Katie Kendrick, Jo Derbyshire and Cath Williams gave evidence.

Q Welcome to our Committee this morning. Perhaps you would like to introduce yourselves.

Katie Kendrick:

I am Katie Kendrick. I am the founder of the National Leasehold Campaign, which has been running for seven years. I am also a trustee of LKP.

Jo Derbyshire:

I am Jo Derbyshire. I am one of the co-founders of the National Leasehold Campaign and a trustee of LKP. I am not a leaseholder; I enfranchised and bought the freehold on my home. I had one of the now-infamous 10-year doubling ground rents on my house.

Cath Williams:

I am Cath Williams. I am one of the co-founders of the National Leasehold Campaign. I am no longer a leaseholder, but I did buy a leasehold house.

Q Thank you for coming to give evidence to us. I have a general question to start. Large parts of the Bill are broadly uncontroversial and uncontentious, not least because they implement Law Commission recommendations. There is lots we could add in, but let us try to keep a focus on what is in the Bill. In your view, to what extent does the Bill deliver for leaseholders in terms of transparency, fairness, enhanced consumer rights and empowerment? What areas could we look to strengthen or tighten up?

Katie Kendrick:

The Bill is very much welcomed and long overdue. As we all know, the Law Commission reports were fantastic and very detailed. The Bill is lacking significantly on the detail of the Law Commission recommendations. The headline was that the Bill would ban leasehold houses, and obviously the Bill as it stands does not do that. I am confident that it will, in the end, ban leasehold houses, but currently that has not been achieved.

The Bill improves the transparency of service charges, but just being able to see the fact that leaseholders are being ripped off more does not actually fix the root cause of the problem. As we all know, the root cause of the problem is the leasehold system per se. I am concerned that the Bill sticks more plasters on a system that we all agree is immensely outdated and needs to go. There is no mention anywhere in the Bill of our long-term vision of achieving commonhold. That is our vision, and it is the elephant in the room. The Bill does not even mention commonhold and how we can move towards it.

A peppercorn ground rent would massively change the playing field and help us to move towards our vision of commonhold, so we need to get a peppercorn ground rent for existing leaseholders in there. With the Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022, which means new builds do not have a ground rent, we have created a two-tier system. The Bill really does need to look at existing leaseholders and what can be done to help to put them in a similar position to new leaseholders. If ground rents are wrong for the future, they were wrong in the past and we therefore need to be bold enough to go back and fix that. Peppercorn ground rent has to be the solution. This is an amazing opportunity and I hope that will be the outcome of the consultation.

Cath Williams:

On peppercorn ground rent, we have noted a new definition of a long-term lease being 150 years, which we have never come across before. Many members in our group—there are over 27,000 members in the National Leasehold Campaign—have modern leases with ground rents at significantly less than 150 years, at around 99 or 125 years. That means that the provisions in the Bill do not give them the opportunity to revert to a peppercorn ground rent. If we have read it correctly—we are not legally trained—they would be excluded as having a non-qualifying lease. That is our understanding: that they would be excluded. That could be a significant number of leaseholders who will not benefit from the peppercorn ground rent opportunity in the Bill.

You mentioned that you welcome the peppercorn ground rent. It has often been put to me by campaigners on the other side of this argument that leaseholders do not mind paying ground rents. What is your view on that proposition?Q

Jo Derbyshire:

I had a ground rent that doubled every 10 years. It meant that my ground rent would be £9,440 after 50 years. It certainly is not a trivial issue in my experience. A ground rent is a charge for no service. That is the big thing for me. Some warped genius at some point in the mid-2000s decided to create an asset class on our homes. It is just wrong.

Do you agree with some of the arguments that are put forward by the freeholders lobby and organisations that abolishing ground rent will destabilise the pensions industry and mean that nurses and care workers and the good people who are toiling very hard in our public services will have their pensions destroyed? What do you say to that?Q

Jo Derbyshire:

I think that is project fear. I work in pensions. I work in administration, not investments, but I sit on a lot of pension committees where we talk about the assets that pension schemes hold. They have investment strategies and they protect themselves from over-investing in one asset class. The amount of ground rents held by pension funds in this country would pale into insignificance compared with, for example, the impact of the mini-Budget and what happened with equities shortly after that. This is deliberate scaremongering.

I have two brief questions. Are there any risks in terms of banning new leasehold houses but not flats? Why do you think this country is an outlier in the world and is so wedded still to this day to the feudal system of leasehold?Q

Katie Kendrick:

You cannot just ban leasehold houses and not flats—70% of leaseholders live in flats, so you are not tackling the problem. You are cherry-picking the easy things, and banning leasehold houses is easy. It is more tricky with flats, but that does not mean it is not achievable. As you have said, it has been achieved everywhere else in the world. We do not need to continue to mask that leasehold system. It is deeply flawed and it ultimately needs to be abolished.

We do understand that there is no magic wand and this is not going to happen tomorrow, but there have been a lot of campaigners, well before us, who have highlighted the issues of leasehold, and yet here we are, still, again, trying to make it a little bit fairer. It does not need to be a little bit fairer—it needs to go. That needs to be the ultimate aim. Everybody needs to work on this. There is something better out there, despite what the other lobbying groups will tell you.

Q This is a question I will ask a number of witnesses. We do an impact assessment for legislative change to all Bills, sometimes done well and sometimes less so. This has an assessment of the total cost of the Bill, with the best estimate being £2.9 billion. That is quite large for a Bill. A large part of that—about two thirds—is a transfer of the value from freeholders to leaseholders. That is at £1.8 billion, or £1.9 billion. What are your thoughts about that transfer of wealth?

Jo Derbyshire:

It is long overdue; bring it on.

Q From that, are you implying that your view is that it has been a rip-off to date, and therefore there are monies that you should have been having for all the years you have been paying and there was no value to it?

Jo Derbyshire:

If I think of my estate, there was no reason whatsoever to create leasehold houses other than to make money from the people who had bought them. That is partly why, going back to an earlier question, it is taking so long to dismantle the system in this country: it is because there is so much money for nothing in it. That is why it is so hard to dismantle it.

Q I cannot remember whether it was you, Jo, or Kate—if I may call you by your first names—who works in a pension fund.

Jo Derbyshire:

I work in a pension fund.

Q On the change in pension funds and investments, you may have different views about how important that is and my colleague asked you that question. However, putting yourself in the place of the people who own the freehold—some may be large overseas entities, some may be members of the peerage of the realm and there may be others—what is your view and what assessment have you made of the impact on them?

Jo Derbyshire:

From my perspective, it is just about how all investment carries risk. This is no different. This is about rebalancing the scales in terms of leaseholders and freeholders. For me, it is about fairness for leaseholders. That is what the Law Commission was tasked with a few years ago, it is what we have been fighting for over the last however many years and that is what this does.

Q I apologise because I came in slightly late today, Chair, so I do not know if people have declared their interest. I should say that I am a freeholder; I am not a leaseholder. I have been a leaseholder in the past, but always with a share of the freehold.

Ms Kendrick, you said that there were things that the Law Commission report had talked about that have not been included in the Bill. One of those is in relation to shared services. Often, in a mixed development, if there is a commercial element to the block of flats, with flats above, you will find that there is a common plant room or a common car park. I welcome the provisions in the Bill that say that you can go from 25% commercial to 50%; that is a good move. However, the Law Commission actually said something specific about whether you should be allowed, if there are shared services such as the car park or the plant room, to be able to take over control, because the flats—the leaseholders—would only have control over the plant room as it related to their block. Is that a provision that you think should be introduced? Otherwise, it makes a mockery, to a certain extent, of increasing from 25% to 50% if you are still going to be precluded from gaining control of your block because of the plant room or shared services.

Katie Kendrick:

Yes, there are clever ways in which they exclude people from being able to do that. We welcome the increase to 50%, but they are very creative when they design these buildings, with the underground car parks and stuff, as to what they can do to exclude the leaseholders from taking back control of their blocks. It is all about trying to have control over people’s homes. We should be able to control our homes—what is spent. No one is saying that you should not have to pay service charges, but it is about being in control of who provides those services. At the moment, leaseholders have no control. They just pay the bills.

Q And the residents having the right to manage that themselves.

Katie Kendrick:

Absolutely, yes.

Q If commonhold will not be in the Bill, would you support a principle that all future leasehold flats should have to be sold with a share of the freehold?

Katie Kendrick:

Absolutely.

Q And that any residents’ association should be able to have the management of the block?

Katie Kendrick:

Absolutely. If they are saying that commonhold is not ready to rock and roll, to have a share of freehold to mandate, a share of freehold for new flats moving forward would be a good step closer.

Q I hope you do not mind if I start by congratulating you on the work you have done with the National Leasehold Campaign. I know that my constituents in Warrington South have greatly valued the assistance and knowledge you have managed to secure through bringing people together. Thank you for the work you have done there. May we just go back a little bit? Can you tell the Committee what sort of problems leaseholders have when they go to buy their freehold?

Katie Kendrick:

All three of us have now successfully bought our freehold. Yes, we are still here.

Jo Derbyshire:

There are a number of things. The first is that most leaseholders do not understand the difference between the informal way and the statutory way to do that. The more unscrupulous freeholders will write to leaseholders with a “Get it while it’s hot” type of offer, which can be quite poor value for money. So, there is understanding the process in the first place. Then, regardless of which way you go—if you go the statutory way, currently you pay your own fees and the freeholder’s fees. There is an element of gamesmanship that goes on at the moment, which is why the online calculator is so important. Your valuer and the freeholder’s valuer will argue about the rate used to calculate the amount and then you will try and have some kind of an agreement. It is not a straightforward process at all. Cath will tell you what happened with her transfer, because they leave things in the transfer documents.

Cath Williams:

Yes, they did. In my case, it took 15 months and £15,000 to get my freehold.

Q It cost £15,000?

Cath Williams:

Yes, £15,000 on a house. It took that long because I found—this is one of the problems that leaseholders have—that I knew more than the alleged leasehold-specialist solicitor who was dealing with my case at the time. That was very early in the campaign, so a lot of education needs to go on for everybody: leaseholders, conveyancers and solicitors. Because I had done some research and tried to get my head round leasehold clauses and what were fee-paying clauses, shall we say, in the TP1, which is a transfer document, they tried to carry across all the fee-paying clauses. Essentially, it would be freehold but fleecehold, because I would still have to pay to the freehold investors.

It took that long because I kept redacting my own TP1, putting a red line through it and sending it back, saying, “I am not doing that, that or that.” Eventually, we got rid of them. The problem now is that we still have a lot of conveyancers who do not do that for the leaseholders. If the leaseholder does not understand the system or the lease terminology, that is always a big barrier. The way that leases are written—all their legalese—means the general public generally cannot understand; so, it is difficult.

Q Sorry to interrupt. When you were buying your house initially, did you know it was leasehold?

Cath Williams:

No, there was nothing on the site or in the paperwork to say that it was leasehold.

Q So when did you find out?

Cath Williams:

I found out on the day that I paid my deposit and went in to look at the extras list, which you tick to say, “I’m going to have carpets, curtains” and so on. The sales person said, “There’s something I need to add”, took a pencil and wrote “leasehold” along the bottom. [Interruption.] It is a true story. I said, “What’s this?”, because I had bought so many houses that were newbuild. I said, “I don’t understand why you are writing ‘leasehold’.” They said, “Did we not tell you?” I got a story about how it was local council land and had to be leasehold, which turned out to be completely untrue.

Q So you paid your deposit.

Cath Williams:

Yes, I paid the deposit, and I had sold my other property. We were very late on in the process, so I believe that I was mis-sold and misled, as were many members of the National Leasehold Campaign. We hear very similar stories.

Q I have residents in 40 or 50 homes on an estate in Chapelford in Warrington where not one of them was told about them being leasehold until they paid the money.

Cath Williams:

That is right. You are committed, and you are at a point where if you do not continue, you will lose even more money. You have an emotional connection to the property that you want to buy and lots of other pressures as well—people might be moving jobs or trying to increase the size of their home.

Jo Derbyshire:

I knew, but the salesperson told me that we could buy the freehold at any point for about £5,000. What they did not tell me was that the business model was to sell it on and what the implications of that would be. They sold it on less than two years after I bought the house, and the price went from the £5,000 they asked for to £50,000.

Q Did you know that they were selling it on? Did they tell you that they were selling it on? Did they give you any notice of it?

Jo Derbyshire:

No.

Katie Kendrick:

No, because legally it is unlike in flats, where when they sell the freehold on they should offer the people in the flat the right of first refusal. That does not apply to houses, so the land was literally sold from beneath us and they told us afterwards. Because we were not entitled to buy the freehold for two years—you must live there to qualify to enfranchise—they sold the freeholds on before the two-year point, so the freeholder was no longer the developer that we originally bought from; it was an offshore investment company that then increased the price significantly. We were never told that that would happen.

Q Can I just go back to your point, Jo? You said that it went from £5,000 to £50,000. Have they given you any rationale for the £50,000? Where did that number come from?

Jo Derbyshire:

That was the market value for a 10-year doubling lease.

Q A huge amount of the Bill is left to future regulations and statutory instruments. That is understandable in many cases—I am thinking of the service charge provisions and others. Are you concerned that it will take a long time to bring some of the measures into force? Is there a specific concern about the incentives that that creates in the time between them coming into force and the Bill receiving Royal Assent? As the Bill is drafted, there are some hard cliff edges, for example, on the new 999-year leases, where you have people who must extend before they come in. However, there are some potential cliff edges if the commencement dates on lots of these things are 12, 18 or 24 months away. Is that a concern?

Katie Kendrick:

It is a big concern, because leaseholders are trapped. They are in limbo, so they do not know whether to enfranchise now or to wait for the Bill to go through. The Bill says that it will make it easier, cheaper and quicker, but the devil is in the detail, and we do not know what the prescribed rates will be. We are being promised that it will be cheaper, but will it? It all depends on who programmes the calculator. Ultimately, will it actually be cheaper? The Bill says that it will abolish marriage value, which is hugely welcomed by leaseholders, so those people with a short lease approaching the golden 80-year mark are waiting. Do they go now?

Q Some of them will not have a choice, will they?

Katie Kendrick:

No, some people do not have a choice. People’s lives are literally on hold, and have been for many years, waiting for the outcome of the legislation. If we need further legislation to enact the Bill, people cannot sell. Housing and flat sales are falling through every single day because of the lease terms and service charges. It is horrendous. It will grind the buying and selling process to a halt.

Q I want to ask you about this whole business of people being unable to sell, and, in effect, the interaction between what the Government have tried to tackle in the Building Safety Act 2022 and what we have in this Bill.

Under the Building Safety Act, the provision is to appoint a designated person—an agent—to deal with the safety of the building. Often it will be the developer who is responsible for the remediation of a building that has fire safety defects and so on, which the Government are quite rightly trying to address, but they will argue that it is not possible to do that unless they have control over the management of the block as a whole. Therefore, there is a conflict between the Building Safety Act and the provisions in this Bill to help leaseholders gain the right to manage.

You might have just enfranchised and got the right to manage your own block, yet there is now an appointed person who will be told by the court that they have the right to manage the block. Very often, it will be the person you have just liberated yourself from. You will have just enfranchised yourself from that freeholder, only to find that they are now back in control. Do you feel there is a way in which the Committee should try to remediate and address that problem when it is looking at the Bill, and do you have any ideas as to how we should go about it?

Cath Williams:

First of all, the situation that flat leaseholders are in at the moment, where they have building safety issues and leasehold issues, is so complex. It is horrendous. We hear daily in the National Leasehold Campaign about these poor leaseholders. It is really heartbreaking.

It is awful.

Cath Williams:

People are at breaking point.

People have committed suicide, have they not?

Cath Williams:

People have committed suicide, yes. That is worth noting.

They ask for advice. We have never been flat leaseholders; that is the first thing, but there is a lot of support in the group to try to help people navigate their way through the Building Safety Act first of all, and now we have this Bill as well. In principle, I think they would really welcome some sort of cohesion between the two. I don’t know what that would be; it is really hard.

Katie Kendrick:

It is really difficult because we are encouraging people to take control, but by doing that they are liable for more of the building’s safety. The two Bills have to work together.

Q There is a real tension here, is there not?

Katie Kendrick:

There is.

Q You have talked extensively about ground rent and, Ms Derbyshire, your situation with it doubling. We all know the story about the inventor of chess, who asked for a grain of rice on the first square as his reward as long as it doubled until the last square, and then there was not enough rice in the world to provide it. This is clearly inequitable. You said that you welcome the provision in the Bill to be able to get rid of ground rent—to take it down to a peppercorn. Given that we have the consultation at the moment, would it not better if the Government just did that rather than you having to pay for it, which is what is recommended in the Bill? You should not have to pay to get out of a situation that is unjust. It was unjust in the first place, and it would be much better if the Government simply moved the consultation onwards and got rid of it.

Cath Williams:

Yes.

Jo Derbyshire:

The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 has essentially created a two-tier system where you have new builds without ground rent. As Cath mentioned, we are concerned that clause 21 and schedule 7 of the Bill seem to say a qualifying lease for buying out to a peppercorn rent must have a term of 150 years. We have seen lots of examples in the National Leasehold Campaign of new build properties—flats in particular—where the lease is 99, 125 or 150 years from the start, so a whole swathe of properties would be automatically excluded.

However, for us, because ground rent is a charge for no service, peppercorn is the answer. We also fear that, in terms of the timetable for legislation and getting this through, the sector will fight intensively and try to tie this up in the courts for years. It has nothing to lose; why wouldn’t it?

Q Katie, can I just go back to your earlier point about how lots of sales are falling through? Can you just explain why that is? What is causing sales to fall through on leasehold properties?

Katie Kendrick:

Because an escalating ground rent worries mortgage lenders and buyers are unable to get mortgages because of an escalating ground rent. Where that is because of the £250 assured shorthold tenancy issue, my understanding is that that will be sorted through the Renters (Reform) Bill, so that will close that loophole, but lenders do not like—for most leases now, the doubling has half-heartedly been addressed and a lot of leases are now on RPI—the retail price index.

However, with RPI being the way that it is—it has been really high in the last couple of years—some of those ground rents are coming up to their review periods and are actually doubling. Therefore, RPI, as Jo said many years ago, is not the answer. Converting to RPI is not the answer because an escalating ground rent is still unmortgageable, and it takes it over the 0.1% of property value, which, again, mortgage lenders will not lend on.

Therefore, a lot of mortgage lenders are asking leaseholders to go to the freeholder and ask them to do a cap on ground rent, which is then costing the leaseholder more money to get a deed of variation from their freeholder. That is if the freeholder agrees at all, because the freeholder does not have to agree to do a deed of variation to cap the ground rent. That is coming at a massive cost if someone wants to sell, but without that people are losing three, four or five sales, and people have given up because their properties are literally unsellable.

Cath Williams:

There is a house on my estate where sales have fallen through twice already. It is a townhouse; it is worth about £220,000. The ground rent currently—it is on an RPI lease—is £400, which takes it over the 0.1% of property value. Two sets of buyers have had problems getting a lender to lend in that situation.

Q A final question from me: on your social media channels, you talk about the leasehold scandal as being very similar to Mr Bates—who is in Committee just over the way—against the Post Office. I mean, is that true? Is it David versus Goliath?

Katie Kendrick:

Absolutely. When I watched the programme, I was shouting out loud. The parallels—the similarities—are astounding. The system there was a computer system; the system here is leasehold. People have been ripped off for so many years and paid unnecessary fees, and lots of leaseholders are thousands of pounds out of pocket. And that is because the system—the leasehold system—has allowed that to happen, and it is a scandal of the same magnitude, as far as I am concerned. People have, unfortunately, lost their lives. I have become a bit of an agony aunt for people; my phone never stops because people contact me in tears, and I have stopped people from taking their own lives because of leasehold. It is horrendous—absolutely horrendous—when you are living it and you feel completely trapped. It is when they feel that there is no way out that people look at taking another way out, and it is horrendous.

Cath Williams:

And we were both told, weren’t we, by the CEOs of the developers that we bought our houses from, that there was no leasehold scandal?

Katie Kendrick:

Yes.

Q Can you tell the Committee about what is commonly known as “fleecehold”? Does this Bill in any way deal with aspects such as that?

Katie Kendrick:

Our campaign coined the term fleecehold, and it has been used as a bit of an umbrella to describe all of the different ways that we can be ripped off through our homes. It first began because, when we were enfranchising and buying our freeholds, the freeholder was trying to retain all the same permission fees—such as permission to put on a conservatory or to paint the front door—in the transfer document. Ultimately, you could be a freeholder but still have to pay permission fees to the original freeholder.

That is where fleecehold came from, but fleecehold is now used as a much broader phrase because we have estate management charges. The new build estates all have estate management charges attached to them. They have replaced one income stream—leasehold—by creating another asset in the open green spaces. We all have lovely big open spaces and lovely parks, but it is the residents who pay for that. Again, it is a private management company that manages them. You have no transparency over what they are spending.

I can remember somebody ringing me up and saying, “Katie, I have a breakdown of my estate management charges and they are charging me such-and-such for a park, so I rang up and said, ‘You’re charging me.’ ‘Yes, Mr Such-and-Such. You have to pay for the upkeep of your park.’” And he went, “I understand that, but I haven’t got a park.” It is outrageous. It is great that they are going to give people more right to challenge the costs, which they do not currently have with their freeholders. They have fewer rights than leaseholders to challenge at tribunal. But ultimately why have we gone to a private estate model? Why are people paying double council tax? They are paying full council tax the same as anybody else is, yet they now have to pay thousands of pounds in estate management charges. It is a ticking timebomb.

The estates look very nice now, but in the future when the pavements are falling to pieces—I spoke to a police officer and things are not enforceable because they are classed as private. Speeding restrictions? You could have a boy racer running through the estate, but the police cannot enforce anything. The same with double yellow lines and things like that. It is a ticking timebomb, because new build estates are popping up all over the place with private management companies.

Jo Derbyshire:

There are some things in the Bill that try to stop things. Typically on fleecehold estates there might be freehold houses, but the estate management charge is secured legally by something called a rent charge. What most people do not understand is that if they withhold their estate management fees, the property can be converted from freehold to leasehold. Again, that cannot be right.

Q I just want to clarify your understanding of something that Mr Gardiner said earlier. I might need to put this to the Minister later, but Mr Gardiner said that if the new provisions on ground rent go through and ground rent goes to peppercorn or zero—I might be misquoting him.

You have been spot on so far.

You mentioned that in the new Bill leaseholders will have to pay to get their ground rent to zero. Can you set out what that provision is? Where is that in the Bill?

Cath Williams:

I don’t think we know. That was one of our questions. There is a process in the Bill about how a leaseholder can acquire the peppercorn ground rent, but who pays for that is not clear. I think that was raised before. I do not think leaseholders should pay, because it should not have been there in the first place.

Katie Kendrick:

Or there should be a prescribed cost—“apply for your peppercorn now”—with a simple process. Otherwise it will be exploited, and lawyer will charge different amounts to convert. You can see what will happen, so it needs to be streamlined. Whatever we go for, it needs to be streamlined.

Cath Williams:

And we need an online system that cuts out everybody in the middle, so that there is no confusion or discussion about what it should cost.

Thank you so much for clarifying that.

I could not agree more about the challenges you set out around people finding new ways to extort homeowners and the moves towards charging for the maintenance of public space. In my constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, Q many estates suffer from this issue. Mr Fuller will have similar ones on his estates in North East Bedfordshire. I completely agree that it feels shocking for lots of people that they are essentially paying twice for services: once for council tax and once for a charge that they have little control over and where there is often little guarantee of good services.

There are many estates in my patch where you can literally see where it becomes private because the condition of the road is shocking compared to 2 feet away, or the condition of the public space completely deteriorates. What measures would you like to see added to the Bill to help address that? Would you agree that ultimately we need mechanisms to ensure that a stated object can happen in a way that everyone can have confidence in?

Katie Kendrick:

In an ideal world, the local authorities would be adopting these areas. I do not think there should be a private management at all. Local authorities used to, and they can charge the builders more for the land at the start.

Cath Williams:

I agree.

Katie Kendrick:

Adopt the lot.

Q Katie, it seems to me that you and your team should be congratulated—you are the agony aunts. Believe you me, people look to these ladies and groups of people as their saviours rather than the Government. Already, leaseholders are saying, “Well, perhaps we can make this peppercorn. If we all go for this peppercorn, perhaps we can work then to get that peppercorn and get in there, and get shut of it that way.” Really, this is the opportunity. We should be listening to them—granted—and I genuinely believe there is listening going on with this Bill.

We have to tie it down and not let the situation become like the one we have seen with the post offices. It is an obstacle course. People have committed suicide. Managers have broken down. Homes have been lost. Jobs have been lost. The management charges are unbelievable, and I do not think people understand that. I have not seen it anywhere, but a leaseholder has to write if they want to change the carpet; they then get charged a couple of hundred pounds for that, they get charged for the answer, and they get charged when somebody comes to have a look at it. That is how it goes on. The management charges are as big a fear as the lease, because leaseholders do not know where they are going.

The Government simply have to step in. It is the biggest money-making racket in this country now—and it is a racket. It is said that people have sat down and designed this system, and we should not leave these people to do the fighting on their own. I genuinely believe that there is desire to do so from both the Minister and our shadow Minister. Please come forward with your thoughts; do not give up. I do not believe for one minute you will give up.

Katie Kendrick:

I believe there is political will to do this from across the House; there is unanimous agreement and there is no dispute. If there is no dispute, we just need to get it done.

Right, that is probably it then—[Laughter.] Thank you.