Housing Reform
-
● The Government is committed to helping more people to
own the home of their dreams. We believe home ownership
provides people with greater security to raise a family and
live comfortably.
-
● Alongside the work to improve the regulation of
social housing, the Government remains committed to creating
a fair and just housing system that works for everyone.
-
● The Government will be taking forward a comprehensive
programme of reform to improve fairness and transparency in
the leasehold market.
-
● The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 will come
into force on 30 June. This means that landlords will be
prevented from requiring a financial ground rent in most new
long residential leases. We will also publish accompanying
guidance for enforcement officers and consumers.
-
● This was the first part of our seminal programme to
implement leasehold and commonhold reform in this Parliament.
Building on this, the Government remains committed to:
o transforming the experience of leaseholders by making it easier
and cheaper for them to extend their lease or buy their freehold,
and simpler and quicker to take control of the management of
their building;
o better protecting and empowering leaseholders by giving them
more information on what their costs cover and ensuring they are
not subject to any unjustified legal costs and can claim their
own legal costs from their landlord;
o banning new leasehold houses so that all new houses are
freehold from the outset other than in exceptional circumstances;
and
o delivering a reformed commonhold system as an alternative to
leasehold ownership.
● We will continue to work closely with the Competition and
Markets Authority as their investigation into mis-selling and
unfair terms in the leasehold sector continues. In recent months,
the Authority secured commitments from fifteen businesses that
had bought freeholds from the housing developer Countryside to
remove egregious doubling ground rents terms for their
leaseholders and revert charges to original rates. We encourage
developers who have not yet engaged with the investigation to do
so.
● This is part of a wider housing reform agenda to level up
homeownership. We have set ambitious housing missions for renters
to have a secure path to ownership and reduce the number of
non-decent rented homes. The Government is also supporting more
first-time buyers to get onto the housing ladder; has announced
the offer to regenerate 20 towns and cities across England;
launched a £1.5 billion Levelling Up Homebuilding Fund; is
increasing the amount of affordable housing and is also reducing
homelessness.
Key facts
-
● There are around 4.6 million leasehold homes in
England, representing almost one in five of the total housing
stock.
-
● The Law Commission’s investigation on how to help
existing leaseholders and revitalise commonhold provided a
set of recommendations in 2020 for the Government to
consider. They highlighted the need to make the process of
lease extensions and freehold acquisitions easier and
cheaper, the need to revise the eligibility of Right to
Manage and simplify this process, and to re-invigorate
commonhold as a workable alternative to leasehold.
-
● Multiple industry surveys over the last six years
have reported major problems with the system, including
owners of long leasehold properties unaware of being in a
‘landlord and tenant relationship’ and having different
rights to owner occupiers.
