ANDY BURNHAM IS TOO GOOD A POLITICIAN TO LEAVE LEASEHOLDERS HANGING
Burnham’s clever war on grifters and the extraction economy will finally free leaseholders
Our new cost-of-living Prime Minister is channelling the zeitgeist with a mission to topple rip-off Britain, and the leasehold mafia are panicking.
Not even a month in power and riding a wave of retail-friendly policies, Andy Burnham is proving himself far too good at politics not to cancel leasehold, the ultimate subscription scandal that bleeds people dry, causes widespread misery and has logjammed the housing market across England and Wales.
Imagine buying a home, to find that some feudal legacy means you’re a mere tenant in bondage to a landlord, or freeholder. You’re trapped in a contract that lets an investor with a minuscule stake endlessly hike your subscription.
With leasehold, an Englishman’s home is not his castle, but his landlord’s, and public awareness of this grim reality has created the biggest gap between house and flat prices in three decades. Even estate agency Zoopla has admitted it this week, highlighting the healthier position in Scotland, where flat owners are not subject to leasehold and control their costs and providers.
In leasehold, junk fees, or “service charges” and “ground rents”, can spiral so high that your home becomes unmortgageable and unsellable. Your choice is either to keep paying the extortion demands on top of your mortgage, or risk having your home seized by your freeholder under gangster-like “forfeiture”.
You can’t cancel. You’re left trying to flog a subscription nobody in their right mind would now take on.
Yet every PM who took power in the last 35 years promising to liberate leaseholders has refused to confront the rentier class, even though Parliament has been talking about leasehold abolition since the 1880s, before working men and women had the vote.
At the last general election, the Labour manifesto contained a totemic commitment to end leasehold for good. Yet, Keir Starmer and his lawyer chums invoked legalistic guff to protect money-for-nothing ground rents until 2068.
Burnham is right. Westminster has insisted that endemic rip-offs are just life, and left-behind leaseholders are furious.
As Manchester mayor during the apartment boom, Burnham saw how leasehold turned nasty. He joined leaseholders on demonstrations, but only Westminster could change the law. Now PM, Burnham can cancel the subscription. Smashing the leasehold mafia to help desperate people honours his mission of putting care at the heart of everything.
Ending leasehold is also great politics: a popular pro-growth agenda without the need for tax rises. By helicoptering cash into people’s pockets, rather than simply knocking a few pounds off the usual subscription, Burnham will gain the halo effect.
Angela Rayner’s return as housing secretary shows Burnham means business. Banished by Starmer to the backbenches, Rayner in the wilderness chose one battle: to fight him over his failure to free leaseholders, even teaming up with Lord Gove, who crusaded for us under the Tories.
To tame Treasury orthodoxy, there’s now a pro-leaseholder Chancellor in John Healey who, as Corbyn’s shadow housing secretary, devised policy proposals to end the subscription scam.
Meanwhile, an obstructionist Attorney General is out. The departure of Lord Hermer, the high priest of ECHR legalism, is a blow to the freeholder lobby, which weaponised human rights to spook Starmer’s rule-by-lawyers government.
Starmer’s “talk big, act small” politics on leasehold is over.
Instead of Starmer’s 40-year plan to zero money-for-nothing ground rents, Burnham can end the grifting next year. This policy gives an immediate cost-of-living win while cutting freehold acquisition costs, and is eminently sensible, backed even by former Treasury aide and furlough creator Lord Leunig.
Burnham can easily adopt the pay-the-piper principle on service charges. Instead of allowing freeholders to dictate them, he must empower leaseholders to “take back control” with universal Right to Manage. This means slashing the red tape that entrenches scammy service charges. Currently, leaseholders have to perform somersaults to cajole a whole 50% of flats just to establish an RTM Company. It’s impossible in the face of fear, apathy, ignorance, geography and freeholder tricks.
A 20% RTM membership threshold is enough. It won’t become some secretive process given all leaseholders have to be notified anyway. No one is permanently excluded, either: those who don’t join now can become a company member later.
To end leasehold, Burnham must set the valuation rates to slash freehold acquisition costs. This also involves implementing a key Housing Select Committee recommendation: removing the development value wheeze that allows freeholders to claim they can build in the garden to block the freehold sale.
Five million households are subject to leasehold. That’s 10 million voters scattered across all sorts of constituencies, including Blackpool South where Reform UK came second and too many retired leaseholders are being milked dry.
Ending the ultimate subscription scandal of leasehold will change lives forever and lock in a decisive voter bloc for years to come. Burnham’s too canny not to cancel it.
