Leaseholders are losing it with Labour

It’s been half a year and there has been no movement, despite the High Court in October siding with the government against elite landowners who waged a judicial review against the 2024 act, which Labour crucially supported in the pre-election wash-up.

A self-styled government for the people being this cosy with Big Money is terrible politics, especially with leasehold contributing to the cost-of-living emergency and local elections fast approaching.

Indeed, Green Party leader Zack Polanski smells opportunity. Earlier this month, Polanski mobilised urban voters and nearly broke X by going to war on a post by a Labour MP boasting of yet another closed-door meeting with industry insiders. With zero leaseholders or campaigners there, it looked like putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.

“A self-styled government for the people being this cosy with Big Money is terrible politics, especially with leasehold contributing to the cost-of-living emergency and local elections fast approaching”

“How quickly did ‘abolish leasehold’ become work with managing agents and insurance companies to ‘reform’? Labour constantly showing where their loyalties lies – and it’s definitely not with the people,” he posted.

Anxiety over Polanski – who is two points behind Starmer in a YouGov poll on who Britons think would make the best prime minister – weighing in on Labour’s leasehold foot-dragging boiled over last week. In parliament, Pennycook attacked “the usual naysayers” and talked up the complexity of leasehold and commonhold policymaking.

Why is a Labour government with the second-biggest parliamentary majority in the party’s 126-year history acting powerless to deliver a manifesto promise that will cut the cost of living and tackle injustice?

As health secretary Wes Streeting says, “this excuses culture does the centre-left no favours. If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge?”

On the enfranchisement consultation he promised for summer 2025, Pennycook dodged his broken promise by weaponising an excuse he made in November 2024: that there are supposed defects in the 2024 act.

“There’s been ample time to make the fixes, and Pennycook’s department could have used the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 or the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025”

However, in his November 2024 timetable, Pennycook never made publishing the enfranchisement consultation dependent on making those corrections first.

There’s been ample time to make the fixes, and his department could have used the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 or the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025. There is precedent: defects in the Building Safety Act 2022 were fixed via the unrelated Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.

As government dithers, the flats market is in freefall, with the gap between house and flat prices at its widest in 30 years. A crisis trapping people in their homes requires a crisis response.

The collapse in buyer and lender confidence in leasehold flats is hitting the capital especially. New Hamptons data shows London is now the UK’s most likely location for homes to sell at a loss. Flat sellers, accounting for 60% of transactions last year, made up 90% of homes sold at a loss.

Even if the draft Commonhold Bill is published imminently, as is now being suggested post-Polanski, leaseholders won’t be celebrating.

We need assurances that the legislation will be prioritised on the statute books and commenced in full along with the 2024 act, which sits rusting, well ahead of the next general election.

Nor will weird legalism surrounding the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights be acceptable. Last month in a Spectator interview with Dominic Cummings, Lord Michael Gove, the former housing secretary who spearheaded the 2024 act, said these laws were even being invoked by blockers within the last Conservative administration to hurt the leasehold abolition agenda.

The government must slash money-for-nothing ground rents to peppercorn, or zero. Labour pushed for this in opposition. Now, the party can finally deliver for the working people it claims to represent.

Nearly half of leaseholders say leasehold has prevented them starting a family, rising to 56% in London, found a poll by Opinium for Free Leaseholders last year. The government is mistaken if they think continued foot-dragging and excuses won’t be politically disastrous.

Removing the barriers to freehold acquisition for a mass shift to commonhold requires going beyond timid Law Commission proposals that began life a decade ago under a Conservative administration which was not committed to ending leasehold.

With Reform UK now rumoured to launch an attack over what it calls a betrayal of “alarm clock Britain”, and following government U-turns on farmers’ inheritance tax and mandatory digital ID, Starmer will have to change tack again, siding with the grafters, not the grifters, on leasehold.

Harry Scoffin, founder, Free Leaseholders