EXPERT: Leasehold reforms have ‘failed to make process easier’
John Midgley of ALEP says leasehold practitioners are stuck in "a state of indecision" after the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act was passed a year ago.
Property professionals are disillusioned with recent reforms to leasehold, with two thirds saying it has failed to make things easier.
In a poll of leasehold practitioners, 67% said the process of extending a lease is just as difficult as it was before the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act came in a year ago.
The act was one of the only law changes that made it before the General Election was called in May last year.
It meant a ban on leaseholds for new houses would become law, as well as extending the standard lease term to 990 years. But a controversial cap on ground rent was left out.
Further and quickly
Labour then said in the King’s Speech after the Election it would go further with reform and quickly. This would include giving leaseholders greater rights to extend their lease, buy the freehold, and take over the freeholder’s building management functions.
But ‘secondary legislation’ was required to make any of the measures become actual law.
The survey carried out by ALEP (the Association of Leasehold Enfranchisement Practitioners), reveals that very little has changed.
The market is now caught in a state of indecision.”
John Midgley, Director at ALEP (main picture), says: “The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 was passed with great haste, in the ‘wash up’ at the end of the last parliament, just before the election.
“The result is exactly what many of us feared – a piecemeal piece of legislation that not only requires extensive secondary legislation and time to enact (as might be anticipated), but also by the government’s own admission needs primary legislation to fix fundamental flaws in the valuation mechanism before it can be made ‘live’.
“The market is now caught in a state of indecision, and both leaseholders and their advisers need clarity.”
