Dispatches from the front

This handbook has been the profession’s lodestar – the book you reach for when your brain whispers, ‘surely someone’s written this down before’. Frances Silverman once again delivers a volume that is equal parts comfort blanket and compliance manual.

The 32nd edition lands in a property market that has barely caught its breath. Between the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, the Building Safety Act, and the incoming Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, there is scarcely a paragraph of the law left untouched. Silverman manages to corral this legislative menagerie into a readable order, without losing her dry wit or patience with poor drafting. The new preface, dated 1 August 2025, reads like a dispatch from the front – concise, realistic and quietly heroic about the sheer velocity of change. 

For practitioners, the updates are more than ornamental. Leasehold reform is treated not as a niche residential curiosity but as the seismic event it is for mixed-use and commercial transactions. The Data Act material, complete with the National Underground Asset Register, earns its place alongside perennial favourites: TA6, TA7, and the ever-expanding family of Law Society protocols. 

The tables alone are, as ever, worth the shelf space. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the profession that, in this uncertain world, some things are reliable.

Physically, the book remains a doorstop, but a doorstop of the most dependable sort. Its index still functions as a form of therapy: proof that, somewhere, every problem has been anticipated and alphabetised. The acknowledgements list a small army of experts, each thanked with the kind of politeness that suggests their contributions were extracted under duress and delivered with grace. 

This handbook does not just keep pace with the law – it quietly reminds the profession that someone, somewhere, is still keeping the score.

Anna Newport is a solicitor and director at Newport Land and Law Limited, Wakefield