recognising the important interaction of clauses 7 and 8 with the consultation, I hope that underneath there is general consent for clauses 7 and 8. I hope I have covered most of the questions asked. I will write to the Committee in response to the question from the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich about redevelopment, because I need to obtain clarity on that.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Seventh sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 25th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank the Minister for his response. Let me just deal initially with the three Government amendments, with which we take no issue. On the ground rent consultation, I will not labour the point, because I get the sense we will not get any further information out of the Minister. It is always easier to say this from the Opposition side of the Committee, but it would have been logical to have had the ground rent consultation well in advance of the Bill, as then we could have had a Bill with all the elements properly integrated. It is not like the Government did not have enough time. I think that the previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), announced the second part of the two-part seminal legislation back in 2019, so the Government have had time—but that is where we are. By the sound of what the Minister is saying, we will have to significantly overhaul many clauses in the Bill if the Government do decide to enact one of the five proposals.

On amendment 6, I do not find the Minister’s argument convincing. The Law Commission recommended a 250-year threshold. The Government have clearly determined that they need not follow that recommendation to the letter, although they have implemented the principle of it. They have chosen to put their finger on the scale, as the Minister said, at a different threshold. I think trying to put one’s finger on the scale on this particular issue is likely to cause more problems than it solves. I hope the Government might think again about cutting the Gordian knot entirely.

The most common forms of lease are 90, 99 and 125 years. Leaseholders with the most common forms of lease will not be able to enjoy this right. The Government are in effect saying to them, “You must buy out under clauses 7 and 8—your lease extension and your ground rent at the same time.” From what the Minister said, it sounds like the Government think that is right because some leaseholders might disadvantage themselves by trying to exercise only the right in schedule 7. There is a case for giving those leaseholders the freedom to exercise their own judgment on that point—I am surprised the Minister has not agreed with it. A lot of leaseholders will be watching our proceedings who have leases of, say, 120 years and simply do not have the funds available to exercise their right to extend the lease and buy up the ground rent under clauses 7 and 8. This will therefore completely lock leaseholders with shorter leases out of extinguishing their ground rent provisions. We think that is inherently unfair.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my view that the Minister is a reasonable gentleman? [Laughter.] I know it may be specific to us and not widely shared. My hon. Friend having made such an eloquent case, the Minister may go away, reconsider this, speak to his officials, and perhaps, once the consultation has concluded, be able to come back with a different answer.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, which tempts me to give a number of responses. As I am feeling generous this morning, I will say that I do think the Minister is a reasonable individual —far more reasonable in Committee than he is in the main Chamber—and I suspect that he agrees with me about the 150-year threshold. To encourage him to go away and think further, I think we will press amendment 6 to a vote.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

Schedule 7 will confer on leaseholders a right to buy out their ground rent without extending their lease. As the premium payable will be subject to the 0.1% cap on ground rent, this measure will be especially helpful for leaseholders with high or escalating rents. Paragraph 2 sets out that leaseholders who qualify for a lease extension will have this right as long as their remaining term is at least 150 years. Community housing leases and home finance plan leases are excluded, as they were from the Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022. Leaseholders may not qualify for lease extensions because they have a lease of Crown land, or because they do not satisfy the low rent test in the Leasehold Reform Act 1967. Such leaseholders will qualify for the new buy-out right.

Paragraphs 3 to 7 set out procedural arrangements for leaseholders and their landlords. They provide that the right is exercised by serving a rent variation notice on the landlord, including time limits for responses and arrangements for either party to apply to the tribunal if they so wish. The premium payable is the same as the term portion of the lease extension premium set out in schedule 2, and is subject to the ground rent cap. It is the capitalised value of the rent payable for the remainder of the lease.

Paragraph 8 provides that where the lease is not varied to provide that the future rent is a peppercorn rent, the leaseholder or landlord can apply to the tribunal. The tribunal shall decide whether it should be varied and, if it should, can appoint a person to execute the variation in place of the landlord. Paragraph 9 sets out the circumstances in which a rent variation notice ceases to have effect. A claim can be revived if it ceased to have effect due to a later extension or acquisition claim, where the later claim ceases to have effect.

Paragraph 10 sets out details of how the schedule applies in relation to the lease of a house; paragraph 11 does the same in relation to the lease of a flat. Finally, paragraph 12 gives various enabling powers to the Secretary of State, including giving effect to the rights, making provisions about notices and amending the details of how the schedule applies to the lease of a house or a flat.

Question put and agreed to.

Schedule 7, as amended, accordingly agreed to.

Clause 22

Change of non-residential limit on right to manage claims

[Barry Gardiner]

I beg to move amendment 129, in clause 22, page 38, line 21, leave out “50%” and insert “75%”.

This amendment would allow leaseholders with a higher proportion of commercial or non-residential space in their building to claim the Right to Manage.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss clause stand part.

[Barry Gardiner]

First of all, let me say what this is not about: it is not about enfranchisement. It is quite simply about the right to manage. I say that because a few days ago, a journalist got this entirely wrong. We welcome the change to 50%. The amendment would allow leaseholders with a higher proportion of commercial or non-residential space in their building to claim the right to manage. It is not about shared services or the percentage of the leaseholders who can be contacted; it is about square footage.

I welcome the proposed increase from 25% to 50%, but as we heard in the witness sessions, the Law Commission was originally asked by the Government to remove the 25% rule on the right to manage completely on the basis that leaseholders who are paying a service charge should have control over the areas for which they are being charged. This would leave the management of the commercial premises absolutely unchanged. It was taken out by the Law Commission, which actually wanted to be more restrictive than the Government, who had said that it could be 100%. On its reason for that, it said, “There could be, at the top of the Shard, 30 residential properties. This could have the perverse result of them taking control of a much larger area.” It used that special example to illustrate why it felt that 100% was not appropriate. The Government had suggested that we go a lot further, but the Law Commission said, “There are special cases, so let’s row back on this.” But then the Government came back with 50%.

Let us take the advice of the Law Commission and accept that 100% is not the right figure. I propose that we go to 75% and use that as the basis, because it would avoid that unique case that the Law Commission put forward. It would achieve what I think was the Government’s original intention of allowing more people in that situation the right to manage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barry Gardiner]

If the Minister casts his mind forward to the next two amendments, which seek to give the Secretary of State the authority to determine the limit, and should the Minister indicate that, in the future, the Secretary of State would almost certainly not determine it to be less than 50%—as the Government have already proposed—then I just might be persuaded to withdraw my amendment.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comments. We are sticking with what we have suggested, but I hope he will consider withdrawing his amendment none the less. I will just say a few words on our reasons for sticking with what propose in clause 22. We have been clear that we want to improve access to right to manage—I think that view is shared across the House—and we accept that the current limit of 25% of floor space is not proportionate. Therefore, through this clause, we are seeking to increase the non-residential limit from 25% to 50%, as has been discussed. That replicates clause 3 on collective enfranchisement, recognising that this is not a debate about collective enfranchisement on a specific clause.

For the reasons that we have outlined, 50% is the place where the Government have landed, and where we feel is most proportionate. We hope that it will mean that more leaseholders in mixed-used buildings can take over the management responsibilities of their properties. I commend the clause to the Committee, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will consider withdrawing his amendment.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to the Minister for his response; he is courteous, as ever. I just point out that the all-party group on leasehold and commonhold reform, co-chaired by the Father of the House, the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), also made the recommendation that the Government look again at this issue. I am prepared to throw my weight behind amendments 26 and 27, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn .

[Matthew Pennycook]

I beg to move amendment 26, in clause 22, page 38, line 21, at end insert—

“(b) after paragraph 1(4) insert—

‘(5) The Secretary of State or the Welsh Ministers may by regulations amend this paragraph to provide for a different description of premises falling within section 72(1) to which this Chapter does not apply.’”

This amendment would enable the Secretary of State or (in the case of Wales) the Welsh Ministers to change the description of premises which are excluded from the right to manage. By virtue of Amendment 27, such a change would be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. Notwithstanding the tone of my responses, given the Committee’s interest I will happily write to it to make sure there is clarity on that point. I hope that, as a general and broad macro point, my comment still stands.

[Barry Gardiner]

The Minister has yet again confirmed his reputation for being reasonable. Can I probe him on the point about reasonableness? Many leaseholders complain that there is an amount in their service charges, which they may think is either reasonable or unreasonable, for a particular service, but when they enquire about the service provider, they find that it is in fact their landlord under another name. They then pay not only the cost of that arm’s length contractor providing the service, but a 15% service charge on top of it. Many people would feel that this is another rentier practice that landlords are using. I appreciate that the issue does not relate specifically to amendment 10, but I would very much like to get the Minister’s thoughts about the reasonableness of that practice on record.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point. He articulates another example of good law being used in a way that is, in my view—without talking about individual incidents—both unintended and inappropriate. I am not a lawyer, and do not seek or have any desire to be one, but as I understand it, there is a concept of reasonableness within the legal domain based on an Act from a number of years ago. Hopefully that helps to answer part of his question, at least from a structural perspective. On the variable service charge side, without talking about individual instances, that kind of instance is a clear example of where those impacted would be able to go through the process of challenging it, which I think would be very sensible. If I were a leaseholder, I might be very tempted to do that, unless the charge could be justified in a different way. On the fixed service charge side, although I accept that there is the potential for these kinds of challenges, conceptually that needs to be balanced with the fact that when the contract was entered, an agreement was made to consent to that amount, for whatever reason—good or otherwise. That is why we are pursuing this. However, I take the hon. Gentleman’s broader point.

[Rachel Maclean]

This discussion goes to the heart of some practices and problems that leaseholders have experienced across the sector. On behalf of the many retirement leaseholders, mentioned by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, I will make a point and ask for reassurance from the Minister.

What we are talking about with this amendment is different from the ground rent issue. Ground rent is a payment for nothing—nothing is being provided—whereas something is being provided for service charges. There is a service, so there is a need for a charge; that is perfectly legitimate. As Conservatives, we do not dispute the fact that there should be financial recompense for services. However, we find ourselves with a problem, the law of unintended consequences and the drivers of business models.

I would welcome if the Minister could touch on this in his response, but my fear is that if ground rents are removed and business models need to adjust to make recompense for that, the natural behaviour of unethical operators in the retirement sector and possibly elsewhere—some are unethical and do not think about the people who bought properties in good faith—will surely be to seek to load their charges, their profit and loss, back on to the service charge in some way. I am not close enough to existing contracts to know whether they will be able to do that with a fixed charge, so the discussion might be better suited to when we talk about the variable charge. The Minister can help me on that.

The broad point stands, however, in the case of someone dealing with the estate of a loved one, perhaps someone who has passed on, is in care, is suffering from dementia or otherwise does not have the capacity to deal with all this—the Minister will be familiar with such cases. They might be stuck with a property that they cannot sell, and that often applies in such cases when service charges are racking up in a way that is difficult for people to get a handle on—

[Barry Gardiner]

I agree with all the points that the hon. Lady is making. I wonder whether she is aware of the report by Hamptons last year, which said that service charges had increased by 50% over the past five years. That is an indication of just how much of the gouging she is talking about is going on. Furthermore, leaseholders paid a staggering £7.6 billion in service charges last year. Of course, much of that is for the proper renovation of the property, but it seems an extraordinary amount. In fact, 10 years ago, Which? estimated that leaseholders were being overcharged by £700 million.

[Rachel Maclean]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing those figures to the attention of the Committee. I am familiar with them, as are others. [Interruption.] I do not wish to detain the Committee any longer—I can see the Whip making that plain to me. I will leave my remarks there, perhaps to continue at a later point, but the Minister may wish to respond in detail.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Eighth sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 25th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I think the Minister referred to section 47 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987. Is he entirely confident that that is effective? I have a case in my constituency, in Wembley Central Apartments. The co-developers have sold on and on, and the owner is now in the Cayman Islands. The UK address to which one can apply is that of the managing agents, Fidum, but Fidum says, “We have asked our principals, and they say that they have asked their principals,” and it goes all the way to the Cayman Islands, and one gets nothing back. The leaseholders have been desperately trying to access the information for months. They have served the correct notice to the correct address in the UK, but they still cannot get the information that they require.

[Lee Rowley]

I recognise that in some instance it is an incredibly frustrating process to go through. As I know the hon. Gentleman will appreciate, this is a pretty technical element of policy. The assurances that I have received from officials and experts involved is that the legislation should cover those bases. There will always be challenges around finding people and going through operational processes. There will be challenges in finding people who do not want to be found easily, but ultimately the law is clear that they need to be found. From that perspective, I think that the law is sufficient. We do not think anything has been missed, but if something has, we will happily receive further correspondence and consider it.

[Lee Rowley]

Service charge demands are one of the most important ways in which leaseholders receive information from their landlord, as we have been discussing. Under current arrangements, landlords are required to issue any service charge demand in accordance with the terms of the lease, or otherwise in a manner that suits them. That has led to variable practice in the sector, which has often been to the detriment of the leaseholder, who then gets confused about what they are paying for and has to spend time chasing the landlord for more information.

Proposed new section 21C enables the Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers to prescribe a standard form and the information that it should contain. We will work closely with leaseholders, landlords and managing agents to ensure that we prescribe both the right information and the right level of detail. Proposed new section 21C(2) makes it clear that a failure to provide information in the new standard format will mean that the leaseholder does not have to pay the charge until the failure is remedied, and any provisions in the lease for non-payment will not apply. The Secretary of State will also have the power to create any exemptions if our work with stakeholders demonstrates that there is a good case for any landlord being excluded, either now or in the future.

Clause 27(2) omits existing legislation relating to obtaining information on a summary of costs, as well as other unimplemented legislation surrounding service charge demands. Those measures will be superseded by the provisions we are implementing in part 3 of the Bill, so it is not necessary to retain them. That measure, alongside others, should ensure that landlords provide relevant information to leaseholders, and I commend the clause to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 27, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 28

Accounts and annual reports

[Barry Gardiner]

I beg to move amendment 130, in clause 28, page 44, line 17, at end insert—

“(iii) a statement of all transactions relating to any sinking fund or reserve fund.”

This amendment would require the written statement of account which the landlord will be required to provide to a tenant to include a statement of all transactions relating to any sinking fund or reserve fund in which their monies are held.

This amendment would require the written statement of account, which the landlord will be required to provide to a tenant, to include a statement of all transactions relating to any sinking or reserve fund in which their moneys are held. Sinking or reserve funds in England and Wales contain literally millions of pounds. Even the smallest block of flats will have a fund of tens of thousands of pounds, yet leaseholders find that they cannot get information about what is happening with it. A landlord may be raiding it to meet their cash-flow problems, in the hope—which is not always fulfilled—of putting the money back later. If millions of pounds is held in a reserve account, leaseholders want to know what interest they may be earning on those funds or whether it is being quietly siphoned off by the landlord.

The amendment would require the written statement of account, which the landlord will be required to provide to a tenant, to include a statement of all transactions relating to any sinking or reserve fund in which their moneys are held. As colleagues will remember from the evidence session that we had before we started our line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill, Martin Boyd of LEASE—the Leasehold Advisory Service—and Andrew Bulmer of The Property Institute said that this provision was really important to include; indeed, it is now part of their voluntary code. They pointed out that it was originally included in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 but was never brought into force.

The provision is particularly dear to me because it is what started my campaigning for leasehold reform 26 years ago. A group of leaseholders in Mountaire Court came to me and explained that they had each paid £23,000 to their landlord, who was the head leaseholder. They lived in a block of 30 flats, so the total was well over £600,000. They said that the head leaseholder had gone into liquidation and that their money had gone. At that point, the freeholder came to them and said that they were prepared to do some of the work. The leaseholders had been arguing that the work should be done. The freeholder then came to them and said, “Yes, we’ll do the roof and the windows, but we need you to pay us £6,000 each to do that,” in addition to the £23,000 they had already incurred. They came to me and asked, “What guarantee do we have that our moneys are not going to be filched away in the same way as the original funds?”

I tracked back through Companies House—I think there were 156 different companies, which were ultimately registered, through Daejan Holdings, to Freshwater—to find out that the head leaseholder, who had gone into liquidation, had signed form 397, which allowed Freshwater to take any moneys that were left with the head leaseholder. All that money had gone back to Freshwater, and there was no way of accounting for it. The debate that I held with the then Minister at that time started the campaign. He said, “This is outrageous. These moneys should be held in some sort of escrow account.” They were not, however, and the leaseholders had no access to what was happening. It is important that there is real accountability for reserve funds, because at the moment it is being held blind from the people who are paying the money.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for his amendment. When I was a councillor in a location not too far away from him a number of years ago, I had similar experiences with the challenges of sinking funds, so I completely appreciate the point he makes. The amendment would prescribe that landlords provide specific information to leaseholders. I agree that they should have access to relevant information. My pushback is merely about where we put this as opposed to what we do, subject to consultation. I am very sympathetic to many of the points he made.

Clause 28(2) does give the appropriate authority the power to prescribe other matters that should be included as part of a written statement of account. We need a consultation to give relevant parties the ability to debate and discuss that and give their views. We must ensure that it is proportionate and cost-effective, but once we have gone through that consultation, I think there is a strong case for ensuring that there is sufficient information as he has outlined to some extent.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to the Minister for what he has said, but the strongest protection would be to have it on the face of the Bill. Even when it was on the face of the 2002 Act, the Government never brought it into force. So this is not something we have not had previously. It is right there in legislation for a leaseholder to have access to this information, but we have never brought it in. What the Minister is suggesting is actually a regressive step, taking leaseholders further away by saying, “We’ll do it through secondary legislation now.”

I really do think it is important to have this on the face of the Bill. We know how Committees work. I know the Minister cannot accept the amendment now, but I would ask him to go away and come back on Report. If he comes back with his own amendment to achieve the objective, I will be delighted.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

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[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

It’s like those leases he keeps talking about; they just keep rolling round.

[Barry Gardiner]

Oh yes, I was intervening.

[Lee Rowley]

Thank you, Mr Efford. Would my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch like to intervene on me?

[Lee Rowley]

Sadly, I confess to not having that knowledge from back when I was at university; I probably was not studying the right things. I appreciate the point from my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch that there has been an opportunity for this to be implemented under Governments of both parties and it has not been done. I am always happy to listen to the hon. Member for Brent North, and I do appreciate the point he is making. It is this Government’s intention to move forward with this, albeit through secondary legislation, which I know he has concerns about. I am happy to put that on the record on the assumption and hope, at least on the Conservative side, that we are in government when this happens. I hope he will not press his amendment.

[Barry Gardiner]

I will press the amendment to a vote because I think it is important that we have it on the record.

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Division 6

Ayes: 5

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Labour: 5

Noes: 7

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Conservative: 7

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I beg to move amendment 131, in clause 28, page 44, line 34, at end insert—

“(4A) Any of the contributing tenants, or the sole contributing tenant, may withhold payment of a service charge if the tenant has reasonable grounds for believing that the payee has failed to comply with the duty imposed by subsections (1) to (4); and any provisions of the tenancy relating to non-payment or late payment of service charges do not have effect in relation to any period for which a service charge is withheld in accordance with this subsection.”

This amendment would enable leaseholders to withhold service charge payments where the landlord has failed to comply with the obligation to provide a written statement of account in the specified form and manner within the six month period from the end of the financial year.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 13, in clause 28, page 45, line 4, at end insert—

“(8) Where a landlord of any such premises fails to comply with the terms implied into a lease by subsection (2), any rent, service charge or administration charge otherwise due from the tenant to the landlord shall be treated for all purposes as not being due from the tenant to the landlord at any time before the landlord does comply with those subsections.”

This amendment would require courts and tribunals to treat the landlord’s compliance with the implied term requirement for annual accounts and certification as a condition precedent to the lessee’s obligation to pay their service charges.

Amendment 14, in clause 28, page 45, line 40, at end insert—

“(9) Where a landlord fails to comply with subsection (1), any rent, service charge or administration charge otherwise due from the tenant to the landlord shall be treated for all purposes as not being due from the tenant to the landlord at any time before the landlord does comply with that subsection.”

This amendment would require courts and tribunals to treat the landlord’s compliance with the implied term requirement for annual accounts and certification as a condition precedent to the lessee’s obligation to pay their service charges.

[Barry Gardiner]

Amendment 131 would enable leaseholders to withhold service charge payments where the landlord has failed to comply with their obligation to provide a written statement of account in the specified form and manner within the six-month period from the end of the financial year that is specified in the legislation. Arguably, it is more important for leaseholders that the accounts are presented in time than that they are presented in a specific form. I welcome what the Government have done to make sure that accounts are presented in a specific form, but the real crux of the matter is: are they presented in time? The amendment would enable leaseholders to have redress if they were not.

We heard in the evidence sessions of that huge imbalance of power in the leasehold system. Given that the Government already accept the principle of leaseholders withholding service charge moneys where they have not been demanded by a landlord in the right way, surely we should rebalance that imbalance of power in the landlord-tenant relationship in leasehold by permitting them to withhold service charges when they are not forthcoming within that allotted time. I believe that policy was also in the 2002 Act, but again, as with the provisions on sinking funds, it was not brought into force.

I also welcome amendments 13 and 14. Certainly, the former achieves something similar—maybe even better. If the Minister were able to give me an assurance that he were willing to accept amendment 13, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, I might even be persuaded to withdraw amendment 131.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I rise to speak to speak to amendments 13 and 14. As I think my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North just touched upon, clause 28 inserts new sections 21D and 21E into the 1985 Act to create a new requirement for a written statement of account to be provided by landlords within six months of the end of the 12-month accounting period for which variable service charges apply. It also places an obligation on landlords to provide an annual report to leaseholders. We welcome the clause, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North, for the reasons discussed in the evidence sessions last week. The 2002 attempt to mandate a form of regular service charge accounts and statements was ultimately unsuccessful, with the replacement section 21 of the 1985 Act never brought into force. As a result, service charge processes remain unstandardised.

A staggering range of different procedures are being used across the country. Some leases specify the form that annual budgets and accounts must take, while others do not. Some require certification by the freeholder, managing agent, management company, accountant or auditor, while others do not. Some prescribe deadlines by which budgets or accounts must be produced and make adherence to those conditions a precedent to liability to pay a service charge, while others do not.

Clause 28 clearly seeks to overhaul this fragmented patchwork of arrangements by introducing the new section 21D, making annual accounts and certification by a qualified accountant a mandatory requirement and, through new section 21E, introducing a statutory duty to provide leaseholders with an annual report about their service charges. By introducing the mandatory requirements that it does, new section 21D(2) implies a term into leases of dwellings with variable service charge provisions.

In our view, the decision to imply terms raises a number of questions and concerns. First, do the implied terms of new section 21D replace any equivalent existing provisions in the lease? If not, landlords and managers will potentially be forced to prepare two sets of accounts: one under the existing terms of the lease and the other under the new implied terms in section 21D. Secondly, why are no express sanctions for non-compliance included in new section 21D? That point was raised by Amanda Gourlay in the Committee evidence sessions.

Given that the implied terms are not covered by the enforcement provisions in new section 25A—provided for by clause 30—surely it is not the Government’s intention to require leaseholders to apply for specific performance through the courts when it comes to this matter. Thirdly, despite the clause including no right to recover implied costs, there is a risk that some landlords will nevertheless seek to recover the extra costs of complying with these requirements through service charges. Can we be sure that leaseholders will not find themselves picking up the bill for complying with the new mandatory requirements? I would welcome the Minister’s response to each of those questions and concerns, in writing if he is not able to address each in detail today—they are very specific and technical.

Perhaps the more significant question that arises from the decision to imply terms by means of new section 21D is whether the landlord’s compliance with those terms will be treated by the courts and the tribunal as a condition precedent to the lessee’s obligation to pay their service charges. We believe it is important that it is made clear in the Bill that compliance with the implied terms in question is a condition precedent to the lessee’s obligation to pay their service charges and that, by implication, leaseholders are not required to pay if the landlord does not comply with the implied terms. Amendments 13 and 14 would have that effect, with the same desired outcomes as the welcome amendment 131, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North, but without the tribunal potentially having to arrive at a judgment on the state of mind of the leaseholder who is withholding their charge. I hope the Minister will accept those amendments as a means of providing the necessary clarification.

[Lee Rowley]

I thank the hon. Members for Brent North and for Greenwich and Woolwich for their amendments.

Amendment 131, in the name of the hon. Member for Brent North, seeks to enable leaseholders to withhold payment of their service charges when accounts are not provided within six months. I absolutely agree with the sentiment that information must be provided in a timely manner, and that there have to be consequences for not doing so. However, the question is whether withholding the service charge is a proportionate and effective means of doing so; the effective question is whether the risk of doing so creates unintended consequences. For example, were a leaseholder to withhold payments in circumstances where it is found that section 21D had been complied with, that may render the leaseholder liable to pay their landlord’s litigation costs, depending on the terms of the lease. Withholding payments also creates consequences for other leaseholders and may eventually mean that works are not carried out. I recognise that that is not the intention or the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but in the portion that we are looking at, it is important that we consider all potential unintended consequences.

Services of certified accounts will, for most landlords, be a necessary step for a landlord to identify whether they have spent more than estimated during the accounting period and, where the costs incurred during that period are more than was estimated, the landlord will wish to serve a further demand to recover the shortfall. It is in the landlord’s interest to do that, but I recognise that not all landlords act in a completely rational way or a way that necessarily follows logic. Should a landlord, however, fail to issue a demand for costs within 18 months of those costs having been incurred, then through new clause 6, the leaseholder would not be liable to contribute towards those costs at all.

I realise that that answer will probably not address every part of the concern expressed by the hon. Member for Brent North; it is the same as when I applied that logic to the amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich. However, I hope it demonstrates both that we are clear that it should be done—that there is a logic, an incentive and a rationale for it to be done—and that there is ultimately a cliff at the end of it, a cut-off point in the event that they do not do it. I hope that provides some assurances; I will see whether that is enough to tempt the hon. Member for Brent North to withdraw his amendment.

[Barry Gardiner]

I appreciate what the Minister has said about that cliff edge of 18 months. We have talked about cynicism in this Committee before, but let me tell the Minister what I believe may happen. I think a landlord who is withholding information will decide that they can now do so with impunity for 17 months and 28 days, and then they will serve the required information up on a plate. The provision is almost tempting them to do that. If the Minister is going to rely on that, rather than looking at the question again in further detail, I urge him to reduce that timeframe substantially. I will not put a figure on it—I do not say that it should be 12 months, or nine months—but it should be reduced substantially. However, I am very happy to withdraw my amendment in favour of amendment 13.

[The Chair]

That was an intervention; I will come back to you.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comments in that regard. To save time, the same logic applies from our perspective to amendments 13 and 14, and I hope that at least in part reassures him—I will wait to hear his comments, but I encourage him to withdraw his amendment if it does.

[Barry Gardiner]

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Matthew Pennycook]

Mr Efford, may I respond to the Minister’s comments on amendment 13?

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[Lee Rowley]

I thank my hon. Friend for her question. Yes, that is my understanding, and, as part of the response in writing, we will clarify that.

To conclude, new section 21E places an obligation on landlords to provide an annual report in respect of service charges and other matters likely to be of interest to the leaseholder arising in that period.

[Barry Gardiner]

Could the Minister clarify a point for me? Obviously, there are different forms of accounts, such as short-form accounts and audited accounts. In what he is proposing, as I understand it, there is no compulsion to have an audit of the service charges shown in those accounts. The certified accounts happened in blocks already, but they are pretty meaningless because the freeholder appoints the accountants and tells them what form they want them in. Surely the key is having not just the accounts but the service charges audited as proper.

[Lee Rowley]

I am going to include that in my written response, too, because I know that the specifics of the definition of audit are quite different from other aspects of this question. My understanding is that we will prescribe in secondary legislation what needs to be provided. Given that an accountant will be a part of that, they will have to ensure that the audit conforms to their usual codes of practice. I will write on the specifics to ensure that I have given sufficient information.

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[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for moving amendment 16. He does not deny that landlords will incur a cost for answering information requests. The level of cost will vary, depending on the volume of information, the complexity, the period, the timeline and a number of other factors. There may be difficulties in obtaining all that information. Landlords may also incur a cost in chasing other people who hold the information required to answer a leaseholder’s request, notwithstanding our earlier conversations about the reasonableness of the costs for talking to other parties.

Given the variety of different scenarios, we start from a place in which it is very difficult to set a cap that would not create another unintended consequence somewhere else. None the less, I note the hon. Gentleman’s concern and am happy to confirm that we are listening very carefully on this matter, but I hope he might consider withdrawing the amendment.

[Barry Gardiner]

Amendments 132 and 133 would prevent a landlord from recovering the cost of complying with a requirement to provide information imposed by new sections 21F and 21G of the 1985 Act, which is very much in line with what my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich said.

Given that the Government are rightly focusing on reducing costs to leaseholders, these amendments would ensure that a landlord cannot charge leaseholders for giving them information about their home and their charges. We do not charge voters or taxpayers for complying with freedom of information requests, so I am not clear why there should be a distinction here. Many requests and information transfers will now be made electronically. The days when people had to go to the office to pull out hordes of receipts are, I hope, a thing of the past. These requests and transfers should not involve a great deal of expense.

Again, I do not want the Minister to think I am a cynical chap, because I am not, but I know what will happen. There will be the same hierarchies that we talked about earlier. Landlords will create arm’s length companies to hold this information in tiers and categories, and they will charge for providing information at each level. That is what they do. We have to understand that it is not a mistake or one bad apple. Many landlords adopt this practice as a way of securing revenue. Painful though it is to admit that our fellow citizens do this sort of thing to each other, they do. We are passing this legislation to try to protect people.

[Lee Rowley]

I will not detain the Committee, because my response will be similar to the one I gave to the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich.

We accept the broad point made by the hon. Member for Brent North but, for the reasons I outlined previously, we think it would be difficult to do this. There is at least an argument that proportionality has to be considered. However, I am happy to confirm that we are listening very carefully. On that basis, I hope the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich may be willing to withdraw amendment 16.

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[The Chair]

Mr Gardiner, is it your intention to press amendment 132 to a vote?

[Barry Gardiner]

Mr Efford, it is the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Therefore I am happy not to press amendments 132 and 133.

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[Lee Rowley]

As best as I understand it, the situation is exactly as my hon. Friend describes. The threshold is lower, and therefore the provisions are more proportionate, and evidence of financial loss is not required. On that basis, I hope that the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich will withdraw the amendment. I will come to amendment 134 in due course.

[Barry Gardiner]

Amendment 134 would enable a tribunal to order the remedy of a breach in respect of, and damages to be paid to, a leaseholder affected by a breach revealed by an application to the tribunal, even if the leaseholder is not party to the application. Let me explain why that is appropriate. In an estate in my constituency, Chamberlayne Avenue and Edison Drive, FirstPort was the estate manager. It failed in the case that went to the leasehold tribunal, which was brought by one member of the estate. The tribunal quite correctly found in favour of the leaseholders. However, everybody else on the estate was equally affected, and they are now all having to bring a separate tribunal case against FirstPort in order to receive the same benefits and relief. It seems to me that where that is the case, it would make sense for the tribunal to be able to instruct the landlord that where there has been a failure affecting all the leaseholders, they should remedy that breach to all the leaseholders, not just the one who brought the case, if there are damages.

I was heartily gratified by the explanation that the Minister and the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire gave about “damages” not being the legalistic sense of damages, because I was beginning to worry that the second part of my amendment might fall foul of exactly what my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich said. However, if we want to free up and speed up the tribunal system, that would be one way of doing so that would afford great relief to the very many people trapped in that situation.

[Lee Rowley]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his amendment, which he has just outlined. The Government are sympathetic to the intention of the amendment. It is not that we do not understand the point that he has made or the point that he articulated in relation to Chamberlayne Avenue; where freeholders behave badly, it should apply across the board, and that is the kernel of the point he makes. The challenge—and I am sorry to be difficult about it—is that, as I know the hon. Gentleman will appreciate, there is a potential ramification to asking a tribunal to make a read-across from one case to every other one. Even though it is highly likely that it will apply to all or almost all of those cases, there is the difficulty of creating the link that makes the assumption that it must apply. For that reason, we do not think we can accept the amendment, although I am sympathetic to the point made by the hon. Gentleman.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to the Minister, because it is really good to know that he will consider those points further. Let me therefore make a suggestion: if the tribunal were given powers through secondary legislation on estate cases where the matter is remedying something about the estate that applies equally to everybody, it should be obvious to the tribunal that anybody living on that estate is equally affected.

Let me give an example. If the managing agent, FirstPort, says that it has mended a fence, and it has charged everybody for mending that fence, but it is found that it did not mend the fence and it was not its fence to mend—this is the actual case. Everybody on the estate received those charges, and everybody on that estate was due therefore to be compensated for them. That will happen in some cases, but I accept what the Minister says. Would it make sense to consider giving the tribunal the power to instruct the managing agent to remedy the breach for any of those similarly affected, such that, if they did not, there was an additional penalty when that case was brought to the subsequent tribunal to prove that they were affected?

[Lee Rowley]

I am happy to ask the Department to look into that in further detail. I have no personal understanding of whether that would be possible or reasonable and proportionate and not have a series of other consequences, but it is reasonable to look into it further.

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[Lee Rowley]

They are two separate challenges. If a challenge goes to the tribunal and it is deemed that a penalty should apply, for whatever reason or whatever poor behaviour, and a penalty of up to £5,000 is apportioned, and then another person makes the same claim about exactly the same instance, one would logically expect the tribunal to allocate the same penalty. Multiple challenges get multiple fines.

[Barry Gardiner]

Could the Minister elaborate on something? Where a group of leaseholders brings the challenge—let us say that 30 leaseholders in the block all club together and bring the challenge—is it one challenge that pays one set of £5,000, or is it 30 challenges that pay £5,000 each? Otherwise, we risk leaseholders bringing one challenge and then everybody thinking, “Okay, if I’ve got to, I will now do it,” and making the same challenge over and over again, clogging up the tribunals. That is not what we want. If they all come together and make that application, surely they should all get the damages that the tribunal feels is proportionate.

[Lee Rowley]

The hon. Gentleman is making a number of important points. As it is currently structured, one challenge of n people gets up to £5,000; if it is multiple challenges of one person or n people within challenge 2, challenge 3 or challenge 4, that would be £5,000. As it is structured at the moment, one challenge equals £5,000, irrespective of the number of people within that challenge.

[Barry Gardiner]

Does the Minister appreciate that that could lead to a situation in which we are multiplying challenges unnecessarily?

[Lee Rowley]

I absolutely appreciate the point that has been made. There is a balance to be struck here. Obviously we will need to go through the justice impact test, or whatever it is called, to check the volume of challenges that would potentially come into the tribunals system as a result of the changes in the Bill. Again, it is about trying to balance those very challenging concepts, making sure that there is a penalty—it is important to recognise that the penalty is doubling—but also that people have the ability to choose to do things or not do things. I know that members of this Committee will have different views about how to structure that balance.

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[Matthew Pennycook]

I take the point, and I understand what the hon. Gentleman is driving at: there is the very real risk of clogging up the system with multiple challenges if leaseholders are sophisticated enough to understand the provisions of the clause and work out that the best thing they can do is submit multiple challenges. I do not think that most will. There is therefore a detrimental impact on the incentives for leaseholders to try to dispute these matters.

Coming back to the fundamental point of whether this will change the behaviour of landlords when it comes to compliance, though, I think the hon. Gentleman is right: the figure of £5,000 is too low. I have had this debate so many times with Government Ministers. We had it on the Renters (Reform) Bill: the maximum that local authorities can charge for certain breaches of that Bill is £5,000. Most landlords will take that as a risk of doing business.

[Barry Gardiner]

An operational cost.

[Matthew Pennycook]

It is operational. It can be absorbed on the rare occasion that it will be charged, so we think that amount should be higher. Ultimately, as the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire said, we have to make clear that we are very serious about the sanctions in this new section biting appropriately. For that reason, although I am not going to push the amendment to a vote at this stage, it is a matter that we might have to come back to. It applies to part 4 of the Bill—to residential freeholders—equally, and it is important that we get it right and convince the Government to look at this matter again. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

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[Barry Gardiner]

I beg to move amendment 151, in clause 31, page 50, line 32, leave out from beginning to end of line 32 and insert—

“(a) exceed the net rate charged by the insurance underwriter for the insurance cover, and”

This amendment would define an excluded insurance cost as any cost in excess of the actual charge made by the underwriter for placing the risk, where such cost is not a permitted insurance payment.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 135, in clause 31, page 50, line 34, at end insert—

“(2A) Costs for insurance are also ‘excluded insurance costs’ where—

(a) a recognised tenants’ association has not been provided in advance with three quotations from reputable insurance companies or brokers, or

(b) the recognised tenants’ association has not had the opportunity to submit a further quotation (in addition to the quotations required by paragraph (a)), which the landlord must consider prior to placing the insurance.”

This amendment would require a landlord to provide a recognised tenants’ association with three insurance quotes before placing the insurance, and provide an opportunity for a recognised tenants’ association to submit an alternative quotation.

Amendment 152, in clause 31, page 50, line 35, leave out from beginning to end of line 6 on page 51.

This amendment, to leave out subsection (3) of the proposed new section 20G of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, is consequential on Amendment 151.

Amendment 153, in clause 31, page 51, line 18, at end insert—

“(5A) The regulations must specify a broker’s reasonable remuneration at market rates as a permitted insurance payment.

(5B) The regulations must exclude any payment which arises, directly or indirectly, from any breach of trust, fiduciary obligation or failure to act in the best interests of the tenant.”

This amendment would require “permitted insurance payment” to include payment of a reasonable sum to a broker at market rates for placing the cover, and to exclude any payments which have arisen from wrongdoing.

Amendment 137, in clause 31, page 52, line 24, leave out third “the” and insert “a reasonable”.

This amendment would ensure that the costs which a landlord can recover from tenants in making “permitted insurance payments” are reasonable.

Clause stand part.

Amendment 154, in clause 32, page 51, line 3, leave out “Sub-paragraph (2) applies” and insert

“Sub-paragraphs (1A) and (2) apply”.

This is a paving amendment for Amendment 155.

Amendment 155, in clause 32, page 53, line 5, at end insert—

“(1A) Within six weeks of the insurance being effected, the insurer, or, where the insurance has been arranged by a broker, the broker, must provide all tenants with a written copy of the contract of insurance.”

This amendment would ensure that tenants are provided with the contract of insurance which covers their building.

Amendment 136, in clause 32, page 53, line 12, at end insert—

“(2A) Regulations under sub-paragraph (2) must specify the contract of insurance containing the full extent of the protection afforded by the insurance, and the associated costs.”

This amendment would require a landlord to provide a tenant with the contract of insurance containing the full extent of the protection afforded by the insurance, and the associated costs.

Amendment 156, in clause 32, page 53, line 22, leave out from beginning to the end of line 23.

This amendment, to remove sub-paragraph (7) of new paragraph 1A of the Schedule to the LTA 1985, would remove the landlord’s right to charge tenants for providing them with information about insurance.

Amendment 157, in clause 32, page 54, line 20, leave out from beginning to the end of line 21.

This amendment, to remove sub-paragraph (7) of new paragraph 1B of the Schedule to the LTA 1985, would remove the right of a person required to provide information about insurance from charging for providing that information.

Amendment 138, in clause 32, page 54, line 21, after “the” insert “reasonable”.

This amendment would ensure that the costs payable by a landlord for information requested by him from another person, under paragraph 1A(2)(a), are reasonable.

Clause 32 stand part.

New clause 41—Building insurance and section 39 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000—

“A landlord may not manage or arrange insurance for their building under the protections of section 39 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.”

This new clause precludes a landlord from operating as an appointed representative under the licence of Broker, where the landlord has no such licence themselves.

[Barry Gardiner]

Gosh, that is quite a mouthful of a group! I draw the attention of the Committee in the first instance to amendments 151 to 153. I welcome the fact that the intention behind the Bill is to improve the situation with regard to insurance charges; I make it clear to the Minister that I do recognise that. Together, however, those amendments would prevent the Bill from excluding different descriptions of the type of costs that are excluded. Amendment 151 would change the definition of the actual cost that is permitted to a much tighter one, namely that which the underwriter has charged. Amendment 153 would add that the reasonable brokerage that the broker is charging the client, who is the landlord, is recoverable at prevailing market rates.

There is also the issue of fiduciary duty. Fiduciary duty and breach of trust are important, because the leaseholder on whose behalf the insurance is being arranged by the landlord has an insurable interest in the property. That means that the landlord, in affecting the insurance, is doing so not only on his own behalf but on behalf of the leaseholders; otherwise, the leaseholders would not be paying for it. The landlord is technically an agent of the leaseholder, and the law of agency in common law is specific about the duties of an agent to their principal. In particular, they may not do anything against their principal’s interest, as that would be a breach of trust. That means that should a landlord do anything improper to increase his own revenues against the leaseholder’s interest, he would be guilty of a breach of trust, and the leaseholder would and should be able to recover under common law and have a remedy for it.

Together, the amendments would provide a tight circumscription of what should be permitted as the recoverable costs when placing insurance, but of course I have left wiggle room for the Secretary of State, who is still able to specify in the secondary legislation anything that he or she thinks reasonable, so it is not a straitjacket. I hope that the Minister will understand that this gives much greater clarity to the notion of permissible insurance costs and much greater clarity, which I think is what he seeks in the Bill, to that which properly ought to be excluded. I have not constrained it so greatly that secondary legislation could not come into force to make something else permissible.

Amendment 135 would require a landlord to provide a recognised tenants association with three insurance quotations before placing the insurance, and to provide an opportunity for a recognised tenants association to submit an alternative quotation. In its multi-occupancy buildings insurance investigation, the Financial Conduct Authority found evidence of at least £80 million in insurance kickbacks going to landlords and their managing agents paid for by leaseholders. The amendment would bolster the rights of a recognised tenants association, which successive Governments have supported and sought to protect. Although it would not give the RTAs the power to place the insurance policy, it would help them to close the informational asymmetry with the landlord and pressure them to get a competitive deal by submitting their own quote.

I point out to the Minister that where capital works are being done under a section 20, that is exactly the procedure that would be in operation. The landlord would provide quotations, and the RTA would have the opportunity to submit its own quotation for the work to be done. It seems to me that introducing that same procedure for insurance would be extremely helpful.

Amendment 137 would ensure that the costs that a landlord can now recover from tenants in making permitted insurance payments are reasonable. Although the reasonableness of the cost of buildings insurance can be difficult to prove, especially in a market where brokers are often loth to quote to anyone who cannot place the insurance, the reasonableness test for service charges is the last line of defence for many. I do not think that the insurance scheme in the Bill can fail to make reference to the reasonableness of the permitted insurance payments. The Minister may well say that that will be prescribed in secondary legislation, but I seek to probe him on the point.

Amendment 136 is an important amendment that would require the landlord to provide a tenant with a contract of insurance containing the full extent of the protections afforded by the assurance and the associated costs. In the Bill, we have gone to great lengths to ensure that the leaseholder, as the assured, is able to access information from the landlord, but we heard in the evidence submitted to us by the witnesses in the evidence sessions that there should be a shortcut. The FCA rules already state that, if approached, an insurance company has to provide the information, although we then found out that the landlord did not have to tell leaseholders who the insurance company was; and we know about the difficulties in securing information from a landlord.

Would it not make sense to the Minister to have amendment 136 on the face of the Bill? This information is in the schedule of insurance. The underwriters want to know, “What is it I’m insuring?” They know exactly which units are in that block and exactly what is going on in that block. Therefore, they have the information to do it directly. It seems to me that the amendment would be a far more efficacious way of achieving the objective that the Minister has rightly set out in giving powers to acquire the information from the landlord; it would be far easier and far cheaper simply to say that the insurer has to do it.

Amendment 138 would ensure that the costs payable by a landlord for information requested by him from another person are reasonable. I am sorry that that was a lot, but it is a big grouping. Absolutely at the heart of the issue are amendments 151 to 153 and, ultimately, new clause 41, but we do not get to that until later, I understand.

[The Chair]

Order. We are debating new clause 41 now.

[Barry Gardiner]

Fine. In that case, let me speak to new clause 41, which

“precludes a landlord from operating as an appointed representative under the licence of broker, where the landlord has no such licence themselves.”

The whole point of this new clause, which goes to that issue of fiduciary duty and agency, is that at the moment, landlords can operate under the licence of a broker to provide brokerage services. If we were to take away that capacity from them by passing new clause 41, we would then have circumscribed the way in which a landlord would be able to game the system, because they would not be able to operate under the protections that the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 affords them, operating under somebody’s licence when they themselves do not have those qualifications.

I am unsure whether this is a proper interest to declare, but I am an associate of the Chartered Insurance Institute. That was many, many years ago; I am not practising now, but I have mentioned it just in case. I think that landlords are getting away with murder by operating in this way, and it would be good to close that loophole to bring it all very tightly together. I appreciate that amendments 151 to 153 and new clause 41 have to be seen as a unit, but they really do give the Minister the opportunity to do what I think he is attempting to do through the Bill, but in a tighter and more effective way.

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Amendments 156 and 157 seek to remove leaseholders’ ability to be charged for the provision of insurance information. Obviously, there is again an interaction here with what the FCA has been doing. The changes that the FCA has made allow leaseholders to receive their policy documents and information about the overall premium. The hon. Member’s amendments would remove the ability for reasonable compensation to be provided for supplying information. As we have discussed many times both today and previously, the Government’s view is that costs that are reasonably incurred should be borne by leaseholders. Not allowing such costs to be transparently recovered would be logically problematic and may lead to further attempts to transfer money in other ways, which we would not want.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to the Minister for the way in which he is engaging with the issue and for the points he has made. Given that it would be possible to relay the insurance contract electronically, will it be possible for secondary legislation to stipulate that any additional layers of complexity would be outwith the permitted costs? The Minister will see that I keep coming back to that theme, because unfortunately landlords add additional layers of complexity. We need to be sure that, where it is possible to do something simply, it is not permissible to recover the cost of doing it not simply, if I can put it that way.

[Lee Rowley]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. I will not try to solutionise in Committee, given the inherent dangers doing so from the Government Front Bench. We have committed to consulting, and there will be lots of experts and interested parties who will want to engage in that. As the hon. Gentleman suggests, transfers of data in an electronic form do not necessarily involve a substantial amount of time or effort, albeit that the provision and creation of the data in the first place may do. Those are exactly the kinds of things that we will want to talk about as part of the consultation, as and when it comes. On that basis, I hope that the hon. Member will consider not pressing amendments 156 and 157.

Amendment 138 seeks to require that charges made of parties where they request information from the landlord are reasonable, and I agree with the sentiment. Reasonableness is already required through section 19 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985. As I indicated in relation to amendment 137, reasonableness is not in itself a guarantee that costs will be constrained and proportionate, especially where the test is reliant on the assessment of normal behaviour across the sector. The Government would seek to deal with this area in secondary legislation, to ensure that the priorities of transparency and proportionality are in place. On that basis, I hope that the hon. Member will consider not pressing his amendment.

Before I conclude, I have two further points. Clause 32 confirms the importance of the intention of transparency, which is behind the Bill. The clause places a duty on landlords and managing agents that compels them to proactively provide information on building insurance to leaseholders. That should help leaseholders to better understand what they are paying for, and give them information they need to scrutinise that and take appropriate action, should that be necessary. The required information will be specified in the regulations, but it is anticipated that it should detail the insurance policy that is purchased, including a summary of the cover such as the risks insured, excess costs, premium costs and any remuneration received by the insurance broker. We also anticipate that it will include details of all alternative quotes obtained from the market and any possible conflicts of interest that arose during the procurement process.

Subsection (2) will insert new paragraph 1A into the schedule to the 1985 Act to allow leaseholders to request further information from landlords or managing agents. This could include full contractual documentation and policy wording, as well as the declaration of technical information that may have shaped the eventual premium price. We hope that giving leaseholders this improved information will allow them to challenge the reasonableness of their policy costs, if required. We expect that it will change landlord behaviour by making sure they are more price conscious, as it will be clearer that their movements are being watched. This will ensure that they do not try to pull a fast one on their leaseholders when it comes to insurance.

New paragraph 1B imposes a duty on third parties to provide landlords with any specified information requested within the specified period. Under paragraph 1A landlords will be obliged to provide information that is in their possession, and under paragraph 1B, where a landlord needs to ask another person for that information, that other person will also be required to provide the information within the specified timescales. Again, those timescales will be detailed in secondary legislation.

Clause 32 places requirements on landlords for how the handling fee that will replace insurance commissions will be disclosed to leaseholders. Again, this seeks to ensure greater transparency and allow more scrutiny where the charges are unreasonable.

Under paragraph 1C of the schedule to the 1985 Act, a leaseholder may make an application to the appropriate tribunal if their landlord fails to comply with the requirements under paragraphs 1A and 1B. I commend the clause to the Committee.

Finally, new clause 41 would preclude landlords from undertaking regulated insurance activity on behalf of a broker. Although I understand the sentiment behind this new clause, I hope the hon. Member for Brent North will recognise that the underlying point behind clauses 31 and 32, on which I hope we all agree, is transparency and fairness. These clauses will require the disclosure of fees charged for any work, as I have just indicated. We will prescribe what is a permitted cost that can be collected through the service charge, which should ensure that commissions that bear no connection to the work undertaken will not be permitted. It should also ensure that key documentation is provided.

[Barry Gardiner]

The Minister said that all the costs of the broker will have to be disclosed, which is absolutely right. However, where the landlord is operating under the provisions of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, he or she would be indistinguishable from that brokerage company and, therefore, the leaseholder will not be able to ascertain what was done by the broker and what was done by the landlord operating under the licence of the broker. What will be revealed is simply “the brokerage.” Unless we can unravel that, we will never get to the issue of kickbacks. As we saw with the Canary Riverside case before Christmas, those kickbacks can be frighteningly large—£1.6 million for one block. The disaggregation of what is the landlord qua broker and what is the broker qua broker is really important.

[Lee Rowley]

I will try to reassure the hon. Gentleman. I think we both agree on the intention behind full transparency and clarity, so that things are not being hidden in the “value chain,” to use a terrible expression from my previous life.

The secondary legislation for clause 31 will seek to define the permitted insurance costs, and we will consult specifically on issues around regulated insurance activity. I hope that secondary legislation will cover some of the hon. Gentleman’s points and allow him, and others with concerns, to make their case. We can then determine how best to approach it.

With that, I hope the hon. Gentleman will consider withdrawing his amendment.

[Barry Gardiner]

There is good news and bad news, Mr Efford. The good news is that I am content to withdraw amendments 135, 137, 154, 155, 136, 156, 157 and 138, but I wish to press amendments 151, 152, 153 and 157 to a vote.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Ninth sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 30th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Matthew Pennycook]

Under my reading of the hon. Gentleman’s amendment, if it is ensured that services or works that would ordinarily be provided by local authorities are not relevant costs for the purposes of charges in this part, who will pick up the bill? If the local authority is not compelled to adopt the amenities, our concern is that no one will maintain them. To address his point directly, I worry that his amendment would not ensure that the private estate management company picks up the charge. I will come to why I think our amendment is a superior way of addressing this very real problem.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I am listening carefully to my hon. Friend. It may interest him to know that I was on a private estate in Kingswood at the weekend, for some reason. It soon became apparent that the developer had gone into liquidation and the estate was being run down in a quite dreadful way. As my hon. Friend said, in that situation, the developer itself and the management of the estate had, to all intents and purposes, ceased—residents were very voluble on things not being done—but the local authority had not adopted the road in the first place, and the services were suffering accordingly.

[Matthew Pennycook]

We are all driving at the same point. I was very much taken by the CMA’s conclusion that reducing the prevalence of these arrangements requires a combination of the mandatory adoption of amenities and putting in place corresponding common adoptable standards. If we do one without the other, we risk some unintended consequences.

My concern about the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire is that we cannot simply remove from estate charges costs that should in an ideal circumstance be borne by local authorities and then expect the private management company to simply pick them up. I fear that the more likely scenario will be that the amenities are not properly maintained. That is a real concern, and should be for residential freeholders on the estates. As the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire outlined, there are some good reasons why local authorities are reluctant to adopt public amenities on private or mixed-tenure estates.

--- Later in debate ---

If we cannot resolve the issue now, I urge the Minister and the shadow Minister to go away and think about actions to tackle it, whether that is in the Bill or in other legislation. It is one of the biggest emerging challenges facing new towns and new communities, such as those in Mid Bedfordshire, and we should not enable such practices to continue. Exactly the same logic that the Minister set out last week—cracking down on rent-seeking behaviours in other areas, which the Bill does good work on—applies here. I urge him and my Front-Bench colleague to continue their work with renewed vigour, so that the Bill and subsequent legislation can tackle the issue once and for all.

[Barry Gardiner]

The Minister will recall that in response to a Government consultation in 2018, the Government committed to introducing a section 24 right for freeholders on housing estates, but that has not appeared in the Bill. It would have given those freeholders the right to go to a first-tier tribunal and appoint a court protective manager. The Minister and his officials may wish to reflect on and remedy that failing in the Bill. However, even that would be an imperfect measure, because it would not ensure that leaseholders in homes on estates had the same rights as leaseholders in a development block, for whom the Bill seeks to facilitate the right to manage. Will the Minister look at that issue and ensure that that provision is realised?

[The Minister for Housing, Planning and Building Safety (Lee Rowley)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark, and it is good to continue debating these issues this morning. I am grateful to all hon. Members who have raised such important points. I do not think that the disagreement between Members on any of the Benches is about whether there are issues; the question is rather about the technicalities of how to approach them, what to do and what is proportionate.

I will talk briefly about the amendments. Although the Government cannot accept them now, I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire and the shadow Minister will listen to the points that I make; the broader point is that I am listening carefully and have a lot of sympathy for the underlying point, which we are all trying to solve. The question is about how we do it and whether we need to go further.

There was an extended debate between my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire and the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich. I will not try to repeat that, but not because I do not want to give due regard to everything that my hon. Friend put on record or to his underlying point. He is absolutely right that there is a problem; we all see it in our constituencies. The challenge, as I see in my constituency of North East Derbyshire, is that there is now a move towards greater estate management outside the demise of the local representation of the state. It works in some areas and for some elements, but there are specific areas and specific estates in which it clearly does not work. We have all heard the stories about the issues that are visible.

In the past, it would have been typical for local authorities to have adopted estates, but that is moving further and further away from reality. There is a question about whether there are some elements of estate management where it is reasonable to have some kind of arrangement outside the aegis of the state, but equally I accept the argument that that has gone too far in certain areas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If the Committee will indulge me, I have personal experience of examples of this in North East Derbyshire, and I know the complexity involved in getting this correct. I have an estate by an unnamed developer in the south of the constituency, near Wingerworth, where this discussion is going on already. Before Christmas, I spent two hours talking to representatives of owners on the estate and to the estate management company itself. I recognise the complexities on an estate that was being managed relatively adequately from afar but clearly still had issues.

The second example—this is why we have to be so careful to get this right—is from the other side. Fenton Street in Eckington has been unadopted for more than a century. The residents recognise that it is unadopted and have bought their houses understanding and acknowledging that. Possibly it was been adopted many decades ago, but there is no record.

We have to make sure that this works for everybody. In an ideal world, everybody would be scooped up and this would all be fixed in one fell swoop with whatever a benevolent Government could do, but that is not the reality of the choices that we face. Nor is it often the reality of what happens when a Government try to do things that work in the way that we all intend. Although I understand the intention behind the two amendments, I encourage hon. Members to withdraw them.

[Barry Gardiner]

The Minister has not responded to the point about a section 24 court-appointed manager. Would that not give a power enabling redress for residents in situations such as the one he outlines, where there has been a complete failure to adopt and maintain? Will he commit to considering that point as part of the mix?

[Lee Rowley]

We may touch on some of those elements under later clauses. The hon. Gentleman’s core point is about whether the Government are willing—without providing any guarantees in this place—to look at additionality. Of course we are. There are the usual caveats, which I have explained in previous sittings, about what we can do, how we do it, and the priorities, but this is an area in which we are listening carefully.

In conclusion, I ask my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire and the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich to consider withdrawing their amendments. I hope that they have heard that I am serious and willing to look at the issue again, although I cannot offer guarantees at this stage.

I will turn briefly to clause 41, to put on the record exactly what the clause contains and what we are voting for. Freehold homeowners on private and mixed-tenure estates who pay estate management charges have fewer protections than leaseholders paying the service charges that we have spoken about. Clause 41 will introduce limitations on what estate management companies can charge homeowners through estate management charges. Subsection (1) states:

“Costs incurred by an estate manager are relevant costs…only to the extent that they are reasonably incurred.”

Clause 41 will ensure that where these costs are incurred in the provision of services or the carrying out of works, they will be relevant costs only if the services or works are of a reasonable standard.

Subsection (2) makes it clear that when an estate management charge is payable in advance, only reasonable costs are payable. Furthermore, after reasonable costs have been incurred, any necessary adjustment must be made to the charge by repayment, reduction of subsequent charges or any other method. Those new rules are equivalent to requirements in the leasehold regime and provide homeowners with more confidence that they will not be overcharged. We seek to provide increased protections for homeowners through the clause. I commend it to the Committee.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 27th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Minister was most accommodating throughout the proceedings in Committee, and we are all grateful to him for the way in which he has listened.

Further to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Minister will know that many developers have located themselves extrajudicially in places such as the Cayman Islands. Wembley Central Apartments Ltd in my constituency has finally ended up there, as have many others. What in this Bill will enable us to extend our reach and force such companies to respond, reply and do what the Building Safety Act 2022 already says they ought to do?

[Lee Rowley]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, which I know we debated in Committee. He correctly highlights the challenges in certain areas of enforcement. If I may, I will come back to that later in the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

Let me begin by declaring my interest as an adviser to the HSPG group, which among other things is a registered provider of social housing.

I rise to speak to new clause 68, which is based on a specific challenge that I have encountered in my constituency and that affects residents in more than 70 homes spread across three locations in the town of Hayle and the village of Mount Hawke. The experience of those cases exposes a potential gap in the Bill and in policy on the issue of shared ownership. The Bill deals at some length with standard leasehold agreements and the problems of extortionate ground rents, as well as with some of the issues around service charges and management companies with which we are familiar. However, in the early 2000s some agreements were put together that were technically leasehold agreements but that masqueraded as shared ownership agreements, even though those shared ownership agreements do not comply with the standards of modern shared ownership agreements.

The agreements I have encountered contain a number of defects, and I would like the Minister’s view on them. The first is that the freehold on those homes is not held by a registered provider. It was initially owned by the developer who built the sites, but it has changed hands twice. In a way that is familiar to many Members, the freehold has ended up in the hands of an offshore investment vehicle based in the British Virgin Islands, and with a company called Rockwell, which has not been easy for residents to deal with over the years.

The second major defect in the agreements is that there is no provision for staircasing or enfranchisement of the leaseholder’s share of the property. Residents typically own between 58% and 72% of their property, but their stake is fixed and cannot be extended. There is no right to extend under the agreement. The agreements are under a 990-year lease and there is no ability to extend that, although I appreciate it is a long-term lease.

The third defect is that even if residents could enfranchise and extend or staircase their ownership within the agreement, a section 106 covenant means that the properties must be sold to a local connection with a significant discount on market value. The way that has been worded in the agreement means that it is simply not worth the while of residents to increase their share, since there would be no value to the increased share that they would have.

Finally, there was something described as ground rent, although in practice a big chunk of that was effectively a rent on the shared ownership portion. The ground rent was initially around £20 per week, but that was linked to the retail price index on an escalating model. It has now got close to £2,000 per year for those residents, and it is still increasing rapidly.

All of those defects in that leasehold tenure arrangement or shared ownership arrangement—indeed, it appears to be neither one nor the other—mean that all of the properties have been judged unmortgageable by lenders, and that means the residents are trapped. They cannot sell their properties because no one can get a mortgage to buy them. These are people in my constituency who had a local connection. Typically, they are on modest incomes. These agreements and these homes were sold to them as a way to get a foot on the housing ladder, and for those residents it has transpired to be a complete nightmare.

I will say a word about planning and pay tribute to Penwith District Council, as it was then, and Cornwall Council. Planning was granted between 2004 and 2006, and the local planning authorities did their due diligence. They could see that this shared ownership model was defective, and they refused planning permission on all three sites on that basis. The Minister might ask how these homes were then built and sold under the arrangement, but I suspect he can predict the answer, which is that they were approved at appeal by the Planning Inspectorate, an agency within his own Department. The situation that my constituents face has been caused principally by a chronic failure of due diligence by the Planning Inspectorate, as is often the case with such issues.

In conclusion, my new clause 68 seeks to address a gap in the Bill and to give the Government the opportunity to atone for the mistakes of the Planning Inspectorate. It deals explicitly with shared ownership agreements and would create a statutory right to staircase ownership and put a cap on the rent of the freeholders’ portion of the home. I do not intend to press new clause 28 to a Division this evening, but I hope that the Government will consider the matter closely. I would like to meet the Minister or the Secretary of State and share with them and their officials a copy of the shared ownership agreement that my constituents are suffering under so much, with a view to seeing whether the Government might consider further changes at later stages of the Bill’s consideration to address a gap in it. Given that the Planning Inspectorate has been somewhat culpable in creating this problem for my constituents, I hope that the Government will seek to do that.

I support the general thrust of the Bill in all its attempts to deal with management charges, service charges and ground rents, but I hope that the Minister will agree to meet me to discuss some of these remaining issues.

[Barry Gardiner]

It was 1 December 1998. I had been an MP for one year and seven months to the day, and I was chained to the railings of College Green by 200 cheering leaseholders. Thankfully, they were friendly. It was to illustrate that leaseholders felt that they are were prison. Those were the days before social media, and it was a photo op. The BBC ran the headline, “Leaseholders demand more control”. They still do.

Since then, we have had the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2022, which was an attempt to resolve some of the problems, such as forfeiture of a person’s home for a failure to pay a small service charge, the ground rent grazers charging money for no service and moneys not being held in trust in sinking funds. It is strange that after 25 years, these should be the very areas that yet another Bill on leasehold reform is pretending and failing to solve.

I say “failing”, because that is the reason I rise to support new clause 5, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook). It is ridiculous that a landlord can take away a person’s home worth hundreds of thousands of pounds for a simple failure to pay a minor service charge amounting to a couple of hundred pounds and where there is a dispute over whether the service was even provided. That is why I tabled new clause 16 about moneys being held in trust, which would implement a provision of the 2002 Act that has never been brought into force. We heard in Committee that the policy had strong support from stakeholders, including spokespeople for the Property Institute and the Leasehold Advisory Service. Even the British Property Federation has campaigned for this provision of the 2002 Act to come into force, yet it is not here in the Bill. Of course, 2002 was a time when nobody had even predicted the new rentier practices that freeholders and developers have since invented to extract money from homeowners for the privilege of living in their own homes: the scandals of leasehold houses; the repeated doublings of ground rents; and the inclusion of commercial areas and shared services in any development to stop any hope of residents exercising their right to manage.