By Sebastian O’Kelly LKP and the National Leasehold Campaign are organising a public meeting for leaseholders with the Law Commission tomorrow afternoon. Law Commissioner Professor Nicholas Hopkins and his team will explain their work on enfranchisement, lease extension and commonhold. Other speakers will include Professor Susan Bright, of Oxford University, and barrister Amanda Gourlay. There […]
LKP’s essential leasehold guide in The Sunday Times … feel free to add
By Sebastian O’Kelly It was good to be able to use a small Q&A article in yesterday’s Sunday Times to offer a mini guide for leaseholders. This is the sort of thing the Leasehold Advisory Service should be putting out, if it were not in thrall to the commercialisers in the sector. Indeed, it was […]
Is LEASE an institutionally corrupted organisation?
“Institutional corruption is manifest when there is a systemic and strategic influence which is legal, or even currently ethical, that undermines the institution’s effectiveness by diverting it from its purpose or weakening its ability to achieve its purpose, including, to the extent relevant to its purpose, weakening either the public’s trust in that institution or […]
Martin Boyd should be the chair of LEASE
By Sebastian O’Kelly, LKP trustee There is only one outstanding candidate to be chair of LEASE and that is Martin Boyd. He is the only person involved in leasehold activism with the knowledge and abilities that will hold credibility with the sector. He is respected on this subject by ministers, MPs and civil servants. As […]
LEASE chair Roger Southam resigns
The taxpayer-funded Leasehold Advisory Service, LEASE, has announced this evening that its non-executive chair, Roger Southam, has resigned with immediate effect. No explanation for the resignation is given, but it follows calls from the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership that he resign, questions in the Commons from MPs such as Justin Madders and LKP patron Sir Peter […]
National Leasehold Campaign tells Roger Southam to resign from LEASE
UPDATE: Has Roger Southam resigned from Savills? His LinkedIn profile suggest his employment there discontinued at the end of last month. He is now associated with the Eighty Nine Consultancy, which has no website and may be self-employment. The National Leasehold Campaign Facebook group today urged Roger Southam to resign as chairman of the […]
LEASE chair Roger Southam launched complaint to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner against Sir Peter Bottomley and Jim Fitzpatrick (and LKP, naturally enough)
‘Why was I left out?’ asks Sir Ed Davey Roger Southam, the chairman of the Leasehold Advisory Service, issued a complaint to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner about Sir Peter Bottomley and Jim Fitzpatrick He added LKP in the official complaint, in its role as secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group. “I am disappointed not […]
Thanks LKP for raising Grenfell issues. Now we are giving yet more money to LEASE, says housing minister
The housing minister Alok Sharma has thanked LKP for raising Grenfell cladding issues in private apartment blocks. We have intervened in a number of these cases, and will continue to do so. Our intervention at Blenheim Centre / Reflexion on behalf of leaseholders resulted in freeholder Legal and General agreeing to pay the £165,000 a […]
We are dissatisfied with the running of LEASE, APPG chairs tells housing minister
Earlier this afternoon two of the co-chairs of the Leasehold and Commonhold Reform All Party Parliamentary Group made a submission to the backbench business committee for a debate on leasehold and commonhold issues. At approximately 2:47 Sir Peter Bottomley states that he wishes to “place on the record we are dissatisfied with the running of […]
Sector foxes warn that changing leasehold will be ‘dangerous’. But for whom?
The government now understands something that LKP has been saying for years: leasehold is a deeply flawed system. It is also a critical and growing part of the housing market in England and Wales. The Housing White Paper entitled “Fixing our broken housing market” launched in February 2017 made this very clear. This has come […]
Roger Southam silenced on LEASE website as blog is removed
The sector fights back … er, deploying LEASE chair Roger Southam The blog of Roger Southam, the controversial chairman of the Leasehold Advisory Service, was removed this afternoon. The article was seen as an apologia of the existing leasehold system that has brought misery to tens of thousands of leasehold owners, particularly those in new-build […]
The sector fights back … er, deploying LEASE chair Roger Southam
A message from LEASE Chair Roger Southam – The Leasehold Advisory Service July 2017 It is great to see the two DCLG consultations launched and the opportunity to have open engagement to address the issues. In reality leasehold is not the evil thing that is being portrayed. Doubling ground rents and unreasonable administration fees are […]
Not the job of LEASE to warn ministers of leasehold houses scandal, Roger Southam tells BBC
Roger Southam, the controversial chairman of the Leasehold Advisory Service, told the BBC today that it was not the quango’s job to alert ministers to the leasehold houses scandal. Mr Southam said that LEASE was not a lobbying organisation and that it was tasked with giving impartial advice to all in the sector. Asked […]
Motion of no confidence in Roger Southam as LEASE chair
DCLG stakeholders’ meeting for leaseholders told property manager chairman must go UPDATE: Roger Southam and Jim Fitzpatrick MP are being jointly interviewed on leasehold homes tomorrow on BBC R4 You & Yours 12.15 A motion of no confidence in Roger Southam, chairman of the Leasehold Advisory Service, was proposed at the DCLG leasehold stakeholders’ meeting […]
Is this LEASE being ‘unapologetically on the side of leaseholders’, Mr Barwell?
Two months after the housing minister told the Leasehold Advisory Service that it would be funded to free itself from commercial dependence on the sector, it is selling its services again. Gavin Barwell told LEASE at its humiliating annual conference on February 1, that: “What we really want is for [LEASE] to help leaseholders. To […]
DCLG rejects second complaint about Roger Southam as LEASE chair. He was appointed on merit, it claims
The Department of Communities and Local Government has rejected a second complaint about Roger Southam being the chairman of the Leasehold Advisory Service. “Mr Southam has not done anything in his private business that impinges upon his role as Chair of LEASE,” the DCLG tells the National Leasehold Campaign Facebook group. The group represents many […]
