Calls Grow for Reform of Leasehold System Amid Ground Rent Concerns

I believed this government’s manifesto promise to end leasehold and free me. But that promise seems to have evaporated. Legislation is endlessly delayed. All the while, Labour remain silent on eradicating ground rent which is a fundamental component of this parasitic system now paralysing our lives.

My wife and I are among the 43 per cent of leaseholders who say the leasehold system has stopped them starting a family, according to a poll last year by Opinium for Free Leaseholders.

The draft Commonhold Bill, promised in the 2024 King’s Speech and meant for publication in the second half of 2025, was quietly paused by Number 10 just before Christmas.

Last-minute lobbying by freehold investors to block a cap on ground rents, a policy core to ending leasehold, is said to have spooked aides to the Prime Minister. 

If ground rents are not cut to peppercorn, i.e. zero financial value, or even the £250-a-year compromise cap, millions of “working people” who bought homes in good faith and are being trapped by rip-off fees are being sold out.

Ten years ago, I was a first-time buyer using the government’s Help to Buy scheme. The developer steered me toward their “recommended” solicitor: easier, cheaper, they said. I trusted the system. 

What I got: an escalating RPI-linked ground rent now approaching £400 a year. A one-bedroom flat worth perhaps £270,000 on paper, but a double whammy of ground rent payable to a third party and the building safety crisis trashes its value. A property that I cannot sell, cannot remortgage, and perhaps cannot ever escape without paying a punitive amount to buy out a clause that should be illegal.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that “necessity never made a good bargain”. He was right. Young people using Help to Buy buy from necessity, vulnerable to developers who hold all the legal, financial and informational cards. The developers’ power is exploited by an industry determined to extract as much cash as possible from unsuspecting buyers.

The gap in reform thinking

The government and its allies frame the debate around prevention, mandating commonhold for future developments and self-congratulating about the 2022 ban on ground rents for new leases. 

But this is throwing existing leaseholders, victims like me, under the bus to protect ground rent grazers and boost the new-builds market for developers. Millions who bought in good faith are held as financial captives by the exploitative leasehold system, regretting the day we “got on the ladder”. Trust in the system is gone, deepening the sense of a broken social contract.

If Labour has the mandate to end leasehold and the second-largest parliamentary majority in its 125-year history, why won’t it stand up to the exploiters and free the exploited? 

The chokehold of leasehold

Our freehold was sold to a third-party investor one month after completion. They paid for an income stream: our escalating ground rent. They provide nothing. They maintain nothing. We already have a Resident Management Company (RMC) controlled by us, the leaseholders. The ground rent is pure extraction. The Competition and Markets Authority determined in 2024 that modern monetary ground rents are neither legally nor commercially necessary.

But control without freehold ownership is an illusion. 

We took our freeholder to tribunal over buildings insurance and won. It was found there had been £645,000 in overpayments, 157 per cent more than should have been charged. Victory, right? No. To recover that money requires separate litigation. More lawyers. More costs. More years.

The idea that monetising third-party landlordism is a necessity in England and Wales in 2026 – or that flat owners here are uniquely incapable of controlling their own buildings and costs, unlike almost everywhere else in the world where commonhold-style systems flourish – is a fantasy. 

But it is one that apparently holds sway when whispered to successive governments.

The “legal advice” myth

A familiar defence emerges: you signed the lease with legal advice. You should have known.

Like thousands, I was steered to the developer’s solicitor as a condition of the sale. The advice was conflicted from the outset. In 2015, banks weren’t flagging RPI-backed and doubling ground rents.

To blame buyers for a systemic failure that government, developers, conveyancers, and investors all enabled is intellectually dishonest. It protects the bad players while punishing the weakest and most blameless party, leaseholders.

Help to Buy was a flagship government-backed scheme. It required buyers to purchase new-builds and funnelled them into toxic leases, helping spawn the exponential growth of a 21st-century rent-seeking class of “professional freeholders”. 

The idea that leaseholders should just grin and bear it if they cannot afford thousands or tens of thousands of pounds for a lease extension to escape a trap that the state helped set is outrageous. In other parts of our economy, consumer rights and unfair contract terms legislation protect buyers. 

What ground rent reform needs

With the Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 restricting ground rents on new leasehold homes to peppercorn, or zero financial value, properties with monetary ground rents are less attractive to lenders and buyers. 

To stop accusations of “two-tier Keir”, this Labour government must peppercorn all existing residential ground rents. If we are paying for nothing, we should be paying nothing.  

Any policy that is a fudge, avoiding peppercorning or a £250 per annum cap on the basis of tackling the most “aggressive” ground rents, will just perpetuate the market paralysis and exploitation of existing leaseholders. Also, a 0.1 per cent restriction will be a costly and litigious valuation nightmare.

My property, purchased for £270,000 in 2015 and now unsaleable, carries a ground rent approaching £400 per year. These properties will never recover their marketability of their own accord.

In October, the High Court made clear in its decision against the freeholders who invoked “human rights” to block reforms under the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 that they had assumed an investment risk. Investments rise and fall, and Parliament has the power to rebalance unfair contracts in the public interest, even if this diminishes the value of freeholders’ so-called assets. 

Voters have no sympathy for those who bought into one of the UK’s largest organised scams and now expect to be compensated when Parliament delivers a manifesto commitment to end the feudal leasehold system for good. 

The cost of inaction

I’ve lost nearly a decade fighting my way out of a situation that should never have been allowed. Tribunals, letters to ministers and committees, insurance analysis, campaign work. I bought this flat for somewhere to live and move on. That shouldn’t be too much to ask in modern Britain.

There are thousands like me. Millions, if you count everyone touched by leasehold’s extractive machinery.

We are workers in the economy, education and the NHS. Working people who just need a home of our own.

A choice for the Prime Minister

This government promised to “end the feudal leasehold system”, not make it “fairer”.

“Legal challenges might delay it” is a freeholder lobby talking point. 

Starmer has a choice: show politics is a force for good, or side with the lobbyists to maintain the leasehold gravy train, write off our generation and fuel a backlash at the next election.

Joe Douglas is a chartered management consultant. He is also a leaseholder, RMC director in north London, and campaigner with Free Leaseholders. He has appeared at the property tribunal four times over insurance overcharging.