The Housing Minister has warned that it is unlikely that leasehold will be abolished until after the next election.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has slammed Labor for failing to deliver on its original pledge, withdrawn in the run-up to the last election, to abolish leasehold rights within the first 100 days of his government.
Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook outlined some of the barriers to ending the leasehold system in his speech to the Institute for Government in Westminster yesterday, and hit out at opponents’ claims.
Pennycook said “leasehold ruins lives” and is “an anachronism in the 21st century”.
According to the edited transcript of his speech shared by the government, he said: “Therefore this [political content removed] The government has made a clear and unequivocal commitment in its manifesto to take action [political content removed] and finally put an end to the feudal tenancy system.
“When we made that manifesto commitment to end the leasehold system, we did not promise that we would immediately abolish leasehold completely.
“If complete abolition had been our intention, we would have stood behind a manifesto that promised as much.
“We have not, and for good reason, because anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of leaseholds knows that the outright and immediate abolition of around five million English and Welsh leases is almost certainly impossible.”
Pennycook criticized the attitude of political opponents such as Polanski, suggesting they were out of touch with the legal and practical barriers.
He said: “Those advocating such an approach cannot answer the question of how this would be legal; how the impact on the mortgage market would be managed; how it would even be feasible for the Land Registry to scrap millions of leasehold and freehold titles and replace them overnight with ordinary title deeds.”
He continued, wondering how opponents proposed to immediately create multi-million community associations or what the impact would be on buildings that have already acquired rights or exercised the right to manage.
Pennycook said of his opponents: “They cannot answer these questions because abolishing leasehold altogether is a slippery soundbite rather than a serious policy proposal.”
The Housing Minister further indicated that it is unlikely that the end of the leasehold will be completed before the next election.
He said: “We made it clear long ago, and well before the general election, that the consequences of [political content removed] when it came to leasehold reform, this was the case [political content removed] government an entire parliament to deliver what tenants were promised.”