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Thank you Jeffrey. I am not a legal professional but there are a few glaring issues apparent to everyone. It is enlightening that some in the legal profession are recognising the flaws and welcoming new legislation in outdated leasehold tenure laws. It acknowledges the legal loopholes, where the professional investor freeholders (often found hiding behind nominee company directors, with ultimate beneficiary's in offshore tax havens) have an advantage, weighted in their favour. Root and branch reform is required to move away from the archaic root of these feudal practices. It is 2018 not 1066. Points to note!
1. The investor freeholder may own the land when purchasing the freehold but has minor economic interest in the individual properties or building. Freeholds are bought with often just a minimum capital invested by the freeholder compared to the overall building value. The leases are bought at the same value of similar sized freehold properties in most instances and the leaseholders long term investment building can be significant sums. It about time those paying for the building have the majority of the say in its maintenance and insurance.
2. Ground rent is recognised by many as for no defined service whatsoever, so its value should reflect that. Ground rent should revert to peppercorn (zero value) as to avoid some of the nefarious practices in monetising the leaseholders in lease extensions and enfranchisement. Remove the ground rent and that goes some way to removing some of the onerous event and permission charges that have arisen. Freeholders like to claim they are the guardians of the development (yeah right) and the ground rent is for that but the kick backs from lease extensions, permission fees, exit fees and commissions are the rewards for guardianship?
3. Reform Section 167 of Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 a Landlord may not be entitled apply for forfeiture in respect of an amount outstanding for Ground Rent, Service Charges or Administration Charges unless that amount is greater than £350 / 3 years. Grounds rents and service charges are now significant amounts since this legislation was enacted. So this should be raised to match, say x multiple of service charge / ground rent where ground rent still exists.
4. End forfeiture clauses. This is a nuclear option for freeholders and often the debt can be a fraction of the lease value. No other industry would tolerate this, it is an unfair contract term under consumer protection law. There are other mechanisms available like putting a charge on the property. Freeholders often claim debts back through the mortgage lender, except where a lease isn't mortgaged, can result in the whole property being forfeited. It is obscene in a modern society.
5. Unintended consequences of ground rent monetisation due to the Para 3A of Schedule 1 to the Housing Act (HA) 1988 under which the rent payable for the time being is payable at a rate of, if the dwelling-house is in Greater London, £1,000 or less a year and, if it is elsewhere, £250 or less a year potentially makes the lease an AST. While this has been largely ignored both by lawyers and lenders, it has come to prominence due to the leasehold homes scandal and brought about the the 0.1% cap on ground rents applied by lenders to protect their capital investment on the property.
6. The leasehold houses scandal correlates to 5 above. Frankly, these houses have been mis-sold under most definitions of consumer protection laws. Yes, the buyers knew they were leasehold but were told they could buy the freehold for a relatively small nominal fee after 2 years. This information effectively made the sale, yet it misrepresented the facts, as the developers had made a pre-development arrangement to sell on the freeholds to an investor freeholder. Scratch below the surface shows many of the directors of the house developers were also directors of many of these professional ground rent investors. If your ground rent is £295 doubling every 10 years is around then the cost of buying your freehold is around £26,000 based on your freeholders 5% cap rate. That`s much more than the £7k the developer claimed during the sale. This scandal should be treated same as PPI mis-selling. Come on legal professionals, you SHOULD be supporting this. Now many of these home, tens of thousands in fact are un-saleable and un-mortgageable due to the high ground rents in relation to the CML cap of 0.1%. These poor hard working individuals, duped and now with their lives frozen are stuck with onerous ground rents. Is this what a modern UK is about and is is this what you want? They are getting political support but I suggest only because their may be an election looming but essentially the message from government is- Don`t sue the developer SUE the SOLICITOR, its their fault!
7. Ban the selling of the freehold company which owns the leases to avoid getting around the law where leaseholders can enfranchise after 2 years, usually at a much greater multiple of the ground rent. It`s so obvious - it is actually painful to see the legal industry actually participating in this legalised scam.
8. Managing agents - the most scrupulous of organisations with a vested interest and an unnatural relationship with the freeholder that conspires to increase charges. Not one is chosen from consumer choice. This is an unregulated industry, anybody can set up one of these companies and are responsible for holding and administering huge sums of money. Why are they not FCA registered? We need to see a change where leaseholders choose the managing agent on a competitive tender basis. Remember, it was not long ago The Peverel / Cirrus (now Firstport) £1M price-fixing scandal involved cheating pensioners who were the direct victims of unlawful and probably criminal actions at 65 sites by installing Cirrus equipment through bogus tendering. The scam took place between 2005 to 2009.
9. Regulating or removing onerous permission & event fees. Should it really cost £295 to get permission for a doorbell? Seriously? While most agree the 1% contingency fee on sale, a 1% admin fee is for no service whatsoever. Very common in retirement flats sold by MCCarthy & Stone to Firstport.
10. Legislate against formal lease extension offers from the freeholder. Often cited as "trojan horse" offers that have alterations to covenants or permission fees to load lease extension with more profit opportunities down the road. This needs to go through a formal process in all instances.
10. Protection for the elderly retirees in purpose built blocks. Funnily enough but the only check in this instance is by the freeholder on the retiree purchaser. Albeit that purchaser can be 85, in ill health, take possession of a 999 year lease and in some cases (Audley Retirement) a 15% exit fee on a £400k property. How does that sound? Why would someone that age need to buy anyway? There should be age restrictions on purchases and rent being the only option for lets say person over 75. This would be doing our elderly citizens a great favour - a study by Age UK found that over 50% of retirement flats (2004 - 2012) lost value on re-sale. One McCarthy & Stone development in Kent has lost over £750k on re-sales in a 10 year period, averaging £60k loss per flat in a block of 70. Some of the smallest sized flats have ground rents exceeding some similar sized Mayfair properties. Pensioners are easy targets, they don't want confrontation and are easily ripped off in this revenue stream.
11. Unfortunately, this goes further in respect of the Grenfell cladding issues. The are thousands of UK flats having to remove unsafe cladding with the leaseholders having to foot the cost for cladding the developer used during construction. It`s not the leaseholders fault how a building is constructed. This is another failure of leasehold tenure. Some are faced with £40k costs on top of the mortgage costs. The freeholder apparently is not the guardian of the building in this instance - it is the leaseholder responsibility.
12. Help to Buy is fueling the leasehold stranglehold on this country. It basically tax payers money funding developers profits - some £75million bonus for one CEO. With average profits per house £70k the freehold sale isn't necessary but used as an excuse. Clearly, the figures above show there's enough profit in the industry. Just one look at the help to buy funded websites, almost every property has rent to the developer and service charges loaded in to the figures. Many have additional ground rents at onerous levels. So this problem isn't going away, it being compounded by this scheme.

Leasehold should be replaced with commonhold and property owners such as flats will own a part share in the property just like standard house freehold title. That is true empowerment rather than feudal rule. Its a misnomer that we the people cannot manage our own guardianship. For existing leases, enfranchisement must be made easier and cheaper and the next lease extension has to be converted into enfranchisement weighted in the favour of the leaseholder. We`ve had 900 years of this nonsense and no I don't need the local lord to raise an army. Goodnight.