Paul

LABOUR IS BACKTRACKING It’s now a top-tier political issue, with @bbclaurak drawing a car-crash performance from @AngelaRayner. Rayner refused to give leaseholders a cast-iron guarantee that the cost of extending a lease or buying out the freehold will come down. Yet that was Labour’s position in opposition. Labour warned that governments could be “lobbied by vested interests” into setting enfranchisement rates “that will be punitive for leaseholders”. And @mtpennycook even tabled amendments to the legislation that became the 2024 Act, seeking to make premiums “as cheap as possible for leaseholders”. Yet for the past two and a half years, the government has been stalling on the commencement of these enfranchisement reforms, already on the statute book, claiming they will only come into force once it has made “fixes” to the 2024 Act through the forthcoming Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill. But Pennycook’s opposition amendments, which sought to establish a “guiding principle” of “reducing premiums for leaseholders to their lowest possible level”, are not being carried forward. Look at the small print of the government consultation on lease extension and freehold buy-out rates that neither Rayner nor Pennycook publicised in the media. It opened on 15 July without an awareness campaign and closed on Wednesday. Once these rates are picked by Ministers, they are locked in for 10 years: what leaseholders must pay. The policy will decide whether leasehold will live or die. Leaseholders were left out in the cold again, while the consultation’s obscure legal and technical jargon favoured freeholders and their lawyer and valuer lobbyists, who will have flooded it with responses. Even our supporters who are economists, have PhDs, or have backgrounds in finance and regulation said they had never encountered a more exclusionary or gamed government consultation in their lives. But buried in that consultation is Labour’s U-turn, in paragraph 14: “… it is not intended to use prescribed rates in and of themselves, as a means of further reducing premiums for leaseholders”. The enfranchisement rates policy is now merely to: “... reduce the potential for dispute and provide certainty for leaseholders, freeholders and professionals as to what to expect from this part of the enfranchisement process.” So much, then, for Labour’s manifesto promise to “act where the Conservatives have failed and finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end”. No wonder Rayner and Pennycook are lashing out. Note the sass when Rayner invokes the Prime Minister, as if @andyburnham saying the right things about leasehold were enough to guarantee that this government will ensure a policy agenda repeatedly captured by vested interests finally favours leaseholders, not the property mafia. All the evidence of the past two and a half years, the excuses, foot-dragging and U-turns, points in the opposite direction. And Rayner acts as if journalists in a democracy need ask no further questions about this vitally important issue. We want to work with the Prime Minister and his Number 10 team to get these reforms right, but we’re being shut out. It doesn’t help when the PM’s housing minister is calling the government’s U-turn “misinformation”. We’ve run this campaign long enough to know that talking is not the same as doing. And leaseholders are rapidly running out of time. Ending leasehold is the test of the Burnham government, whether they want it to be or not.