Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 29th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, my main focus so far has been boosting leaseholder control over service charges by removing barriers to the right to manage. However, we must dramatically reform the law for leaseholders who cannot gain this control and who wish to stand up to their freeholder on service charges. It is positive that the Government are enforcing service charge transparency and disclosure with the new right-to-inform scheme in Part 4, Clause 55, which makes changes to the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, but I believe we need to go further and make it easier for leaseholders to challenge rip-off freeholders with their service charge.

Tribunals are very stressful: they take a long time and often do not have the power to enforce their decisions. This leaves leaseholders in a very strong predicament. Leaseholders normally have to file another application with the county court to get their money back for any overcharging, at least as they see it. My Amendment 78A is all about enforcement and giving teeth to tribunals’ decisions, where it has been determined that the service charges that the leaseholders have paid were not payable or were unreasonably incurred.

Various rules in Parliament have been passed in an attempt to regulate this behaviour of freeholders; again, I mean poor freeholders—the whole market is not like this. Often, these work only when leaseholders have the time, money and energy to enforce them at tribunal, which then is not always guaranteed when residents are up against armies of layers. Freeholders often hold many freeholds and have a big financial backing behind them and can just tire out leaseholders—they can work them into the ground and threaten them with forfeiture, for instance, should something go wrong. The Secretary of State was right to say that we need to put the squeeze on freeholders, but that means making freeholders actually fear leaseholders bringing cases against them at tribunal.

In my Second Reading speech, I mentioned that research from Hamptons has shown that leaseholders paid £7.6 billion in service charges. Many of those service charges were overcharge, and we want to create a situation where leaseholders can fight back. The annual service charge for flats in England and Wales has increased by 8.4% since the beginning quarter of 2023. Around 270,000 leaseholders are now paying more than £5,000 a year in service charges, which could quickly become a second mortgage for many leaseholders.

My Amendment 78A seeks to amend the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 regime for service charge disputes to try to make service charge tribunals against freeholders more serious by taking three important steps. One is by providing an opt-out. At the moment, leaseholders have to sign up for a case to benefit. Even if the tribunal determines that they have been overcharged, unless they have signed up their neighbour may receive a payment but they will not because they did not sign up. That is unfair in modern life: you could be elderly; you could have children; you could just be away when all these things are going on. Your neighbour would receive benefit and you would not, even though you would also have overpaid. That is why we need an opt-out, not an opt-in, to make it more serious.

Secondly, after a successful Section 27A challenge by any leaseholder in a block, the freeholder would be under a duty to account to all leaseholders within a two-month period of the decision being handed down. This means that any money overpaid would have to be paid back within two months, because leaseholders—many of them owning a place for the first time, many of them young people, many of them elderly people on fixed incomes—have paid out this money which they often could not afford. They should get it back in a speedy fashion.

Thirdly, there should be interest after a two-month period if the freeholder has not paid back money owed to the leaseholders. This is to give the sanction some bite and to make sure that a freeholder does not just wait out hapless leaseholders because they have all the power and the financial power.

I would like to see some more action in this Bill to deter and punish bad behaviour by freeholders and ensure that leaseholders can swiftly get their money back where overcharging has been determined by a tribunal. My Amendment 78A gets us closer to that position.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, Amendment 78 is about one part of service charges that sometimes gets neglected: the lack of consultation about major works that remain uncapped, opaque and difficult to challenge. This mainly affects those who have brought homes where the landlord or freeholder is a council. The amendment is also about the failed attempts by the law to help them in the past and whether we can use the Bill to rectify that.

In Committee last Wednesday it was implied that leaseholders are mainly wealthy home owners of luxury flats. These leaseholders deserve fair treatment, however wealthy they are, and they should not be ripped off, but many leaseholders do not fall into that category, with 49% of leaseholders being first-time buyers. We also have right-to-buy leaseholders who bought their own council homes, and leaseholders who bought former council homes because they were cheaper and therefore home ownership was within their grasp, rather than them being priced out of the market. I declare an interest as one of those people.

Leaseholders living in former council homes now face enormous refurbishment bills of tens of thousands of pounds, despite a legal cap being introduced 10 years ago, which is being circumvented by local authorities. The reason for major works is no doubt exacerbated by years of weak investment and cuts. Social housing estates do need to be maintained, and I understand that councils have difficulty doing that. However, neglect builds up and leaseholders end up being the ones who pay the price. The bill for entire blocks has been divided between the local authority and individual leaseholders because council tenants cannot be charged. Therefore, we end up with situations such as that of George and Alma, a couple who were suddenly landed with a £45,000 bill for windows in the roof of the estate, which do not even affect them, making them sick with worry. As has already been discussed, the disrepair that accumulates on estates ends up not just increasing service charges but coming as one large bill. George said, “I pay a service charge and I have not seen any work being done on a yearly basis—then suddenly we get this big bill”.

I am a Haringey leaseholder of a maisonette. I noted one extreme case that came to light during lockdown, when 76 leaseholders in Wood Green were told to find between £56,000 and £118,000 to cover Haringey repairs and improvements. One young woman, when she bought her maisonette in 2015, was told that major works planned would cost £15,000. Instead, after losing her job because of lockdown, she ended up with a bill of £110,000. Another couple, when buying their property, were given an estimated bill for major works of £12,500. Mid-completing buying their house, that had swelled to £25,000 with no explanation whatsoever for the increase, and they could not find out why. There was then stalling for five years, again with no explanation. Haringey then added in some other major works—roofs, windows and door replacements—so now the final bill is a whopping £108,450. To quote them, “We will be ruined”. The bill will be a third of what they paid for their home.

This is happening all over London, and councils’ responses have been complacent. Lambeth Council said: “We appreciate that major works can place a financial burden on leaseholders, which is why we offer a number of repayment options”. However, even those which break it down over five years, for example, which is one of the options available, can almost double some people’s mortgage, and this is even beyond increasing service charges.

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Certainly, if the principle of my amendment is accepted by the Government today—I hope very much that it will and they will be willing to have further discussions about it—perhaps at a later stage we could also look at a slightly different approach in respect of owner-occupied properties in such multi-tenure high-rise buildings.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, my Amendment 104 is very much part of the amendments I have—both today and on other days—that look at the way the law, as it was previously made, might not be doing what it is intended to. I am interested in restoring Section 24 management for leaseholders suffering at the hands of some predatory freeholders, suffering sky-high service charges and run-down buildings—some of the things we have been talking about.

Like many other noble Lords here, I still have the scars from scrutinising the Building Safety Bill when I first arrived here. It was the most hugely complicated piece of legislation, but it went through the House relatively quickly because of the importance of the topic. As I think we are all aware now, that speed probably led to a number of unintended consequences that have since come to light. One surely unintended consequence of the Building Safety Act is the way that its accountable person regime undermined Section 24 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987. Due to the wording of the Act’s accountable person policy, Section 24 court-appointed managers are barred from assuming their duty-holder role. Until that point, these tribunal-backed managers would be entrusted with all of the building’s management, when it was determined that the freeholder could not be trusted to remain in control of a development and leaseholder service charges.

I am not commenting in general on the accountable person policy per se, although there are problems with it. But it is odd that there is such a wide range of entities that can be the accountable person, including leaseholder-controlled resident management companies and right-to-manage companies, yet strangely, the Act prohibits a Section 24 manager from taking on the role, despite the fact that a Section 24 manager would have been appointed by a tribunal panel, which was satisfied that they had the credentials and experience needed to steward a development that had fallen foul of a poor freeholder. I do not understand how this happened, or why.

It is important to note that Section 24 has been a lifeline right for ripped-off leaseholders unable to buy their freehold or claim the right to manage because of costs or strict qualifying criteria. This is an attempt to ensure that Section 24, which is the ultimate backstop scheme, is restored in the Bill, to give leaseholders a clear route to remove freeholders and their management agents if it has been shown that they have actually been ripped off and it is the only route open to them.

This issue came to my attention in February, when Melissa York in the Times reported a devastating story of Canary Riverside in Tower Hamlets. This story really made an impact on me, because there the leaseholders have benefited from court protection, with Section 24 management, since 2016. A Section 24 manager was installed because the freeholder, a Monaco-based billionaire, John Christodoulou, had lost the confidence of the tribunal due to his company’s seeming financial mismanagement and poor estate maintenance. After years of fighting by the leaseholders, in March this year the Upper Tribunal found that the freeholder had used a related firm to overcharge the development by £1 million in secret insurance commissions—the kinds of issues we were discussing earlier today.

Yet despite this and other well-evidenced service charge abuses, and the fact that the leaseholders have benefited from independent Section 24 management, The Times reports that

“an oversight in the new Building Safety Act means the same court that removed his management company could put Christodoulou back in control of service charge moneys and safety works, including £20 million for cladding remediation”.

It seems to me that the Building Safety Act’s seemingly arbitrary exclusion of Section 24 managers from its accountable person regime did not intend to do this, but its effect is that those Canary Riverside leaseholders, among others, are faced with the prospect of their landlord staging a comeback and regaining control over block management, even though the leaseholders’ work over years, accumulating evidence to prove fault, has been accepted at tribunal level. That work is now undermined because a statutory right that leaseholders relied on for years is now blocked by the Act.

This is so frustrating, and it needs to be tackled in Parliament, as the courts are bound by the laws we make here. In December, in the first test case on this—Canary Riverside—the First-tier Tribunal confirmed that the Building Safety Act does not allow a Section 24 manager to be the accountable person. In March the Upper Tribunal agreed. Despite those tribunal decisions going against them, I commend the leaseholders at Canary Riverside, and say all power to them. They are still appealing in order to keep their Section 24 protection.

This is heroic work, which should remind us all of the real-life toll of the sort of issues leaseholders have to take on. They are ordinary people who bought leasehold flats, and who have ended up going in and out of court regularly—and there is not just the toll, but the costs. Nearly £200,000 has been committed in legal fees already. This is a sharp reminder that the unintended consequences of laws we make here can have wide-reaching, even devastating, effects on real people’s real lives.

We need to put right this wrong, here in Parliament, and to use the Bill to do so. The Section 24-accountable persons clash was raised in January with MPs on the Public Bill Committee by Free Leaseholders, End Our Cladding Scandal and Philip Rainey KC, who all drew this to our attention. As a consequence, the MPs Nickie Aiken and Barry Gardiner moved amendments on this issue in the other place. I would really appreciate it if the Minister looked into fixing this, because I do not think it is what we ever intended to do with the Building Safety Act. It is a loophole, and it has the most devastating consequences for leaseholders, which I am sure we could simply put right.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I admire the persistence of my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath in his indefatigable pursuit of the perhaps unsexy but very important issue of electrical safety defects, as evidenced in his Amendment 95A.

The first group of amendments relates to building safety—a subject that we have debated many times in this Chamber in recent years, following the tragic events of the Grenfell Tower fire. Amendments 82C to 82M, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, relate to a proposal that higher-risk buildings should have a building trustee. The trustee would be an impartial figure, whose role would be to ensure that the interests, rights and responsibilities of the landlord and leaseholders were balanced, that the building was properly maintained, and that the service charge provided value for money—a practice that exists elsewhere. We find the noble Earl’s proposal interesting, and certainly worthy of consideration in the future. However, it is quite a detailed proposal which may not have the chance to be scrutinised further in the context of the Bill.

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Moved by

[Baroness Fox of Buckley]

84: After Clause 69, insert the following new Clause—
“Marketing of residential leasehold property(1) Within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must make regulations to regulate the marketing of residential leasehold property.(2) Regulations under subsection (1) may—(a) require residential leasehold property without a share of the freehold to be marketed and sold as “lease-rental”,(b) require that residential leasehold property without a share of the freehold be advertised with a disclaimer containing the words that “leasehold is a lesser title and management and service charges at this property are controlled by a third-party entity that is not subject to democratic resident control”,(c) provide information about the rights and responsibilities of leaseholders and landlords under a long lease to be given to prospective home buyers by sellers and property agents in the form of a document produced by the Secretary of State or another person,(d) require sellers and property agents to clearly state material information, including lease length, ground rent and service charge, in the marketing of residential leasehold property,(e) define “prospective home buyers”, “sellers” and “property agents”,(f) provide that the document to be given is the version that has effect at the time the requirement applies, and(g) specify cases where the regulations do not apply.(3) Regulations under subsection (1) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would provide for a scheme to regulate the marketing of residential leasehold property. The scheme involves requiring leasehold homes without a share of the freehold to be marketed and sold as “lease-rental”, which adopts a key recommendation of the leasehold report by the House of Commons’ Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, published on 11 March 2019.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Last week, after I spoke in the debate, I received a message from someone I know quite well. It said:

“I’m currently in the final stages of trying to buy a leasehold flat and am pretty worried about what I’m getting myself into. The freeholder, a Housing Association, has increased the service charge by 27% since I had my offer accepted and there seems to be nothing to stop them doing so again. They claim they just do it to cover costs … I get the impression this is a rentier business pretending to be something else”.


The aim of the amendment, which in some ways might appear to be quite glib, is that everyone should stop pretending this is something it is not. When you become a leaseholder you are not actually buying a home, and I want to clarify that to say so is mis-selling.

Of course, I am hopeful that the Government will accept my earlier amendment for a sunset clause on leasehold and that commonhold will become the new normal, but in the meantime those buying homes on leasehold should be frankly told what they are buying into. I have noticed in this Committee, and in the wider debate on the issue, that developers and big freehold often defensively retort when we complain about treatment of leaseholders, “You knew you were buying a leasehold property. You knew the rules. Why didn’t you read the small print?” It is a form of victim blaming—“This is what leasehold is”—but it is disingenuous.

I want to tackle that by regulating the marketing of residential leasehold properties so that they are sold as lease rentals, which in fact was a key recommendation of the leasehold report by the House of Commons Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee that was published in March 2019. I stress that when you buy a leasehold property, you think you are buying a house or entering into the home-owning classes. That is how it is sold to us by politicians. For example, a DLUHC spokesperson, defending the mess that is shared ownership, stated:

“Shared ownership has a vital role to play in helping people onto the property ladder, and since 2010 we have delivered 156,800 new shared ownership homes”.


The whole idea, when you buy into shared ownership or you buy a leasehold flat, is that you are joining the property-owning classes. You think of it as the aspiration to own your own home, and all that that entails. That is what you are buying.

We need to consider the ideology of home ownership. I thought about that particularly when watching an excellent lecture entitled “Making our homes our own” by Professor Nicholas Hopkins, a Law Commissioner for property, family and trust law. When you are renting somewhere to live, there is a sense of dependence on a landlord. You have no conception that you own the property, and it is all very clear. I remember my father saying to me, “It’s time to grow up and stop renting”, and eventually I bought a flat—not until I was 40, mind. It was a leasehold flat, and I thought, “I’m all grown up now. I’m taking responsibility. No landlord—it’s up to me”. Little did I know.

When you buy a home, you think you are buying independence, autonomy and control. Yes, it provides greater security, stability and permanence, but what about what Professor Hopkins calls the “x-factor” benefits—the idea that you buy a property, make it your own and personalise it? Do noble Lords remember those symbolic new front doors that everyone put on their council flats after right to buy came in? It was like saying, “I bought mine, so I’ve got a red door”—it meant something. I am not saying that in a sniffy way; it did mean something. It was about saying, “I’m going to take pride in maintaining this. I’m going to improve it”. People were in control over their houses, how and when to dispose of them, and so on—they had taken that grown-up responsibility. The notion that there is no landlord controlling your home is very important, but it is an illusion in relation to leasehold.

When the Commons Select Committee did an inquiry into leasehold in 2018 to 2019, it

“found a system which stacked the odds in the favour of developers, freeholders and managing agents, leaving leaseholders with all the financial responsibilities and without matching safeguards to protect them. Leaseholders were too often treated not as homeowners or customers, but as a source of steady profit”.

That is exactly what it feels like, but they do not tell you that at the estate agents. They do not say that the leasehold form of home ownership means that, while you pay for the maintenance of your home, you have no control over the amount, quality or cost of work undertaken. The whole experience is disempowering. You are being done to—the object of other people’s decisions.

I will give an example. When Storm Eunice battered Britain a few years ago, the roof of one lady’s top-floor two-bedroom leasehold flat started to leak badly. She said that rain was coming down through the light sockets and switches. Most home owners would try to get someone in as soon as possible to identify the leaks and get the problem fixed urgently via a claim on their buildings insurance—there is a storm, there are leaks and it is dangerous, so you get it fixed properly. But, because Liz’s flat is leasehold, she had to rely on a managing agent to sort things out. Despite countless calls and emails, she could not get anything done. Eventually, the water stopped—they stemmed the flow—but that failed and mould started to grow in the increasingly sodden flat, so Liz had to move out. There was more pleading with the managing agent to find suitable temporary accommodation, and eventually they did, albeit to a dodgy area in which Liz said she did not feel safe.

The Minister said earlier that one reason she was nervous about giving consultation rights to leaseholders in relation to local authorities was that the leaseholders might hold up works and that, somehow, the freeholders would be rushing to get them done. Is there a historic example of that ever happening? Generally, what has happened is that leaseholders are in a rush to sort out problems in their own homes and would know how to do so, but the freeholders, or their managing agents, are less inclined to.

Mis-selling leasehold properties as property ownership is, in my opinion, a con in so many ways. People who save hard for a deposit, and who budget and work hard to get a mortgage, see their new home as a financial asset: a home to pass on. But, as Professor Hopkins explains, the effect of leasehold, in essence, is to put financial value in the landlord’s hands at the expense of the leaseholders, and

“the more a person’s home is used as a financial asset to benefit their landlord, the less it is an investment for the individual. The more a leaseholder’s money is providing an investment for their landlord, the less their money is providing an investment for their own future, their family and their next generation”.

So, for leaseholders, the question is: would they buy that flat if their home was actually a source of investment for someone else—a profit for someone else—and not even something they could easily pass on to their family?

When you look in an estate agent’s window, there are two sections: for sale and for rent. There is no mention, under “for sale”, that there is a two-tier system of property and that leaseholders do not get sold their homes outright but are tenants of a freeholder who owns the land. Would-be buyers may hear their solicitors mumble the word “leasehold”, but the implications are not spelled out. For example, Natalie Walton explained in an article that, when she bought her new-build two-bedroom flat in Wakefield for £105,000, she had no idea that, on top of her £1,600 annual service charge—uncapped—her ground rent would be increased every 20 years. She said:

“It’s not easy when you’re a first-time buyer to understand all of the implications of ground rents. I had a copy of the lease but the solicitor didn’t go through any of it with me”.


So, yes, I know that the paperwork exists, but, without signposting it, and a regulated demand for honesty and frankness through the buying and selling process, many more people will be hoodwinked until we get rid of leasehold for good.

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[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My noble friend asks for clarity. I can completely understand some of the circumstances that people face; that is something on which we share the concerns of the noble Baroness in what she is trying to do, and it is something that we will continue to look at—ways of ensuring that people are aware of the information when they are purchasing a property. We will continue to look forward to engaging with all noble Lords in this House. With that reassurance in mind, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, will agree with me that this proposed new clause is not necessary, and I respectfully ask that it is withdrawn.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the proposed new clause is totally necessary—I disagree with the Minister on that—but I understand the need to withdraw. The only thing that I would just clarify is that all the organisations that are run for leaseholders are no good to people who do not know what a leaseholder is when they buy their flat and then find out that they are leaseholders. You do not think of yourself as a leaseholder; you think that you are a home owner. The only people who call themselves leaseholders any more are activists who have discovered how awful it is to be a leaseholder, who then get a different identity. That is what I am getting at.

The Government’s information is very good, and they should make more of it. That is what the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, was saying—why do they not plaster it around a bit? It is not fair on first-time buyers, who are the people who are being sold out by this. I know that the Government do not want to do that, but they should do something about it. I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 84 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Fox of Buckley]

85: After Clause 69, insert the following new Clause—
“Prevention of leaseholder abuse in retirement housing(1) Within one year of the passing of this Act, a Minister of the Crown must publish a report assessing the state of the United Kingdom’s retirement leasehold sector with special regard to the treatment of elderly and vulnerable leaseholders.(2) The report must consider whether the government should introduce legislation on retirement housing to address consumer detriment while encouraging downsizing, a larger, healthier retirement housing sector and a better functioning property market.(3) The report must also include—(a) an assessment of the extent to which the following factors harm leaseholders in retirement housing—(i) service charges not subject to resident control;(ii) inability to easily switch managing agents to remove predatory or poorly performing service providers;(iii) license and permission fees;(iv) short leases;(v) shared ownership structures;(vi) exit and event fees;(vii) resale values, and(b) an update on the government’s implementation of the recommendations in the Law Commission report “Event Fees in Retirement Properties”, published on 30 March 2017,(c) the Older People’s Housing Taskforce report and a statement on the government’s implementation of its findings,(d) legislative options to address the significant financial loss and emotional distress of leaseholders in retirement housing and those of their families, and(e) a recommendation as to whether the housing-with-care model, license to occupy schemes and commonhold developments should be promoted by the government as preferred alternatives to leasehold tenure in the retirement sector.”Member's explanatory statement
This new Clause would require a Minister of the Crown to publish a report to establish the experience of leaseholders in retirement housing and to outline legislative options to improve consumer outcomes in this sector.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am bored of my own voice, too, so bear with me. It is just that I think that this is an important issue. Through this amendment, I am asking the Government to bring out a review of the specific leasehold property market for pensioners and the elderly, which I would have thought would be of particular interest to all of us in this House who might be looking in that market area.

To be serious about it, I became interested in the issue after watching a “Pensioners Against Leasehold” video, one excellent example in a series of investigative campaign films produced by Free Leaseholders. Jane, who presented the video, made me realise that leasehold is especially devastating for those selling their family home and downsizing into a flat then realising that, rather than doing the sensible thing, they have potentially bought into a debt trap. I have just been talking about first-time buyers, and I am now talking about buyers who are very experienced home owners but who are buying into a new type of home. For example, there is Nick from Bournemouth, who is in the film, who bought into a retirement block of 61 flats and who described having a toxic relationship with management agents.

The other reason why I raised this was that the mother of a friend of mine made that big decision to move later in life and into an Anchor property—and Anchor’s motto is “later life is for living”. All I can say is, “If only”. Having made that big decision to move into a special category of living accommodation and selling up her house, she is faced suddenly with huge service charges and the burden of worry. One resident facing all this said, “We just feel as though they’re waiting for us to die, because we’ve become a nuisance”. Somebody else made the point, “The whole point of selling up and moving into this retirement home was because I didn’t want the burden of worrying about things—and now we spend all of our time checking on our management committee, because they keep ripping us off”. So I think there is something going on.

Retirement properties in Britain are typically made up of individual flats with communal areas and access to emergency health support. They are almost always sold as leaseholds by builders, who then sell the freehold to a management company. Those companies are entitled to charge leaseholders fees for upkeep along with ground rent. They are a novel form of tenure, which I am quite enthusiastic about in some ways, but the system is open to misuse—and, over recent years, there have been a number of scandals, suggesting that we need a close look at this sector. It is taken as a given that retirement homes should be granted exemptions from leasehold reforms in a lot of the discussions, but actually a lot of the problems in this sector are created in exactly the same way as leasehold creates problems.

Newspapers have been full of tales of exploitation of those buying retirement homes. They are sometimes seen as easy targets, perhaps because they are older and suffering bereavement or illness. They certainly see these homes as appropriate for the latter part of their life, and we would be scandalised in any other circumstances if older people were being exploited.

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[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, for her Amendment 85, which seeks to commit a Minister of the Crown to publishing a report assessing the state of the UK’s retirement leasehold sector within one year of the passing of this Act.

The Government recognise that leaseholders make up a significant proportion of the retirement sector, and are committed to ensuring that older people have access to the right homes in the right places to suit their needs. That is why the independent Older People’s Housing Taskforce was established in May 2023. The task force has been asked to look at the current supply of older people’s housing, to examine enablers to increase supply and to improve housing options for older people later in life. The task force has been commissioned to run for up to 12 months, and over this period has undertaken extensive engagement with stakeholders and gathered a great deal of evidence to inform its thinking and recommendations. The task force, as we have heard, will make final recommendations to Ministers this summer. I say to noble Lords who say we already have the review that I am not aware of that.

In addition, the Government have previously agreed to implement the majority of the recommendations in the Law Commission’s leasehold retirement event fees report. This includes approving a code of practice as soon as parliamentary time allows, to make event fees fairer and more transparent. The code will set out that these fees should not be charged unexpectedly, and developers and estate agents should make all such fees clear to people before they buy, so that prospective buyers can make an informed decision before forming a financial or emotional attachment to a property.

More widely, the Bill already introduces many elements that will help leaseholders, including those who live in retirement properties. As we move forward, the Government will continue to be mindful of the needs of leaseholders in retirement properties. The Government’s aim is to make sure that older people can live in the homes that suit their needs, help them live healthier lives for longer and, crucially, preserve their independence and their connections to the communities and places they hold dear. To reiterate, we have committed to making event fees fairer and more transparent and will bring forward legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows. With these reassurances in mind, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, will agree with me that this proposed new clause is no longer necessary, and I ask that the amendment be withdrawn.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Briefly, I thank those who have spoken, as it is the last group of the day. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, has made some excellent contributions throughout, but really summed up why I tabled this amendment in the first place. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, has obviously been reflecting on this issue too, as has the Minister. Particular thanks go to the noble Lord, Lord Best, who made the speech I wish I had made and obviously understands the issue in far greater depth than I do: I appreciate it. I hope that, none the less, the amendment has been useful in raising the profile of the issue.

I want to clarify one other thing. There is always a danger when we talk about the elderly as vulnerable people who might be preyed upon. We here are in a situation in which we might notice that people who are older can be the most ferocious and active, and not remotely vulnerable. In the film from the Free Leaseholders I was talking about, it was more that the elderly people interviewed said they had made a decision to be less active in fighting for their rights and maybe relax a bit and go into a lovely flat. They then found themselves in a situation where they had to become civil liberties fighters all over again, or lawyers or whatever, and that took up all their time and drained them. I do not want to want in any way to sound patronising. I want the sector to grow, but I do not think it will with leasehold. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 85 withdrawn.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th April 2024 Lords Chamber

Amendment 41 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, which would give a fixed formula based on the bank rate, appears attractive at first sight, except that no one can possibly know where the rank rate will be in the future. It looks too high at the moment, and the bank rate plus 5% looks overly generous. If the noble Lord can later advise the Committee on where investors can currently achieve certain returns of over 10%, I would be very grateful.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, explained very well what I would have liked to say, so “hear, hear” to that. I was beginning to worry that the debate might be getting a bit dull—until the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, spoke. He so infuriated me that I feel I have to say something. I am not able to stay for the rest of the evening, but I wanted to clarify a number of things.

It is true that there are some people who own lease- hold flats who are not poverty stricken, but the characterisation of the 5 million leaseholders in this country as wealthy is ludicrous. The main reason why people—certainly me—are forced to buy leasehold flats is that they are cheaper than non-leasehold flats. As I will indicate in an amendment to be discussed on the next day in Committee, very few of us were originally aware of what a leasehold meant. We thought that we were entering into the housing market and buying a house, having saved up very hard to do so, without realising that we were, in effect, pseudo-tenants with very few rights. That has all been discussed often in this House.

The other thing that I wanted to clarify—I hinted at it, and it will come up again—is the notion that any charity that is a freeholder is doing good in the world; that strikes me as at least open to question. Many of the problems that leaseholders face are due to their being local authority—local authorities are not charities, but there are real problems with local authority flats. Also, housing association leaseholders have endured incredible problems with how the leasehold is set up. It is not appropriate to assume that, because charities say that they are doing charitable work, they are not accountable for some of the uncharitable consequences of the fact that they are, in effect, freeholders making a huge amount of money out of leaseholders.

In that sense, what really wound me up was the idea of this being a limitless expropriation scheme. Leaseholders have felt for some time that they are on the receiving end of a limitless expropriation scheme. The reason why this Bill is here and why people across the political parties, from right to left and in between, are so committed to tackling leasehold is that the inequity is in that capacity to expropriate, via the service charge, ground rent and so on. It means that leaseholders feel there is no way to defend themselves against a freeholder who can just take, take, take. Having paid quite a lot in service charges, I know that you do not necessarily get a service and there is not very much you can do about it, which is what the Bill is trying to address. I am pleased that the Government are addressing this, although they are not going far enough.

This is whipping up a climate of fear, and the notion that mad socialists are going around stealing property from freeholders is absolutely mythical. It is very important that we do not allow myths to emerge in the midst of this discussion, and that we have a proportionate sense of how to respond. I do not think that all freeholders are evil, but the system is iniquitous. I mentioned before that it has taken a few years of me being here to hear so much enthusiasm for feudalism, but it seems to be coming up again. It might make it difficult to untangle the law—as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, explained, this goes back many hundreds of years—and I am not trying to be glib, but there have been a lot of commissions looking into this. However, it is not appropriate to sing the virtues of feudalism, either. Feudal property rights are not in the interest of modern democrats, whether they are on the left or the right. The idea that this is the equivalent of the difficulties of expropriating from Putin does not make any sense.

As to the European Court of Human Rights: the irony of the position of Conservative Peers! By the way, I am one of the people who would leave the ECHR— I know everyone here will hiss and boo when I say that —because I do not think it should determine the decisions we make in this or the other House. But Conservative Peers, who would otherwise say that the European Court of Human Rights is unreliable, defending it for hedge fund managers is ludicrous. Freeholders are not necessarily virtuous, benevolent, benign landowners; some are, but most are money-making rentiers. It is actually a criticism of the failures of capitalism that the only way anyone thinks they can make money is by ripping off leaseholders—and then describing them as rich, just because they have got a decent flat. Noble Lords get the gist.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I remind the noble Baroness, in light of what she has just said, that it was in this place in 1215 that the barons said to the King, “This is the Magna Carta”. This principle was established and made very clear that a person’s property could not be seized by the King, except by the lawful judgment of his Peers over the law of the land. The assumption is that if you take the property, compensation must follow, even if you are taking such property because you want to convert some or all of it into leaseholds, so that they too can become owners. The Magna Carta will tell you, “Have you forgotten your history? Have you forgotten your law?” The rule of law in this country is what gives us liberty. It is not just a question of the European Court of Human Rights; it is also Magna Carta, which is really the foundation of all these things. To seize somebody’s property, even by an Act of Parliament, would go against the whole reason why Magna Carta came out and gave us the rule of law, in the end.

Let us be very careful in this Bill. If you take away somebody’s property without compensating them, those barons from 1215 will be rising up and saying, “Remember your history, remember your law, remember the tradition that it has created, and safeguard it”.

I do not think that freeholders are simply wanting to hold on to things, in the way that the noble Baroness described some of them, or are not doing any good charitable thing. I live in Berwick in Northumberland, and the duke there has plenty of other things. I have also seen some of the charity work that is being done.

Let us not use language and words because we are enthusiastic in one direction or another and ignore the Magna Carta. It is what has given freedom and liberty even to newcomers such as me. My friends, the rule of law cannot ever simply be brushed aside because of a desire to correct a particular question. The rule of law matters. The Magna Carta matters.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

I thank the Minister for her comments. On human rights, I neither supported nor did not support them; I commented that human rights will prove a fortune for lawyers, as they argue for years and years over whether assets have been expropriated fairly or unfairly. The Minister referred to complexity; that really will bring complexity to what is at present a relatively simple situation.

When everybody is talking about this and how unfair it is on leaseholders, we should also remember that all a leasehold is is a discount on the freehold value. Somebody has paid less for that asset than they would have done had it been a freehold. If you take that logic to its full extension, why not go to the motor car industry, for example, and say that everybody who has bought their car on hire purchase should be able to have it without having to pay any more? They bought it under certain terms, as the leaseholder did—

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I suggest that one of the problems is that those who buy cars under hire purchase do not think that they are buying the car to own it. One clarification that has emerged only recently is that most people did not know when they bought a home, advertised as being sold to them, that the lease was a hire-purchase arrangement. I hope that is one of the things being clarified by this law.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd April 2024 Lords Chamber

It is obvious that this will not be straightforward because of the financial interests of individuals and institutions in prolonging the existence of the leasehold/freehold arrangement. However, if the Government are determined, as the Minister said that they were, to create commonhold as part of a property-owning democracy—the phrase often used by the Government—the move to commonhold must be implemented, and must be implemented as speedily as possible. There must be no more delay; commonhold has been an option for over 20 years. It needs reinvigorating—the word that the Law Commission uses. It needs some of the barriers to be removed. It needs, as the Law Commission states, a cultural change in the way that commonhold and leasehold reform is looked at. That is what is needed, and the Government are in a position to do it. They have said that they want to make that change; unfortunately, the Bill does not enable it, as “in due course” will no longer be sufficient. I look forward very much to this debate and the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 14. First, I apologise that I was away for Second Reading; I confess that I would probably have made a rather frustrated and angry speech at the Bill’s limitations and the waste of a chance to end leasehold once and for all. However, I come here today in a more conciliatory mood with, I hope, a constructive proposal to create a sunset clause on all new leasehold flats that would allow the Government five years to resolve any outstanding issues for present leaseholders. Because of a time limit, there would be light at the end of the tunnel, and all the rhetoric from the Government and the Opposition condemning leasehold as a feudal, unfair tenure could be turned into a concrete outcome, with no room for broken promises.

There is nothing unreasonable or radical about the amendment. The Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto promised to enact a

“ban on the sale of new leasehold homes”—

and note that the wording was “homes”, not “houses”—and the majority of leasehold homes are flats. In fact, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, pointed out, 70% of them are. We know that it is precisely in relation to flats where the real abuse occurs, where the real money is made by third parties in exploitative extraction, and where the majority are denied control of their own finances and lives. That is where this scandal lies.

What is more, the number of leasehold flats is increasing exponentially, whereas the proportion of new-build houses sold as leasehold is falling dramatically, from a 15% high in 2016 to a meagre 1% of all leaseholds in December 2022. Yet the Bill avoids the main problem, and I am hoping that this amendment will give us a way out, and that now is the time to do it. Banning new leasehold houses is not enough and does not, in my opinion, despite what the Minister assured us, uphold the manifesto commitment. The amendment would allow the Government to honour their promise but without doing it in a rush.

Not to be partisan, I was delighted when the shadow Housing Minister, Matthew Pennycook, pledged to scrap leasehold tenure within Labour’s first 100 days in office, but this appears to have been slightly rescinded or fudged. This is therefore an amendment for all sides, to ensure there is cross-party consensus that we will absolutely name the date by which leasehold will have gone—what Michael Gove, the Secretary of State, has called an “indefensible” system of tenure. As far as I can see, everyone, cross-party, agrees with that. If not now, when? This is the first piece of legislation tackling leasehold tenure for new and existing homes in 22 years, outside of building safety. Another opportunity to move against this iniquitous regime may not come around any time soon; it might take another 22 years.

I am keen to learn the lessons of history, because back in 1995, the late Frank Dobson, then the shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, and Nick Raynsford, then the shadow Secretary of State for Housing, brought out an excellent pamphlet entitled An End to Feudalism: Labour’s New Leasehold Reform Programme. It noted:

“Over recent decades the weaknesses and injustices inherent in the British leasehold system have become increasingly highlighted, but reform has been a long time coming”.


It was promised that reform would come under that Government, but reform has sadly been an even longer time coming because, despite a promise to use the 2002 leasehold Bill to sunset any new leasehold buildings, this was reneged on.

This failure to use legislation 22 years ago to resolve the situation means that over 2 million further leasehold properties have been created—the very debt traps that have caused so much misery for so many. Are we just going to allow this Bill to pass, knowing that we will create more leasehold flats, and therefore more problems and more debt traps ahead? As Sebastian O’Kelly from the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership bluntly put it to MPs:

“You’re out of step with the rest of the world, so stop creating more leaseholds”.


I was delighted to hear the Minister assure us that nobody wants this, but I want that promise to be written down rather than just stated.

I stress that the amendment is not trying to dictate how this should be done. Rather, it would give the elected Government of the day, whoever that is, the space and flexibility to decide on whatever schemes are appropriate to ensure that third-party investors—the rentiers—are no longer permitted to interfere in what will be, I hope, a thriving sector of flats throughout the UK.

The amendment is not prescriptive, as I have said. Commonhold is not even mentioned directly, even though I agree with all those who have said that it is best suited to deliver ownership and management of residential flats for the future. The main point is to set a sunset clause to ensure that, whichever party is in government, there are no more broken promises and that the “in due course” we heard about earlier has an end date. What is more, the amendment, via proposed new subsection (3)(c) and (d), would ensure that existing leaseholders are not left behind. In a way, what is not to like?

However, it is difficult to know exactly who or what I am arguing against, because I am not quite sure that I even understand why this could not have been done in this legislation. The answer has not been forthcoming. I want to look at just a couple of objections.

In this Chamber, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, explained from the Dispatch Box earlier this year that reforming leasehold for flats is “inherently more complicated” than for houses, as they required an arrangement to “facilitate management” of the buildings. Surely the “it’s complicated” defence is a red herring. There have been endless consultations and commissions, and decades-worth of academic and policy research, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, pointed out. We have had the Law Commission, with its 121 recommendations. An expert advisory group, the Commonhold Council, was launched in May 2021 by the Government precisely to prepare home owners and the market for widespread uptake of a collective form of home ownership. So, as the former Housing Minister, Rachel Maclean, told the other place at Second Reading:

“All the work has already been done”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/12/23; col. 676.]


For the remaining complexities, this amendment would give Parliament one more term as a reasonable timeframe to work at any outstanding issues—for example, around the complications of shared ownership, which we heard about earlier.

--- Later in debate ---

With all these assurances in mind, I ask the noble Baroness kindly to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I forgot to declare my interest as a leaseholder. I feel as though I might have to declare an interest to the noble Earl, Lord Devon, as a serf, or at least somebody who is rather pleased that democracy has allowed me to move from that particular interest.

In her response, the Minister said that all this change needs to be managed. In response to my amendment, she said there should not be a ban without due consideration. Fine, but this was a sunset clause in five years; it is hardly rushing it. The endless contributions that have been made suggest that this has been talked about for a very long time. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, made the point that we can all go back. This sort of response, saying that we need to go slowly and that it needs to be managed, makes it seem a little unclear as to what the Government are responding to. Nobody here is exactly rushing through.

Also, can I have some clarification on the idea of a danger to the supply of new homes? I was glad that the Minister responded to the noble Earl, Lord Devon, saying that there does not appear to be any evidence of that, but she said we had to be careful about a ban without due consideration. She herself said that it could damage the supply of new homes, and to be honest I think that is an unjustified threat—although not by the Minister. I keep hearing this: “If we rush this through, nobody will ever build a flat again. We have a housing crisis; what are we going to do?” I know the developers are saying that, but I was interested in the fact that Lendlease is one of those saying that this may disrupt building supply, but actually it seems to be building away and thriving, with massive developments in Australia, where it is from and where, indeed, there is a form of commonhold of which Lendlease was supportive. It is not going to stop the development of houses. We can build, build, build—just not build, build, build leaseholds, surely.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My response to the noble Earl, Lord Devon, was a response on commonhold. My response to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, was more about the fact that her amendment would just ban the sale of leasehold, which I suggest would give an uncertainty to the market.

--- Later in debate ---

Although I accept from the noble Lords who spoke in the debate that there are issues that need to be probed further, spoken about and listened to, perhaps in a round-table discussion before we get to Report, our instincts are that these are shoring up the interests of commercial leaseholders because, let us face it, freeholders are where the money is.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the descriptions that have been put forward—the right reverend Prelate described these thriving communities, which sounded idyllic, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, talked about making sure that we understood that there might be some bad players but that there are also some very enlightened players—made it sound as though this is really just a question of having the right people in charge, whereas I think it is a systemic problem.

One of the reasons why I am anxious about this is that although it is always nicer to have friendly, non-rip-off freeholders—that is genuinely a positive thing—we should not be grateful that we are not being ripped off in the homes that we live in. The system problem is that people lack autonomy and control over where they live and their destiny. I just throw in that a successful community depends on people retaining their autonomy rather than being grateful that they are being looked after.

What the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, pointed out is incredibly important; the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, also made an excellent speech laying some of this out. There are thriving communities with mixed-use abilities all over the world that do not use leasehold. We are now getting to a point where we are saying, “If we don’t have leasehold here, we’ll never have a local swimming pool and there will be no community centres. What will happen to all the shops?” That is mythological. Although I agree that one needs to look at the complexities, and I for one am actually all for nuance in relation to this and not just blunderbussing away, we should also stop myth-building about the wonders of the system, when in fact the reason why we want enfranchisement in the first place is that when our citizens buy a house they should have control over it. It is their home, and they can work collectively on building the community. At the moment they are denied that, which is why we are trying to tackle the problem of leasehold in the first instance.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions, and I start by thanking especially the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, for Amendment 17, which seeks to amend the description of premises that are excluded from collective enfranchisement rights, where leaseholders would otherwise qualify. I know the amendment is well intentioned, with the aim that there is flexibility to amend the description of exceptions without new primary legislation. The amendment introduces a broad power for Ministers to change fundamental elements of the structure of the regime, which are substantive areas of policy. The Government are already making changes to primary legislation by increasing the non-residential limit from 25% to 50%, following extensive consultation, which is right and proper. The powers in this amendment would affect the very core of the regime and how it is structured rather than amending mere procedural changes.

To make sure that stakeholders have certainty as to how the law will work in practice, changes to the fundamental structure of the statutory regime should be clear and stable. Although the intention behind the amendment is noble, the Government are not able to accept it as it is not proportionate or reasonable for the proper functioning of the regime. It would be a sweeping power to change the fundamental structure of the enfranchisement regime after it has been approved by Parliament.

This amendment would introduce uncertainty into the new system, meaning that both leaseholders and landlords would need to second-guess whether changes may be made at relatively short notice, introducing volatility to the regime. This could potentially lead to undesirable outcomes, such as undermining confidence in long-term investment decisions for mixed use-premises, or lead to irregular design of floor-space in anticipation of future changes. I want to make it clear that the Law Commission has spent years considering qualifying criteria and assessed different options in its consultation process before putting forward its recommendations to increase the non-residential threshold to 50%.

The amendment could also remove rights of leaseholders or landlords in a disproportionate way and create unnecessary uncertainty and divergence likely to complicate the overall regime, with consequential effects on the behaviour of different stakeholders in different ways. Therefore, I hope that I have convinced the noble Baroness that the amendment is not proportionate, and that it is not moved.

I thank my noble friend Lord Sandhurst for Amendment 17A, which would exclude long leases held by overseas companies from being qualifying tenants for the purpose of collective enfranchisement. The Government’s aim is to improve leasehold as a tenure and address the historic imbalance of power between freeholders and leaseholders. The Bill does not confer different rights on leaseholders by how their leases are held. The Government do not think that implementing such a definition, in respect of which leaseholders have rights and which do not, is workable or desirable.

Amending the definition of a qualifying tenant for collective enfranchisement will make it harder for other leaseholders in a building to meet the numbers required to enfranchise, should they so wish. Attempting to restrict some leaseholders may well disenfranchise others, meaning that many leaseholders up and down the country could lose the opportunity to exercise their rights. Furthermore, it would remove the existing rights of some leaseholders and complicate the system overall, contrary to the aims of the Government.

I understand that the intention of the amendment may be to safeguard against circumstances in which non-resident or overseas companies do not take an active interest in the management of a building or are slow to respond. However, we expect that most multi-occupancy buildings will be managed by professional management companies on behalf of freeholders, as they are now.

I thank my noble friend again for the amendment, but I cannot accept it because it runs contrary to the aims of the Government and may restrict leaseholders’ rights. I therefore hope that he is content not to move his amendment.

I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby for speaking on behalf of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, with whom I have had a number of meetings about this issue. I am happy if the right reverend Prelate takes back the fact that I will continue that discussion if the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester so wishes.

I thank my noble friend Lord Moylan for his clause stand part notice. Clause 28 increases the non-residential limit for the collective enfranchisement claims to proceed in mixed-use buildings from 25% to 50%. The clause implements a Law Commission recommendation that has been subject to comprehensive consultation by the Law Commission and the department. I note the right reverend Prelate’s and my noble friend’s concerns, which have been raised through various consultations with freeholders and landlords.

The Bill’s impact assessment considers the impact of increasing the non-residential limit for collective enfranchisement claims, including the potential impact on freeholders, high streets and businesses. The increase to 50% strikes a fair and proportionate balance and will ensure that leaseholders are not unfairly prevented from claiming the right to manage in respect to buildings that are majority residential. It protects the freeholders and commercial leaseholders in buildings that are majority commercial. Freeholders can also protect their commercial interests by taking a leaseback of the commercial unit, securing their interest with a 999-year leaseback at a peppercorn rent.

We recognise the importance of the responsibility of building management and, as I have said, would expect that those who exercise their right to take over their buildings will employ professional managing agents—ensuring that the building is managed with the appropriate expertise, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, about the issues that he is aware of.

The Government consider that this increase is proportionate, and I ask the right reverend Prelate and my noble friend to support Clause 28 standing part of the Bill.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, for Amendment 18, which seeks to apply a residency test to the collective enfranchisement claims in buildings with more than 25% non-residential floorspace. As we have discussed, Clause 28 amends the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 to increase the non-residential limit for collective enfranchisement claims from 25% to 50%.

Clause 28 implements a Law Commission recommendation that seeks to broaden access to collective enfranchisement for leaseholders living in mixed-use buildings where the non-residential elements constitute up to 50% of the floorspace. The existing qualifying criteria require leaseholders representing at least 50% of the flats in a building to participate in a collective enfranchisement claim. When combined with these existing criteria, the noble Lord’s amendment would allow claims only in mixed-use buildings with more than 25% non-residential floorspace, where at least 25% of the flats are owner-occupied.

For leaseholders in mixed-use buildings where less than 25% of the flats are owner-occupied but more than 25% of the floorspace is non-residential, this new clause would have the effect of removing all the benefit of Clause 28. This would leave leaseholders unable to collectively buy the freehold of their building because of how their neighbours chose to use their properties. It would also complicate all claims in buildings with over 25% non-residential floorspace, as participating leaseholders would be required to demonstrate that they are owner-occupiers. This could lead to claims taking longer and costing more, and would provide freeholders with another opportunity to frustrate leaseholders’ right to buy their freehold. This is counter to the Government’s aims in this area to broaden access to collective freehold ownership for all leaseholders, and to simplify, not complicate, the system leaseholders use to do so.

Hate Crimes

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I have not had the same feedback as the noble Baroness. As I say, it was this Government that brought in the disaggregation of hate crimes by different religions to help provide insight into the experience of different communities. We provide ongoing support and funding to the CST in its work, and we have regular engagement with the police to understand what the picture is in local areas. I will look at the issue the noble Baroness raises, and also understand from the feedback and conversations we have what impact that has.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, it is the turn of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, will the Minister acknowledge that there are real problems in terms of legislating against hate as a crime, because it can be used to silence opposition? One of our fellow Peers has recently been accused of, and in fact punished for, bigotry, when bad-faith activists wilfully labelled a tweet against Islamists—that is Hamas—as Islamophobic. Conversely, while I consider that the virulent rhetoric and abuse directed at Zionism is often—usually—thinly disguised anti-Semitism, the same legitimate criticism of Israel is being curtailed. Should we avoid using the law, and instead argue back and condemn loudly?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, we have both systems in place. We fully support lawful freedom of speech; it generates rigorous debate and is incredibly important to our society. But it is not an absolute right, and does not include the right to harass others or incite them to violence or terrorism. It is possible to both have in place laws against hate crime while protecting and respecting freedom of speech. Sometimes the implementation of that is a carefully balanced judgment, and that is something we all need to take care with.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Friday 2nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, 136: I shall repeat the number 136 because on Wednesday Ashley Waxman Bakshi asked a packed room of parliamentarians to keep reminding the world that there are still 136 hostages in Gaza, including Ashley’s cousin Agam Berger.

We are here today for Holocaust Memorial Day to keep the memory of the decades-old Holocaust alive. Yet, shockingly, even the memory of what happened on 7 October last year is already fading. That is why so many of the powerful, moving and insightful speeches that we have all heard today really matter. The largest anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust is actively and wilfully being forgotten, and even denied. Indeed, when some seek to remind the world of the hostages—by, for example, putting up posters of their faces—they are treated with contempt and openly subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. Posters are venomously ripped down. One viral video shows an activist responding to a plea for humane empathy with Jewish suffering. His response was to spit out the question, “Where’s your proof?”

Sadly, such echoes of Holocaust denial are making a comeback. Indeed, the reason why Ashley and the other remarkable Israeli witnesses whom some of us heard this week are forced to tour the world’s capitals to give testimony is that—and this is a real shock—so many in official positions have demanded proof that sexual violence was used on 7 October. Often the very same progressives, NGOs and international women’s organisations that rail against #MeToo incidents and demand support for their violence against women and girls initiatives suddenly become sceptical and mute and look the other way, even with evidence that Jewish women and girls were gang-raped, sexually mutilated and degraded. This casual mood of denial was revealed in the shocking recent Economist/YouGov poll showing that more than one-fifth of young Americans agreed that the Holocaust was a myth, while many responded by saying they were not sure whether it was a myth.

Until recently, Holocaust denial was a fringe affair: the racist preoccupation of explicit anti-Semites who called it a hoax, usually associated with the far right. But today a more common form of Holocaust denial is to rip the Holocaust from its concrete and specific context and appropriate it for a range of nefarious ends. This dilution of the meaning of the Holocaust is often espoused by well-intentioned social justice warriors. The Holocaust is anything but absent from political discourse—that is one irony. The Holocaust and its perpetrators, the Nazis, are now prolifically referenced, but I am not sure that this constant go-to metaphor is that helpful. Social media is littered with people smearing their political opponents as Nazis. Newsweek headlined an article:

“Just How Similar is Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler?”—


and such an approach is commonplace.

Policies that people do not like are routinely denounced using Nazi analogies. The Rwanda plan has been compared by some campaigners to herding Jews on to cattle trucks destined for the camps. I have heard the Tories’ voter ID scheme being compared to Gestapo checks. Everything from the Brexit vote to anti-ULEZ protests has recently been denounced as proof that society is descending into 1930s-style fascism. Some animal rights activists claim that the meat industry is guilty of a holocaust of lambs, cows and chickens, while abortion fundamentalists brandish literature denouncing a holocaust of unborn babies.

I worry that when the Holocaust, as a metaphor, is so promiscuously and prolifically used that it will mean we render the Holocaust itself mundane, inevitably relativising its gravity and uniqueness. So often, it can also lead to airbrushing Jews from the story. We saw that with a number of politicians, as the noble Lord, Lord Austin, illustrated, who put out video messages on Holocaust Memorial Day and failed to mention the Jews. They were just forgotten, deliberately or not.

As many noble Lords have mentioned, we have to admit that the Holocaust has now been weaponised, specifically to attack and delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state. We have heard that from a number of noble Lords. I will not repeat their examples, but just cite the idea of young radical peace protestors unapologetically carrying placards with the star of David inside a swastika.

This relativism that now turns the barbarities of the Holocaust into an accusation against the Jewish state considers itself progressive and, worse, is mainstream. One popular progressive commentator, that Dr Shola off the telly, tweeted at the Auschwitz museum:

“I unfollowed you after your disgraceful endorsement of Israel’s extermination, ethnic cleansing & genocide of Palestinians. The museum should be ashamed of itself. Never again means never again for anyone. You’re an embarrassment to humanity”.


Think about those words. Inevitably, Dr Shola was never off the TV after she posted that.

So how should we tackle such ignorant attitudes? For many, the answer is education. As a former teacher, this makes me nervous, as too many thorny questions are outsourced to schools and colleges. Anyway, it is not that simple. After all, the Holocaust is already a compulsory part of the national curriculum and has been since 1991. One concern is that the Holocaust is rarely explained in educational settings as a specific policy designed to purge society of Jewry. Pupils rarely grasp that this was the first, and so far the only, time in history that a state attempted to murder every single member of a people—the Jews. Instead, such is the enthusiasm to make the Holocaust relatable for today’s pupils that there is a whole list of other victims, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, explained so well, often at the expense of a factual, detailed account of the Nazis’ industrialised final solution for Jews. This was more than just authoritarian rule or human rights abuses; it was an attempt at eradicating the Jews.

This drive to make the Holocaust relevant in schools today for pupils has also led to an embrace of concepts associated with identity politics. In trying to make Holocaust education so relevant as to reflect the diversity of each and every pupil, students are asked to imagine themselves as persecuted by evil Nazis—victims due to their individual identity. In the midst of this mêlée, I am afraid that Jews barely get a mention or are known about.

Fuelling relevance via identity politics is a trend, by the way, that is infecting the whole curriculum and can counterproductively encourage competitive victimhood. I remember that, in 2004, a poll carried out in nine European countries by Ipsos found that 35% of people thought the Jews should stop playing the role of Holocaust victims. Since then, often via official educational initiatives, every identity group has been encouraged to view themselves through the prism of their historic victimhood, from slavery to colonialism. Parallel to this, teachers and lecturers have embraced the idea that centuries of western accomplishments should be disparaged and demonised as hateful expressions of white supremacy.

Identitarian ideology has been given an intellectual veneer as decolonisation theory that divides the world into victims versus colonisers. Equality, diversity and inclusion policies institutionalise the divisive focus on skin colour, ethnicity and victimhood across schools and universities. This toxic mix creates a hierarchy of oppression through which, importantly, anti-Jewish hatred is justified. In the EDI schema, Jews have been designated as all-powerful colonisers, the ultimate expression of white privilege and the rightful targets of contempt and hostility among the young and anyone who cares about the oppressed.

To confuse the educational landscape further, identity politics makes it hard to be open in classroom debate about such issues. It can, for example, make it difficult to challenge any young Muslim pupils and students if they express sympathy with Islamist anti-Semitism. A decade ago, when I was giving a lesson on free speech, a vocal group of Muslim sixth-formers told me that 9/11 was a Jewish plot and that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was justified because the cartoonists had insulted the Prophet Muhammad. They also, by the way, bullied fellow Muslim classmates into silence—the kind of young people who the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, rightly referred to as the heroes and the hope of this story.

When I told this story about what had happened in the classroom to a group of teachers, some admitted that such attitudes were one reason they shied away from teaching the Holocaust. They feared that any confrontations if students put forward conspiratorial Holocaust-denial theories would mean that they, as teachers, would be branded Islamophobes—self-censorship to avoid causing offence, or even fear of more aggressive responses. Noble Lords have already mentioned Mike Freer; let me also reference the Batley Grammar School teacher who is still in hiding for fear of his life.

Before we open more learning centres or do more education-related projects, at the very least we need to ensure that educators are not silenced, cancelled or smeared for teaching truths that some identity groups find unpalatable. To ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten and is understood, it needs to be resituated back into its unique historical context and dragged out of the jaws of identity politics and diversity dogma.

For now, the greatest memorial to the Holocaust must surely be solidarity with Jewish people, wherever and whenever they are being attacked because they are Jews. I finish by repeating “136, 136”—let us shout it to the rafters until those 136 hostages are brought home, and then Holocaust Memorial Day will be more than a slogan.

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords—

Residential Leasehold for Flats

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I can reassure the noble Lord that the Bill does contain provisions to bring greater transparency around how service charges are brought for leaseholders, so that there is greater accountability for what those charges go to and leaseholders have a greater ability to challenge them if they think they are unfair.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as the Minister will know, the most frustrating thing for those of us who are leaseholders is the lack of control. There is a tried and tested formula for residents’ control, which is recognised in the Bill, and that is freehold. At the very least, will the Government consider a really simple, cost-free change to the Bill, which would be a mandated share of freehold for all new flats? That would at least prove that they are really committed to tackling the issue of getting rid of toxic leasehold for ever.

Leasehold Properties: Managing Agents

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the estate agents Hamptons estimates that England’s leaseholders will collectively pay a crippling £7.6 billion in service charges this year. The Minister will have heard from the individuals. Although it is tempting to say that the case is therefore for statutory regulation of managing agents, could she comment on the real solution, which is that leaseholders should have the right easily to hire and fire managing agents themselves, as suggested by Commonhold Now, and that they should have some control over their own properties?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right. That is exactly why we are looking at a code of conduct, which will have teeth, and the role more widely of leaseholders when we look to the leasehold Bill that will come through.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

Empty shops are much more frequently a symptom than a cause of the problem. It may be high street decay but turning around the root causes of high street or town centre decline requires a framework to stimulate investment and activity. The British Property Federation tells me it has a model for this, called town centre accelerators. I suggest that His Majesty’s Government work with the British Property Federation to develop these across the country, especially where there is strong local leadership to deliver them.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I apologise that I have not been in Committee in recent sessions; I had amendments on housing. I have discovered that, as a non-affiliated Peer, it is difficult to organise the division of labour when there are so many hefty Bills going through the House.

I have a particular interest in a couple of groups of amendments being discussed today. High streets and businesses are a core levelling-up issue for so many people outside of London. The decline of the high street can illustrate viscerally the feeling of being neglected and left behind. Boarded-up shops and closing community resources such as banks and pubs can be demoralising, making it feel like the heart of a community is being ripped out. Amendments 433 and 434 from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, are important in this regard; she summed up in a compelling way why this is an important group.

A number of the amendments refer to consultations, which are very important. I was interested in the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, regarding incentives. They show that we cannot simply declare a commitment to reviving the high street; it is a bit more complicated than that, to say the least.

I want to raise the dilemma that arises when government policies with different priorities, in completely different areas from this Bill, inadvertently make matters worse for high streets. I will reflect on and support Amendment 432, from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, on assessing the impact of pedestrianisation.

Pedestrianisation can intuitively seem like a good idea for high streets—a positive contributor to a community atmosphere, with increased footfall and increased likelihood of people popping into premises and so on. But stop and consider Naz Choudhury who, for many years, ran the successful Temple Bar, a halal Lebanese grill and Indian food restaurant in Oxford, which permanently closed recently. Why did it close? Mr Choudhury blames a certain form of enforced pedestrianisation in the council-imposed low-traffic neighbourhoods, specifically car restrictions in the Cowley Road area of east Oxford. Mr Choudhury says:

“The council’s decision to put these bollards up along Cowley Road was the main reason people don’t want to travel here anymore”.


Obviously, that is a subjective view, but there are a lot of controversies surrounding the Government’s active travel policies, which emphasise cycling and walking over driving. Businesses are saying that policies such as LTNs are having a negative impact on them. In Haringey, where I live, many shop owners say that LTNs are causing them to lose business.

The controversy around LTNs in Cowley Road in Oxford even hit the national newspaper headlines, largely because of opposition by Clinton Pugh, who is the father of the brilliant “Little Women” actress Florence Pugh. Clinton Pugh said:

“The council have literally strangled the life out of the Cowley Road and it is having a very negative effect on businesses.”


Mr Pugh, who is the owner of two or three cafés and restaurants on the road, even put up a banner accusing Oxford of censorship, quoting Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Rather than talking to or listening to him, the council’s response was to threaten to fine him for not getting planning consent for the banner.

Beyond the celebrity stories, a serious point for this group of amendments on the high street is to note that policies such as LTNs, which I am sure are very well intentioned, can create a type of pedestrianisation that is bad for business. Too often, councils just will not listen to the complaints or look at the evidence. Cowley Road traders became so exasperated that they produced their own business impact survey of the effects of traffic-reducing measures. It revealed that at least eight shops had closed where LTNs are located; that 153 shops had been directly or indirectly affected through a loss of customers and logistical problems with deliveries to businesses and customers; and that business owners reported a decrease in turnover of 30% in some instances, with some claiming 50%. A letting agent said that the tradespeople they use had increased their call-out fee from £45 to £65 due to the time it takes to get around in a van, the extra fuel used and so on. Hospitality businesses are particularly affected. A staff member at a specialist supermarket, which people travel a long way to get to, noted:

“We don’t sell many large bags of rice now because they’re too heavy to take on the bus”.


Something that looks like “Let’s get everyone walking or on the bus, and it will all be lovely and pedestrianised” is actually destroying businesses and having a bad effect on consumers, who cannot get what they want to buy. We can see parallels between pedestrianisation and the removal of free—or any—parking spaces in town. This is a double blow to both shoppers and SMEs alike, again in the name of anti-car, active travel policies.

Oxford traders say:

“We’ve been asking for an independent business impact assessment to be carried out but the council have ignored us, so we had to do our own”.


If we are to have a levelling-up discussion, Amendment 432 would be a sensible way to sort out the pros and cons of pedestrianisation in local areas. In other words, you cannot have top-down policies that undo any possibility of local residents or businesses having a proper say. LTNs illustrate that.

[Lord Etherton (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee: I should have disclosed before I spoke that I have an interest as the owner of high street retail premises.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 459, led by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, to which I have attached my name. As noble Lords will know, this amendment has strong cross-party support, and countering smoking has long had cross-party support in this House. The amendment seeks to ensure that all pavement licences are smoke free. I hear what noble Lords have said about such licences, and this amendment would apply if a pavement licence is granted. It seeks to ensure that the rules inside a bar, restaurant or café apply equally to their outdoor area.

These outdoor areas were expanded in the pandemic so that there was more space between people; outdoors thus became an extension of indoors. The same smoke-free rules that apply inside should apply outside, for exactly the same reasons. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, pointed out, the Local Government Association agrees. That makes these areas more family friendly, and I point out to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, that the LGA argues that it makes it easier to implement if this is applied nationally.

The Government have had several opportunities to make pavement licences 100% smoke free over the last three years and have opted not to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Young, has specified those instances. This is despite the clear evidence of the health harms of second-hand smoke, strong public support for smoke-free pavement licences and examples from various councils, including Manchester, of this measure being introduced successfully.

The public health case for this policy is very clear. The scientific evidence indicates that there is no risk-free level of exposure to second-hand smoke. Associated health effects include stroke, lung cancer and coronary heart disease. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who has just spoken, probably gave up to protect his health. We are seeking to protect others’ as well.

If we continue to allow smoking in pavement seating, passers-by, customers, staff and above all children will keep being exposed to significant amounts of tobacco smoke. The risk is particularly acute for staff, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, specified, who have no choice but to be exposed to people smoking when they work. Of course, children are particularly susceptible to harm from second-hand smoke; we all know that. In Canada, where most provinces have had laws to implement smoke-free patios outside hospitality venues for years, these laws have been popular, easy to enforce and had a positive impact on health. Where smoke-free patios were introduced, second-hand smoke exposure went down by almost a quarter.

Fortunately, the world is changing, as others have said, and smoking is no longer the norm. In the United Kingdom, this House over the last 20 years or so has led the way by helping to reduce smoking—for example, by banning smoking in public in settings, and the noble Earl played his part in that. In 2019, the Government set themselves the worthy ambition of seeking to reduce the number of smokers to below 5% of the population by 2030. While the Government have announced some measures to help deliver this ambition, we are still waiting for the comprehensive strategy needed. Expanding the number of outdoor spaces that are smoke free helps to deliver what the Government say they wish to do.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, raised some of the problems that mean that pavements cannot be pavements. My particular bugbear is cyclists on pavements; they drive me mad. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, raised some of the tensions when deciding how we regulate public spaces, drawing attention to residents who live on streets where maybe there are pavement cafés.

Those things are worth considering but I want to return to the points made at the start of this group, so well explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, and to reference the earlier group on reviving the high street. One of the very few positive outcomes of the dreadful lockdown period was the emergence of imaginative ways of creating social engagement outdoors. When lockdown was such an antisocial action that kept us apart from each other, we found ways of connecting.

Café society is indeed a positive innovation, and regardless of the differences between the weather and climate in the UK and, for example, continental Europe, Brits have taken to this way of enjoying hospitality services. It is a great boost to that industry, which suffered so badly under lockdown.

One of the advantages of this spilling out of café society on to pavements is that it has allowed smokers and vapers to have a coffee or a drink alongside a cigarette, which I consider—shock, horror—to be all very civilised. It is certainly better than huddling outside in doorways in between sips of a drink.

I find it rather galling that Amendments 458, 459 and 461—all of which, one way or another, involve restricting smoking outdoors and making those restrictions a precondition of the licence—have been added to this group. Amendments 458 and 461 emphasise that where there is consumption of food or drink, the licence holder must ensure that smoking or vaping does not affect others. This seems an impossible duty. How could it ever be monitored? It is a degree of micromanagement of the life of communities. It seems the licensee is being threatened—they must prevent smoke drift affecting those in the vicinity, or they will not get a licence.

Tobacco smoke in outdoor areas is highly diluted and dissipates quickly in atmospheric conditions. I worry about moves towards such punitive restrictions on people smoking outside, when all they are doing is indulging in a legal, personal activity. Do we need to overregulate in such a fashion? Smokers, a minority no doubt, are perfectly respectable and considerate citizens and it would be wrong in any way to imply that in some or most cases they wilfully blow smoke into people’s faces or are not mindful of others in the vicinity.

As to involving vaping in this, targeting an anti-smoking device seems just wrong-headed. So many people I know who have stopped smoking did so by taking up vaping, and they improved their health in the process. If the proposers of the amendments are worried about any exposure to tobacco smoke outdoors, this would require that a proper scientific study be brought before the House, or at the very least a national consultation. Amendment 459 goes the full hog and states:

“Pavement licences may only be granted by a local authority subject to the condition that smoking is prohibited”.


It seems that an attempt is being made to use this Bill as a backdoor route to banning smoking in public places per se.

This Bill has been packaged as empowering local decision-making. Can we note that local authorities already have the powers at their discretion to regulate smoking in licensed premises and on pavements outside pubs, bars and restaurants with exterior tables and seating? It is up to them. How can we justify using this Bill to bring in central government legislation that threatens that if pubs and cafés do not ban smoking outside, no licence will be given to them? This seems wholly disproportionate.

We should note that such prescriptive rules could well lead to fewer customers, more high street closures and, certainly for many citizens who as adults choose to smoke, less freedom. It goes against the spirit of a levelling-up Bill when you have an imposition from the top of a kind of “we know best approach” to local matters and individual matters such as smoking, and it will grate with many people.

I appreciate that some people do not like people smoking. Some people find it loathsome. One noble Baroness has boasted about not tolerating smoke drift. There are a lot of things that I do not like and that I would rather not tolerate. I am not keen on people chewing gum or putting on make-up in public or eating with their mouth open or talking loudly or on babies crying when I want to sit quietly with my latte and read my book outside a café, but—my goodness—this is society. We tolerate each other; we rub along. There is something really positive about a café society. We should not use it as an excuse to bring in unnecessary regulations that set us at odds with one another as a means of policing and supervising personal, legal behaviour.

To finish, I do not know whether this will encourage or discourage, but I have noticed that smoking on the Terrace outside the Lords has been banned but somehow smoking on the Terrace of the other place is perfectly okay, and guess what? It is packed with people who work in the House of Lords or sit as Peers in the House of Lords because it is the only place to go—not to damage people but just to relax and have a cigarette with a coffee. They are not breaking the law.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Before my noble friend gets up to respond to this debate and at the risk of upsetting the mood of the Committee, I remind noble Lords that we have done three groups. We have another 19 to go and we are going to finish tonight, so unless anybody does not wish to have any sleep, I suggest we perhaps cut our speeches down just a little bit if we can.

Residential Leasehold

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 17th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

No, we do not intend to extend legal aid. For leaseholders who are considering what to do in future, we have made it very clear that it will be in this Parliament, and they just need to wait and take advice at this time until we can get these changes in place.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

What is the Minister’s response to the revelation from the Commonhold Now campaign that, according to polling, 60% of those who voted Conservative in 2019 support the abolition—not the reform—of leasehold? Perhaps that might concentrate minds.

The Minister says that she cannot at the Dispatch Box pre-empt what is in the King’s Speech, but it is at the Dispatch Box here and in the other place that the Minister and the Secretary of State have constantly assured the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and others that leasehold will be abolished. If it is too difficult for this Government to do, maybe that says more about them than it does about leasehold law.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

We have made it very clear that we wish to extend the benefits of freehold ownership to more home owners. That is why we have committed to ending the sale of new leasehold homes and houses to reinvigorate commonhold, so it can finally be a genuine alternative to leasehold. But, as I have said before, we know that, on commonhold work for flats, the Government, industry and consumers will all need to work together, which is why we established the Commonhold Council to prepare home owners and the market for what we want to do, which is to give this freedom to more home owners.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 24th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for explaining so very comprehensively what the issues are. The key question is whether the Government have done enough. I do not intend to go into all the detail but I have a couple of observations and a query, because I really do not know how to solve this crisis and I need to be convinced that what is being put forward is the solution.

One thing that has been very important is that so many categories of leaseholders were left out of previous arrangements. That has caused immense pain, hardship, a sense of unfairness and so on, as has been described. As we have heard, in the popular imagination this is all about solving the cladding crisis, but actually it goes far beyond cladding and covers a wide range of remediation work. Also, we have ended up in a ridiculous situation of people in the wrong size blocks of flats still having to pay but not being covered by protection and legislation.

I really appreciate all these different difficult dilemmas, and like everybody I had hoped that the work that had been done in the building safety legislation that many of us were involved in would be a great source of relief and excitement for leaseholders. It has not been. People are still absolutely in a very bad situation. The Government have to know that because I know they want to help. Therefore, we should consider our options.

These are my slight concerns. A lot of the problems that leaseholders face are based on the way that people are reacting to remediation work that will need to be done because of the building safety legislation that we passed. There is an atmosphere of risk aversion that means you cannot sell a leasehold flat now because of all the reasons that have been given. The lenders say, “Well, it’s leasehold; there may be future remediation work to be done”, and so on. It has become an absolute nightmare. It seems ridiculous, in the middle of a housing crisis, that people are unable to sell their flats, not because they are too expensive but because they cannot proceed. There is a kind of glut in the flat market at the moment: people cannot move on but people also cannot buy the flats that they urgently need to live in.

My concern is to make sure that we do not always describe this through the issue of critical safety work. Even during the building safety discussions, I was concerned that we would become too risk averse—that the whole process of building and construction would be so mired in fear of what might happen and the idea that fires would burst out at any moment that it would become impossible to build anything with the stipulations that were put forward. With the broader problem of housing supply and the housing crisis, I am terrified that we will end up with nobody building anything anymore because there will be too many risks in doing so because of the legislation that we have brought in. That is one problem.

The other thing that I am concerned about in relation to the polluter pays issue is that we might end up destroying the construction industry. I am more than aware of the fact that there are problems with parts of the construction industry. I do not doubt that there are what used to be described as cowboy builders and so on. I see serious problems when I look at all the work being done by the leaseholder groups to expose the terrible circumstances where people are living in flats that are not fit for purpose. I am not suggesting in any way that those things are not true but I am also very wary of demonising the construction industry and effectively destroying it at the very time when I want it to be hyperactively building houses all over the place to solve the problems of homelessness, the fact that people have nowhere to live, the affordability crisis and so on. Maybe the noble Lords could just answer how we deal with that.

So that we do not focus just on the construction industry as though it is solely the bad guys, I say that I am very frustrated about the fact that the banks are embroiled in holding things up. They will not lend to people who want to buy leasehold properties. That is a real problem; is it something we need to look at? As has already been discussed, and I have raised in past contributions, the role of the insurance industry has also been hugely problematic, with the cost of insurance. That all trickles down and the leaseholders end up being the people who suffer. As I said, I am very nervous about making our focus just on the construction industry.

The thing about the polluter pays model that I am concerned about is who gets labelled as the polluter. I have just walked past the demonstration in which the polluter in that instance apparently is the fossil fuel industry, the energy industry, or people who create cars. Those demonstrators say that the polluter should pay for all the problems in society. I am wary that this is oversimplistic as a solution. However, I say to the Government and to the Minister that saying that the status quo ante is sufficient is a betrayal of the promises that they, and in fact many of us, made to leaseholders last year.