Families held to ransom

THIS may come as a surprise to many property and investment companies, but we are not living in medieval Britain.

So why is it that thousands of hardworking families are still being abused and treated like serfs by greedy landowners?

The leasehold scandal — and it is a scandal — that we describe on pages 38 and 39 is tantamount to racketeering. Some homeowners are being charged more than most people earn in a year to buy the land underneath their own home.

The firms snapping up freeholds admit these have become increasingly valuable because they are viewed as a ‘secure investment’ by pension funds. What they’re really saying is that investors see leaseholders as lucrative cash cows.

The hundreds or even thousands of pounds leaseholders are trapped into paying each year in ground rent is a reliable little earner for landowners. So why on earth would they want to make it easy for these people to free themselves from that financial burden? Homeowners say they were told at the time of their purchase that they could buy their freehold down the line for a few thousand pounds.

They say they were never warned that, in the meantime, the freehold may be flogged to an investment firm which might hike the price ten-fold. This screams of a misselling scandal — particularly when you’ve got professionals saying they cannot make head nor tail of their leasehold smallprint.

Last year, then Communities Secretary Sajid Javid pledged to liberate leaseholders from ‘feudal practices’. He said: ‘It’s unacceptable for homebuyers to be exploited through unnecessary leaseholds, unjustifiable charges and onerous ground rent terms. It’s clear from the overwhelming response from the public that action is needed.’

Yet while the Government has gone some way towards protecting new buyers, where is the promised help for existing leaseholders? At the very least they deserve their freehold at a fair price.

Ministers say they are working with the Law Commission to make buying a freehold cheaper and easier, but in the meantime, families continue to be held to ransom by the greedy and unscrupulous.

Car cowboys

HIRING a car is like navigating the Wild Wild West — and you don’t even need to go abroad to get caught out.

Earlier this month, my partner and I rented a car through Hertz for a couple of days in Scotland.

When we tried to return it, the woman at the desk claimed she had found a tiny chip in the paintwork that was not listed on her damage report.

‘That will be £280 plus a £35 admin charge,’ she announced. ‘Please sign here.’

Imagine our (lack of) surprise when later we pulled up the photographs we had taken of the car when we’d picked it up and found that very same paint chip. A paint chip, I might add, that did not look like it was even close to £280 worth of damage.

This is the second time in six months that a car hire company has tried to pull a fast one on me.

So at the risk of repeating myself: feeling like you’ve been ripped off shouldn’t be the default experience when renting a car.

When are the regulators going to crack down on these sharks once and for all?

BA’s fax faff

WHEN a colleague asked me last week where in the office he might find a fax machine, I was first surprised, then intrigued.

I was under the impression that the advent of email meant no one really needed to use them any more.

It turned out that, on his way home from a family holiday in Italy, his British Airways flight had been delayed and, as a result, he and his brother had to pay for a taxi home from the airport.

When he asked British Airways to reimburse him the £16.07 taxi fare, he was told to fax over a letter from his brother giving permission for him to handle the complaint.

What a faff! Surely a simple email from his brother would have sufficed — especially given that British Airways was willing to accept a copy of the taxi receipt via email?

It’s almost as if it’s in its interest for you to give up . . .