Commonhold and Leasehold Reform: Managing Agents

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield Hallam) (Lab)]

I declare an interest as a leasehold homeowner, which is very common in Sheffield. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) for securing this important debate. I agree wholeheartedly with the recommendations of her Committee, and of Lord Best, about a regulator.

I welcome the fact that this Government have begun to take a close look at the injustices embedded in the leasehold system. It treats leaseholders not as full homeowners, but as a revenue stream for distant freeholders and managing agents. The draft commonhold and leasehold reform Bill is an important step forward in correcting the imbalance, and I believe that it will help address many of the structural problems that leaseholders have endured. In my constituency, the consequences of the system are painfully clear, as has been mentioned by my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed). Not only have my constituents experienced threats of forfeiture, but they have been asked to pay thousands of pounds to their freeholder for minor breaches of their lease.

The ability of a freeholder to strip someone of their home is an extraordinary concentration of power, and I am pleased that the Government’s commonhold and leasehold reform Bill proposes abolishing forfeiture entirely. However, abolishing forfeiture alone does not resolve the fundamental injustice. Leaseholders remain trapped in a system that, at its core, is a feudal relic—a structure designed not to empower people, but to extract value from them. Under this system, people who have bought homes find themselves paying escalating service charges, opaque administration fees and arbitrary costs imposed by freeholders.

A significant number of my constituents own leasehold houses, and their lease requires them to ask permission from their freeholder before building a loft conversion or extension, and even before selling on their home. Those permissions are demanded in return for ground rents of little worth—often £10 a year—yet they give freeholders extraordinary control over the lives of leaseholders. That is not a fair housing system.

My constituents have a clear ask. They have rightly suggested that leaseholders of houses should be given a statutory right of first refusal when their leaseholds are sold. At present, leaseholders of houses do not have this right, while leaseholders of flats do. If a freeholder decides to sell the freehold of a house, the leaseholder has no guaranteed opportunity to buy it. They may learn of the sale only once it has occurred, several months later. If we are serious about empowering leaseholders, the right of first refusal must be extended. That should be included in the Bill.

It is not just freeholders who cause problems. We have heard about the problems caused to residents by managing agents, including in my constituency, where leaseholders were made to find £22,000 within five months for major works after an inept management company left balconies and walls to crumble, and the eventual repairs to become more expensive. A two-bedroom flat on that estate was advertised for sale with an annual service charge of £5,067, or £422 a month, which in Sheffield is a staggering amount of money, given our relatively low housing costs.

Unsurprisingly, some of my constituents have struggled to sell their flats; they are trapped in the Catch-22 that others have mentioned. It is time that we ended that. We need to ensure that all the powers in the Bill are enacted, but we should also be looking at ways to future-proof it, and to root the regulator in fairness.