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You are here: Home / Latest News / Estate of leasehold campaigner Nigel Wilkins leaves £10,000 to LKP

Estate of leasehold campaigner Nigel Wilkins leaves £10,000 to LKP

July 30, 2019 //  by Sebastian O'Kelly

A passion for justice: Nigel Wilkins (d. February 2017), who ran Campaign for the Abolition of Residential Leasehold

By Sebastian O’Kelly

The estate of Nigel Wilkins, the leasehold activist who died after a brief illness in February 2017 aged 66, has left £10,000 to the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership.

LKP sincerely thanks the executors and Nigel’s family for making this donation and we will ensure that it is put to good use.

March 2014: An early LKP Westminster meeting about right to manage at Portcullis House. Clockwise from left: Rob Plumb, HML Holdings plc; Neil Mulhoney, IRPM; Paula Hassall, DCLG; (Sebastian O’Kelly, absent taking picture); Katherine O’Riordan, aide to Sir Peter Bottomley; Sir Peter Bottomley MP; Martin Boyd, LKP / Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation; Nigel Wilkins, Carl; Jim Fitzpatrick, MP Poplar and Limehouse; Cherry Jones, managing agent; Justin Tomlinson, Conservative MP Swindon North.

For years Nigel Wilkins ran the Campaign Against Residential Leasehold.

In addition, he was a leaseholder in South Kensington and was employed at the Financial Services Authority, and its successors the Financial Conduct Authority.

As such he was well placed to appreciate the financial scale of the residential leasehold market, and the considerable financial interests – often based offshore – which sought to profit from it.

Nigel produced an authoritative printed newsletter called The Leaseholder, which I used to receive as a journalist on national newspapers long before the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership was founded.

It continued until the end of his life and produced some excellent editorial.

I was struck by his observation that a mortgage fraudster, a Mr Waya, was treated more leniently by the criminal courts than leaseholders are by the civil ones.

Although Mr Waya was sent off to prison and his property portfolio of flats repossessed by the banks he cheated, the criminal courts were scrupulous in returning to him his seed capital that had launched his career.

Leaseholders, on the other hand, face lease forfeiture – often from the most dubious landlords and their legal henchmen – which results in total loss of all capital in a lease and any mortgage, too.

As Nigel pointed out:

“So leaseholders are being treated far worse than criminals when it comes to forfeiture. Moreover any debts due are purely civil debts, and not a result of theft.

“As we all know a large proportion of the “debts” owed by leaseholders arise because of theft and incompetence by landlords, managing agents and others – the so-called ‘professionals’.”

With such sharp and accurate analysis of the leasehold sector, Nigel would have been a natural ally of LKP.

CARL had been set up by Nigel and another formidable West London activist called Joan South (who is still recalled with some dread by older leasehold sector professionals).

But its glory days were the 1990s, and CARL never made the transition into mass media digital communications, which have seen the rise of LKP and, later, the National Leasehold Campaign (which Nigel would have also hugely applauded).

At Nigel’s memorial wake, I made the observation that his membership of the Kensington Labour party was evidence in itself of an optimistic and cheery mindset. Indeed, he stood unsuccessfully for the local council several times.

Sadly, Nigel did not live to see the extraordinary election of Emma Dent Coad as Labour MP for Kensington and Chelsea – probably the richest constituency in the country – a few months after his death.

Another regret is that he did not live to see the current transformative efforts being made to reform the leasehold sector, with both the Conservative government and the Labour Opposition committed to ending future ground rents.

Nigel would have understood that the ending of this sole legitimate income stream, ends the leasehold game.

Everything falls away to leaseholder empowerment after that, and every new block of flats will be set up – as it should be – with a residents’ management company.

Nigel was far too sensible to know that there will always be plenty of squabbling in communal living set-ups such as flats.

But ridding residential leasehold of a whole load of anonymous scamps, often based offshore, from turning ordinary people’s homes into their investment asset is something he would have warmly applauded.

Requiescat in pace, Nigel. It is up to us to finish the job.

Related posts:

Nigel Wilkins, long term campaigner for leasehold abolition, dies aged 66 Default ThumbnailLeasehold forfeiture: why is LEASE so pathetic over this, too? OFT told: You’ve had the facts on leasehold for years. Just get on with it! ‘Scandalous’ that Duke of Westminster’s wealth comes from leasehold, claims campaigner MPs call for all-party group on leasehold, and to stop right to manage being thwarted

Category: Latest News, NewsTag: Campaign Against Residential Leasehold, CARL, Nigel Wilkins

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Comments

  1. Fiona

    August 7, 2019 at 6:53 am

    RIP Nigel Wilkins.

    Friends and supporters of The Leaseholders Knowledge Partnership, would like to Thank Nigel Wilkins & the trustees for their extremely kind & altruistic nature for supporting an exceptionally worthy organisation, The Leaseholders Knowledge.

    This amazing organisation is genuinely like no other organisation that I have experienced, sharing its knowledge, wisdom, providing advice & support (completely FREE of charge) to others and even sourcing solicitors & barristers to assist leaseholders who are in absolute dire straits & on the verge of losing their homes.

    The financial support will allow the leasehold knowledge party to continue to exist and fight the great imbalance of power between leaseholders and freeholder…which the government not only allows such abuse to exist (payment for no service) but support a freeholders disgusting behaviour by permitting freeholders to levy a further charge when leaseholders extend their lease by allowing “marriage value” to exist, which is NOT even detailed in A LEASE!!

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