Sebastian O’Kelly
Martin Boyd
sok@leaseholdknowledge.com
Press / admin / urgent 07808 328230
For help on leases issues, please use the contact form here. It asks the essential information and saves us time:
The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership is a registered charity (number: 1162584) and the secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold and commonhold reform chaired by the MPs Sir Peter Bottomley (Conservative), Justin Madders (Labour) and Sir Ed Davey (LibDem). They are also the patrons of LKP.
The deputy chairs are Marie Rimmer (Lab), Baroness Gardner (Con) and, as of May 2020, Sir Bob Neill (Con), which special responsibility for the cladding crisis.
The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership exists to protect ordinary leaseholders who get caught up in the leasehold game. Most don’t know the rules, and yet they are up against professionals for whom this form of tenure can be highly profitable.
Advising leaseholders. Avoiding disasters. Stopping forfeiture. Exposing abuses. Urging reform.
We depend on individuals for the majority of our funding.
Getting justice can be difficult, the property tribunal cost regime is unfair, and there are numerous expensive pitfalls that must be avoided.
Freeholders, with a minimal investment in a block of flats, hold a preponderance of power, which includes the nuclear option of forfeiture of a lease where the entire asset is seized.
LKP is very proud of having stopped game-playing lawyers from seizing an £800,000 flat off a pensioner over what began as a £7,000 dispute.
LKP aims to help leaseholders, publish authoritative editorial and campaign for legislative and regulatory changes.
If you are a leaseholder needing advice, please feel free to contact us.
LKP provides no paid services whatsoever – although if we have provided assistance you are welcome to make a donation.
The organisation originated after scandals in the retirement leasehold sector gave birth to our sister organisation Better Retirement Housing, formerly the Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation.
LKP receives income from an accreditation scheme for managing agents, and advertising.
The managing agents that are accredited sign up to good governance, open accounting and straight dealing.
They charge a clear fee for property management – often on behalf of the residents’ own management companies – and do not pocket commissions offered by insurers, energy companies and assorted service providers.
In short, they don’t collude with others to overcharge the residents, which is particularly depressing to encounter with the elderly in retirement developments.
To be accredited, LKP managing agents must sign up to a 35-point accreditation process, and residents in the blocks they manage are selected at random to provide references.
LKP is very proud to be a member – an “accelerated start-up” – with the Open Data Institute, founded by the world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, the artificial intelligence academic at Oxford. its aim is to make publicly available data more widely accessible and socially useful. LKP fully accords with those aims and we understand that by providing data – on leasehold, on offshore property ownership, on tribunal decisions – we will crack many of the scams and exploitation in leasehold. Owning a home really should not be this complicated, and it isn’t in other jurisdictions outside England and Wales.
Leasehold Knowledge Partnership Limited (company number: 08999652) is a company limited by guarantee that is a registered charity (number: 1162584) with the Charities Commission.
Better Retirement Housing www.betterretirementhousing.com deals with retirement housing issues.
Leasehold Knowledge Partnership
The Open Data Institute
3rd Floor
65 Clifton Street,
London EC2A 4JE.
