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The entire residential leasehold system is a racket and the sooner it's brought to an end the better. Not all freeholders are a menace but those that aren't are so due to their conscience and decency and not because of the law.

It's where freeholders can charge you £150+ for a 2-line notice of a change of tenant, where they can charge you service charges for work that wasn't carried out, charge you double or triple the insurance that is available on the open market, slap on admin fees for little or no admin and every other trick in the book. Delay payment and it's a solicitors' letter with another few hundred pounds of charges and yet more admin fees. It's no different when it's a slum landlord in Liverpool or a toff owning half the West End they're all at it and they have the law on their side.

Of course you can challenge it in the Tribunal but who's mad enough to give up months of their life for a few hundred or even thousand of pounds dealing with lawyers with a chance of losing and the freeholder possibly recovering their costs under a term in the lease?

I say this as a lawyer with freeholder as well as leaseholder clients and I see the reality of it all the time in the course of my work.

It must be brought to an end.