Leasehold Reform

James Grundy Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Grundy (Leigh) (Con)]

With regard to leasehold reform, I will speak briefly, if I may, on how many of the leaseholds in my constituency came about. As many people will know—including the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy)—Leigh was a mining town and a mill town that grew quite large in the 19th century. The terraced houses in the centre of Leigh, which I think are responsible for most of the leaseholds in the town, were originally built mostly on land owned by either the Anglican Church or other Churches and on Lord Lilford’s estate.

At the time that that was done, it was quite sensible. The meaning of Leigh is literally “meadow”; the land in what is now the centre of Leigh was in a bit of a depression, so it tended to be quite boggy and was not very good for agriculture. As the coal was found and the cotton came in from Liverpool, all the mills and the terraced houses surrounding them grew up in the town. I think the original intention—although we cannot know, because of course no one from that era is around—was that, while those rents would now be viewed as peppercorns, so many of them were under the same landowner that they were perhaps a replacement for the revenue lost from the somewhat marginal agricultural land that the terraced houses were built on.

However, here we are, a considerable amount of time later. All these rents on leases are now what we would consider peppercorn rents, and many of them have not been collected for decades—as the hon. Member for Wigan said, in some cases, we do not even know who the leaseholds are held by. Recently, a local solicitor with some concern about these issues visited my office to talk through some of them, and I have written to the Minister about the matter with a series of recommendations. I hope she has received my letter; if not, I dare say that I will chase her about it after the debate.

Several things happened far later than we expected after the original leases were put in place. As other Members on both sides of the House have alluded to, what is now happening is that, completely out of the blue, people in some of those terraced houses in Leigh are receiving a letter from a firm of solicitors on behalf of someone who has either found that they own the leasehold or purchased it off someone else. It might have been the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) who said that, in some cases, these are now being treated as financial products, traded and sold.

People have seen letters arriving, saying, “For the past 50 years, your peppercorn rent has been the modern equivalent of three shillings and sixpence. However, attached to this bill for the peppercorn rent is a multi-thousand pound legal bill for all the work we have had to do to trace back the origin of the last time this peppercorn rent was paid.” What was initially put in place as a sensible arrangement when Queen Victoria was on the throne has decayed into this sort of semi-dodgy business. I understand the complexity, and we have heard from both sides of the House that certain aspects of leasehold reform are more difficult than others.

However, a sharp practice has been allowed to grow up because leases that were put in place so long ago are no longer fit for purpose. The situation has been described, quite rightly, as a semi-feudal system and, just as with all other things feudal that we have seen fall into abeyance and disappear or be reformed over the years, it is time for comprehensive leasehold reform and, in some cases, the outright abolition of the system.

A truism in this country is that an Englishman’s home is his castle. We should do as much as we can to ensure that that saying goes from a truism to a truth, and I look forward to Government proposals to address these issues. There is cross-party support for, shall we say, a maximalist position—so as much as can be done within reason on this—and I look forward to a solution that has cross-party support because we need to act. There are things that can be dealt with now, and maybe some things later, but we need to get on with this and the sooner, the better.