Lord Gove supports ending £250 capped ground rents after 20 years
NLC urges protection for fleecehold victims on managed estates
Liam Spender says power to hire and fire is best regulation of managing agents
It was a humiliating day for freehold owners at the Communities Select Committee last Tuesday (3 March 2026), with not one voice – apart from their own paid lobbyist – saying a single good word about their business practices. MPs repeatedly asked the landlord’s representative what ground rents were actually for and never got a straight answer.
Things began badly with Florence Eshalomi, the committee chair, explaining that she had conferred with the Speaker so that the committee could waive parliamentary sub-judice conventions in order to discuss “any relevant legal case”: this meant the freeholders judicial review over the 2024 Act.
Later she said it was “disappointing” that the freehold investment group ARC Time Income had declined to give evidence because of the on-going litigation. The Grosvenor Estate of the Duke of Westminster had also declined to appear, but has since changed its mind and will now do so later in the month.
In contrast to the freeholders, more than 500 leasehold home owners had responded to the committee’s call for evidence, Ms Eshalomi said.
Throughout the morning one MP after another deplored the fact that freehold owning entities, which like to portray themselves as responsible and accountable, had not turned up to give evidence.
Instead, the sole representative was paid lobbyist and solicitor Charmaine McQueen-Prince, of the Residential Freeholders’ Association, who was on the receiving end of the MPs’ frustration.
And there was certainly no comfort for the leasehold sector’s vested interests from Angela Rayner and Michael Gove, the two former housing secretaries, who concluded the session with a bravura performance urging on the government with its leasehold reforms.
It was such an cordial double act that committee member Chris Curtis, Labour MP for Milton Keynes, groaned at the prospect of a new political podcast duo in the making.
Lord Gove expressed his preference for a 20-year phase-out of ground rents now capped at £250, rather than the government’s decision to end them after 40 years – although that was not a time-scale he adopted when housing secretary.
The morning was split into four sections, beginning with evidence from Catherine Williams OBE, joint founder of the National Leasehold Campaign, and Liam Spender, solicitor, leaseholder litigant and trustee of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership.
Ms Williams welcomed commonhold as a means to end leasehold. But she warned that in existing blocks there will be flat owners who cannot afford to participate in the conversion to commonhold. They will none the less face the expense of having their leases varied. She wanted this potential burden – most acute for poorer leaseholders – to be addressed.
Whereas conversion to commonhold would help flat owners, in fleecehold managed estates – owners of leasehold [and freehold] houses would still be at the mercy of estate charges, which at present are difficult to challenge.
LKP has long argued that these house-owning leaseholders should have the same protections – and right to manage – as leasehold owners of flats.
She also pointed out that the government’s proposed £250 cap on ground rents would disproportionately benefit affluent leaseholders in London who have high ground rents, rather than poorer ones whose properties are worth considerably less than £250,000.
“NLC members are finding it very difficult to justify handing over their hard-earned money to a faceless freehold investor, who may have offshore accounts, for nothing.”
Ms Williams said investors had taken a “gamble” on buying freeholds and had had years of benefit from the income, whereas leaseholders “do not get any benefits”.
Mr Spender said of the reforms:
“For new buildings it is a long overdue reform that puts control where it belongs: which is with the people paying the bills. It brings England and Wales into line with the rest of the world.”
Mr Spender said that progress with the secondary legislation in the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 had been “frustrating”.
He also criticised the “40-year sunset period for existing ground rents” albeit without any inflation protection: Scotland managed the same in 30 years, and he thought 20 years was “fairer” – a view echoed later by Lord Gove.
In response to Gagan Mohindra, Conservative MP for South West Hertfordshire, Mr Spender expressed the view that as long as there are leasehold flats “it is possible to put head leases above them with things described as service charges that look like ground rents”.
“That is very common in modern and complicated mixed use sites, where you have retail, shared ownership and other types of housing… These charges are buried in the head leases; the leaseholders have to pay them through service charges. The longer you allow leasehold flats to be created, the greater the risk of more of those sorts of estate service charges being created. We should move quickly to stop that.”
Maya Ellis, Labour MP for Ribble Valley, was the first of several MPs to reference the regulation of managing agents – which residential freeholders in their lobbying are also advancing as a desirable leasehold reform, and almost certainly the only one.
Mr Spender replied: “Commonhold will succeed because it will give the most important power of hiring and firing to the people paying the bills: that is the most effective form of regulation that there is.
“I don’t think we should divert too much energy from improving this Bill to regulating managing agents at the moment, because there is a risk that that will push up prices in existing leasehold flats as the cost of that regulation will be passed on through service charges.
“Until everybody living in a block of flats or on a managed estate has the power to hire and fire, I am not convinced that you will see any improvement in quality among managing agents.”
As for the large managing agents – like FirstPort – who have thrived under the leasehold system, Mr Spender thought it would be “disappointing” if they were still in business in a commonhold regime.
“I think they are like dinosaurs looking at the asteroid heading towards them – I would hope so anyway.”
Ms Williams expressed the view that a regulator need to have teeth and that managing agents should certainly have no involvement in self-regulation as “they have proven to be very bad at that”.
In response to questions from Sarah Smith, Labour MP for Hyndburn who declared that she was a leaseholder, Mr Spender replied:
“Fundamentally, there will have to be cultural change and changes in the market for both managing agents and people living in buildings.
“Managing agents are going to have to get used to putting residents at the centre of what they do, and leaseholders … will have to get used to taking responsibility for being in democratic control.”
Mr Spender pointed out that in Australia, which has strata commonhold title, long-term energy contracts proved unfavourable to the flat owners and were “nipped in the bud”, while in England Ofgem had “belatedly taken over regulation of heat networks … and we are still no closer to solving the problem. It comes back to the point that the people who pay the bills are not in charge.”
Lewis Cocking, Conservative MP for Broxbourne who also declared himself to be a leaseholder, asked further questions on regulating managing agents as “All the management agents I come across are terrible.”
Mr Spender replied: “Standards are uniformly low across the market. If we make it easier for existing leasehold buildings to take over, you start introducing market discipline.
“I would be wary of introducing a system of regulation without teeth, which only passes on the cost to leaseholders and does not produce results. I am afraid that that is the model that the freeholders and managing agents are advocating for.”
In the second section the committee heard from two witnesses: Halima Ali, of the Home Owners Rights Network, which campaigns over private managed estates, and Harry Scoffin, of Free Leaseholders.
Mr Scoffin explained that he was deputy chair of the residents’ association and director of a right to manage company of a site in east London.
On previous occasions he has told MPs that his mother is a leaseholder at West India Quay, a high-end block of flats beside Canary Wharf. Mr Scoffin was made a director of No 1 West India Quay RTM Company Limited in January this year, which hopes to take over management control from the freehold owner, Monaco-based John Christodoulou.
Mr Scoffin told MPs last year that RTM at West India Quay would save 30% on the service charges.
Mr Christodoulou last year asked LKP to remove references to himself from our website, which we declined to do, and is reported to have done the same with other websites, according to Novara Media here:
This Billionaire Landlord Bullied Journalists Into Deleting Negative Coverage of Him
‘Rogue landlord’ John Christodoulou owes hundreds of thousands of pounds to former tenants. Instead of paying them, he is pressuring journalists to remove coverage of his unlawful behaviour. Rivkah Brown reports.
West India Quay also includes the significant commercial element of the 12-storey London Marriott Hotel Canary Wharf, which has made right to manage impossible because it amounts to more than 25% of the site: the 2024 Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act increased this threshold to 50% of a residential building, allowing more sites to opt for RTM.
In 2006 the hotel was in the news after a police inquiry when Tottenham Hotspur players fell ill after eating lasagne in the restaurant before a crucial Premier League match.
Will Forster, the LibDem MP for Woking, asked Mr Scoffin whether the draft Bill would “bring the feudal leasehold system to an end”.
Mr Scoffin replied: “They also say that leasehold ‘will be a feature of the housing market for many years to come’. Also, if you are protecting ground rent until 2068, you are basically sending a big signal to people that have bought up the freeholds to other people’s homes that this system is okay.”
Mr Scoffin said that there is a crisis in the flats market; that press reports said the difference in prices between houses and flats was the “biggest gap in 30 years”.
LKPs figures also point to major issues in the sector, but sales in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024 show that the number of sales was down by 5.4%. What LKP’s figures show is that the biggest fall is in the number of new sales, down by 67%.
Mr Scoffin also said that the Bill “has been shorn” of the Law Commission recommendations on enfranchisement and right to manage.
Mr Scoffin is correct that the government has not taken forward the Law Commission’s proposals on multi-block RTM and other improvements. The 2024 Act only implemented the Law Commission’s proposals on stopping landlords charging their costs for dealing with RTM and increasing the commercial floorspace limit from 25% to 50%, which are both now in effect. But the draft Bill is a draft, with scope to make amendments to RTM.
Later Mr Scoffin said he wished to see reforms to right to manage to allow fewer leaseholders – 35% – to trigger it given the prevalence of buy-to-let owners. This issue was considered and rejected by the Law Commision in their work on RMC and RTM reforms.
Mr Scoffin added: “You could even do something called implied terms in leases, where you say that every leaseholder in that block has given consent to be a member of the [right to manage] company. That would be a huge game changer.”
LKP has also pressed for action on the Law Commission’s recommendations with enfranchisement: it recommended that enfranchising leaseholders could avoid paying development value upfront provided they agreed to a restrictive covenant / overage agreement with the freeholder ensuring that the ex-leaseholders share any uplift in value with the freeholder if they decide to develop the site.
The consequences of failing to address this have been outlined by economist Alexander Hamilton:
Mr Scoffin also expressed concerns about a two-tier market, although LKP has long argued that the leasehold sector is multi-tiered owing to differences in leases, and management of the sites, varying from good re-sales prices to atrocious.
He said: “Our concern is that people are going to be trapped in a two-tier market. Everyone is going to rush to commonhold flats to juice developers’ profit margins — maybe on a Help to Buy 2.0 scheme — and the rest of us will be trapped.”
He later continued: “We saw it with the Conservatives. They gave us partial legislation that they dragged out to the end of the Parliament. We are really worried about Labour playing the same game, because No. 10 and the Treasury have been captured by these cartels, these interests — it is huge.”
After Mr Scoffin was challenged for evidence of this assertion by Ms Eshalomi, Mr Scoffin said: “You can see it in the media.”
Ms Ali, for her part, said that the issues of managed estates – which are not mentioned in the draft Bill at all at this point – did not concern property tenure: “The only way to help us is to legislate for a retrospective universal adoption [by local authorities].
LKP has urged right to manage at these sites so that the home owners can control these companies.
The list of MPs in the committee is here:
The full transcript of the hearing is here:
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/17254/pdf
The hearing can be watched via Parliament TV here:
https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/2f75f9bc-507f-4f80-bf7f-48b3483e2d77
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