colleen Matheau-Raven

A property blogger reports a leaseholders service charge rising from £216 to £733 a month, alongside a proposed major works programme including over £500,000 for balcony flooring alone. When does financial liability become financial persecution? Leaseholders don't control the building, its maintenance history, the contractors or the decisions that lead to these extraordinary bills. Yet they're expected to shoulder potentially unlimited costs, regardless of their ability to pay or the value of their homes. Nobody disputes the need for essential maintenance. But there must be statutory limits on what ordinary homeowners can reasonably be expected to contribute. Owning a modest flat should never mean accepting unlimited financial liability for a building you don't control. Leasehold reform must address affordability, not just forfeiture.

A Section 20 major-works bill can become service-charge arrears. Arrears can become forfeiture proceedings. And forfeiture can mean losing not only your home, but every pound of equity you built up in it. How many people have been made homeless this way? Guess what? The honest answer is that the Government doesn’t know. The Ministry of Justice has admitted that its systems cannot accurately identify residential leasehold forfeitures. Ministers have relied instead on stakeholder estimates and even those figures don’t tell us how many began with unaffordable major-works bills, or how many people and families were ultimately displaced. That absence of data is not reassurance. It is an indictment. Don’t think they can take your home? Under leasehold, you may discover that you were never regarded as its true owner. You’re simply standing in the way of their asset. The happy family on the settee with the Labrador, or the smiling young couple holding their keys aloft in their postage stamp garden in the publicity photographs, have done their work. They sold you homeownership. The small print sold you something else entirely.