Asked by: Gareth Davies (Conservative - Grantham and Stamford)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what his timeframe is for bringing forward legislative proposals to grant freeholders equivalent rights to leaseholders to challenge the reasonableness of service charges for communal areas.
Answered by Eddie Hughes
The Government is committed to promoting fairness and transparency for homeowners and ensuring that consumers are protected from abuse and poor service. Where owners of freehold properties pay estate rentcharges it is not appropriate that these homeowners have limited rights to challenge these costs.
That is why the Government will give freeholders on private and mixed tenure estates equivalent rights to leaseholders to challenge the reasonableness of estate rentcharges. We will also consider the option of introducing a Right to Manage for residential freeholders once we have considered the Law Commission’s report and recommendations on changes to the Right to Manage for leaseholders.
In addition, when parliamentary time allows, we will remove the statutory right for owners of rentcharges to take possession or grant a lease of the property in the event of non-payment by the homeowner.
We have introduced legislation to set ground rents on newly created leases to zero in the current session. This will be the first part of major two-part legislation to implement leasehold and Commonhold reforms in this Parliament.