Ending the Great Property Rip Off

Far too often for those of us living in blocks of flats, our homes become a source of stress — or worse.

Management companies provide poor quality service, and many of our homes have become a financial trap as service charges, building insurance and ground rents rise uncontrollably.

All these problems are made worse by the complete lack of accountability in the property industry, and the astonishing rates of defects in new builds particularly.

It’s a system where the leaseholders and renters ultimately pay the price for poor quality building work and maintenance. Something has to change.

Ending the Great Property Rip Off

While Labour ignores the building safety crisis and only commit to ending new leaseholds, Liberal Democrats are ambitious enough to say we will free all leaseholders. And that we will build new the homes needed, while forcing the industry to build them safely. We are committed to:

• Abolishing Leasehold for new and current Leaseholders. Our feudal system needs replacing with commonhold — in line with the rest of the world.
• Ensuring all leaseholders are fully protected from crippling remediation costs — especially for cladding.
• Forcing accountability on developers, insurers & building inspectors — making the industry pay for poor quality building work — not you.
• Regulating management companies to ensure they deliver a high quality service — whether under leasehold or commonhold.

At our spring conference, we adopted a new policy towards leasehold reform. See Charlie's speech below.