My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 14. First, I apologise that I was away for Second Reading; I confess that I would probably have made a rather frustrated and angry speech at the Bill’s limitations and the waste of a chance to end leasehold once and for all. However, I come here today in a more conciliatory mood with, I hope, a constructive proposal to create a Sunset clause on all new leasehold flats that would allow the Government five years to resolve any outstanding issues for present leaseholders. Because of a time limit, there would be light at the end of the tunnel, and all the rhetoric from the Government and the Opposition condemning leasehold as a feudal, unfair tenure could be turned into a concrete outcome, with no room for broken promises.

There is nothing unreasonable or radical about the amendment. The Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto promised to enact a

“ban on the sale of new leasehold homes”— and note that the wording was “homes”, not “houses”—and the Majority of leasehold homes are flats. In fact, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, pointed out, 70% of them are. We know that it is precisely in relation to flats where the real abuse occurs, where the real money is made by third parties in exploitative extraction, and where the majority are denied control of their own finances and lives. That is where this scandal lies.

What is more, the number of leasehold flats is increasing exponentially, whereas the proportion of new-build houses sold as leasehold is falling dramatically, from a 15% high in 2016 to a meagre 1% of all leaseholds in December 2022. Yet the Bill avoids the main problem, and I am hoping that this amendment will give us a way out, and that now is the time to do it. Banning new leasehold houses is not enough and does not, in my opinion, despite what the Minister assured us, uphold the manifesto commitment. The amendment would allow the Government to honour their promise but without doing it in a rush.

Not to be partisan, I was delighted when the Shadow Housing Minister, Matthew Pennycook, pledged to scrap leasehold tenure within Labour’s first 100 days in office, but this appears to have been slightly rescinded or fudged. This is therefore an amendment for all sides, to ensure there is cross-party consensus that we will absolutely name the date by which leasehold will have gone—what Michael Gove, the Secretary of State, has called an “indefensible” system of tenure. As far as I can see, everyone, cross-party, agrees with that. If not now, when? This is the first piece of legislation tackling leasehold tenure for new and existing homes in 22 years, outside of building safety. Another opportunity to move against this iniquitous regime may not come around any time soon; it might take another 22 years.

I am keen to learn the lessons of history, because back in 1995, the late Frank Dobson, then the shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, and Nick Raynsford, then the shadow Secretary of State for Housing, brought out an excellent pamphlet entitled An End to Feudalism: Labour’s New Leasehold Reform Programme. It noted:

“Over recent decades the weaknesses and injustices inherent in the British leasehold system have become increasingly highlighted, but reform has been a long time coming”.

It was promised that reform would come under that Government, but reform has sadly been an even longer time coming because, despite a promise to use the 2002 leasehold Bill to sunset any new leasehold buildings, this was reneged on.

This failure to use legislation 22 years ago to resolve the situation means that over 2 million further leasehold properties have been created—the very debt traps that have caused so much misery for so many. Are we just going to allow this Bill to pass, knowing that we will create more leasehold flats, and therefore more problems and more debt traps ahead? As Sebastian O’Kelly from the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership bluntly put it to MPs:

“You’re out of step with the rest of the world, so stop creating more leaseholds”.

I was delighted to hear the Minister assure us that nobody wants this, but I want that promise to be written down rather than just stated.

I stress that the amendment is not trying to dictate how this should be done. Rather, it would give the elected Government of the day, whoever that is, the space and flexibility to decide on whatever schemes are appropriate to ensure that third-party investors—the rentiers—are no longer permitted to interfere in what will be, I hope, a thriving sector of flats throughout the UK.

The amendment is not prescriptive, as I have said. Commonhold is not even mentioned directly, even though I agree with all those who have said that it is best suited to deliver ownership and management of residential flats for the future. The main point is to set a sunset Clause to ensure that, whichever party is in government, there are no more broken promises and that the “in due course” we heard about earlier has an end date. What is more, the amendment, via proposed new subsection (3)(c) and (d), would ensure that existing leaseholders are not left behind. In a way, what is not to like?

However, it is difficult to know exactly who or what I am arguing against, because I am not quite sure that I even understand why this could not have been done in this legislation. The answer has not been forthcoming. I want to look at just a couple of objections.

In this Chamber, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, explained from the Dispatch Box earlier this year that reforming leasehold for flats is “inherently more complicated” than for houses, as they required an arrangement to “facilitate management” of the buildings. Surely the “it’s complicated” defence is a red herring. There have been endless consultations and commissions, and decades-worth of academic and policy research, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, pointed out. We have had the Law Commission, with its 121 recommendations. An expert advisory group, the Commonhold Council, was launched in May 2021 by the Government precisely to prepare home owners and the market for widespread uptake of a collective form of home ownership. So, as the former Housing Minister, Rachel Maclean, told the other place at Second Reading:

“All the work has already been done”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/12/23; col. 676.]

For the remaining complexities, this amendment would give Parliament one more term as a reasonable timeframe to work at any outstanding issues—for example, around the complications of shared ownership, which we heard about earlier.

I also want to challenge the notion that the management of blocks of flats is so complicated that it is untenable in the short term. I fear that this hints at a prejudice about whether commonhold will lead to poor property management—something that is often wrongly equated with amateur management. This is a flawed argument that is sometimes put forward by the freeholder lobby. It is patronising and patrician and, in any event, it ignores what is happening worldwide. If you buy a flat in the majority of cities in the world, it will be held in commonhold, and the buildings are not all falling down or neglected.

Groups of flat owners are more than capable of bringing in professional management companies to organise repairs. The Commons Select Committee said, back in 2018-19, that it was

“unconvinced that professional freeholders provide a significantly higher level of service than that which could be provided by leaseholders themselves”.

To be honest, it is the opposite. At present, leaseholders are being charged for services that they do not receive.

In conclusion, what is not complicated is that owners of flats are a safer bet for maintaining and managing their own homes than those developers and freeholders who have given their own profession a bad name. It is why this scandal is being discussed in the first place. I suggest that we simply say that in five years’ time this will be put to bed and finished with, and then no one can accuse whichever Government are in power of breaking promises again.