Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether she plans to end ground rent.

The Government will act quickly to provide homeowners with greater rights. This includes driving up the transparency of service charges and reducing barriers for leaseholders to challenge their landlord. Over the course of this Parliament the Government will go further by enacting remaining Law Commission recommendations and tackling unregulated and unaffordable ground rent charges.

The Government will take steps to bring the feudal leasehold system to an end and reinvigorate commonhold by modernising the legal framework. We will also ban the sale of new leasehold flats. The Government will consult on the best way to achieve this, so that generations to come will benefit from absolute homeownership.

Our planned reforms to empower leaseholders and provide new and existing homeowners with greater security will help ensure landlords and managing agents are better held to account for management failures. It will also make it easier for leaseholders to take on management of their buildings themselves so they can directly appoint or replace agents.

The Government intends to bring forward draft legislation so that it may be subject to broad consultation and additional scrutiny by Parliament. It is only right that the Government takes its time when dealing with such a complex subject to make sure that any future legislation gets it right.