Tories finally move to ban new leasehold houses

The Conservative government's proposed ban on new leasehold houses is too riddled with exceptions to honour the commitments they made to voters.

Today the Housing Secretary Michael Gove tabled new amendments to his Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill, currently making its way through the UK parliament.

These amendments include a proposed ban on new leasehold houses, which was one of the few manifesto commitments the Conservative Party made about leasehold during the 2019 general election. However, the proposed ban has serious exclusions.

A leasehold house ban is something which has been spoken of and promised for some time. This has been to such an extent that notionally serious commentators have sometimes claimed that a ban is already in *force*. The 2022 "Phase 1" leasehold reforms did indeed ban the combination of ground rents and leasehold premiums in some circumstances. This earlier ban was also misrepresented by the wishful-thinkers, some of whom claimed it banned ground rents outright.

The proposed leasehold house ban has a much wider set of loopholes than the 2022 ban on combining ground rents with a premium. The following are only some of the loopholes:

Shared Ownership leases

Community Land Trusts

leases arising from home finance plans, including Rent To Buy

retirement housing(!)

certain National Trust property

subleases of leasehold estates granted before 22 December 2017

It looks here like the fix was in, as far back as 2017.

Now whatever one may think of Community Land Trusts, they and the National Trust are not the problem here, which is Shared Ownership and retirement housing providers (the NHF and ARHM). The best that can be said for the government's purported "ban" on leasehold houses is that it is grandfathering-in the abusers alongside the good actors, and in so doing is at least preventing the problem from getting any *worse* while a solution is worked on.