Misery of leaseholds set to end for millions

Outdated and feudal system will go, vows Gove

MICHael Gove has committed to abolishing the ‘outdated, feudal’ leasehold system of ownership for almost five million homes by the next general election.

‘In crude terms, if you buy a flat that should be yours,’ Mr Gove said.

‘You shouldn’t be on the hook for charges that managing agents and other people can land you with which are gouging.’

The levelling Up Secretary, who yesterday admitted that ‘faulty’ government guidance was partly to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, vowed that under his plans leaseholders will no longer have to pay to for costly repairs such as fixing unsafe cladding, with the burden shifted to landlords.

‘The people responsible for erecting buildings which we now know are unsafe have to pay the costs of making sure those buildings are safe,’ he said. ‘We want to introduce legislation in the final parliamentary sessions of this calendar year to change the leasehold system.

‘It’s not easy in legal terms because you’ve got a tangle of deals going back hundreds of years – unstitching all of that is difficult – but the fundamental thing is that leasehold is an unfair form of property ownership. It is an outdated feudal system that needs to go.’

In an admission never previously made by a minister, Mr Gove told the Sunday Times that the Grenfell tragedy had occurred because government ‘guidance was so faulty and ambiguous that it allowed unscrupulous people to exploit a broken system’.

Today he will announce that developers will have a six-week deadline to sign a contract committing them to fixing unsafe tower blocks, or else be banned from building new homes

Mr Gove said responsibility for the Grenfell tragedy was ‘ collective’ and extended to those in power ‘before the Conservatives came into government’. He

‘Profit before lives’

told Sky News: ‘If you look at what happened at Grenfell there were lots of factors, but yes – government collectively has to take some responsibility.

‘ The responsibility extends before the Conservatives came into government in 2010 and I’m not about attributing blame to individuals.

‘ I think that’s wrong because there are a lot of us who have responsibility to say that the system of regulation that was in place was ambiguous and it was exploited by the people who were putting profit before lives.’

The Grenfell Tower inquiry, which will report its findings later this year, is likely to attribute blame to both the government and developers.