A useful meeting on leasehold reform

Today I had a very useful and well-attended meeting with several other people trying to mitigate the effects of the leasehold scandal. I learnt quite a bit about one particular industry group's tactics, and there was a productive exchange of views.

This was a continuation of the "Dublin Memo" process: trying to address the problem site-by-site with the existing tools (Right To Manage, enfranchisement and so on) whilst seeking statutory change where necessary. This is in distinction to the Westminster-facing approaches of sucking up whatever the government is prepared to concede, or focusing on campaigning to shift the government's position.

What I learnt

• I had assumed that pursuing service charge disputes at tribunal was not as effective as RTM and enfranchisement; it seems that these disputes may pause the debt recovery and have other useful side-effects
• there is one managing agent / landlord group that is particularly egregious; they were already on my radar
• that it would be quite difficult to vertically separate company secretarial work from managing agents because the former is generally not covered in leases
• that the delay at some of the First Tier Tribunals is now two years; a spurious counter-notice to an RTM claim can thus delay RTM for multiple financial years