Whose agenda was LAFRA implementing?
Last year the UK government reformed leasehold and freehold law, via the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024. The law is now known as LAFRA and much of it is not yet in force.
It came after a long process of proposals involving the Law Commission and electoral manifestos. The Law Commission's reports (on Right To Manage, Enfranchisement and Commonhold) were referenced in the government statement of its agenda in January 2021. These reports were commissioned in 2017 and published in 2020.
But LAFRA doesn't touch on commonhold, and only half of it is even to do with leasehold. The legislation has eight substantive parts, and parts 5 to 8 are about estate management and building safety. That leaves us with parts 1 to 4:
- Part 1: ban on leasehold houses
- Part 2: some of the Law Commission recommendations on enfranchisement
- Part 3: some of the Law Commission recommendations on Right To Manage
- Part 4: regulation of leasehold
The Law Commission reports deal with three broad areas of reform within leasehold, but they don't make a coherent agenda on their own. They have their origin in Theresa May's interest in fixing housing policy after the 2017 general election. All of the reports relate to mutualisable buildings, rather than the residuum of buildings where ownership or management couldn't practically be shared amongst the owners of the constituent dwellings.
There was therefore another agenda, which accounts for the vital parts 4 and 1 of the Act ... but whose agenda was it?
The answer quite simply is: Philip Rainey KC. The measures in Parts 4 and 1 are largely derived from a presentation he made at a round-table conference in 2015.
This may go some way to explaining the purported surprise expressed in some quarters about the proportion of the Law Commission proposals that made it into LAFRA. Those proposals only deal with the easier cases where home owners can buy their way out of the situation. Something has to be done for the rest, and that is why Parts 1 and 4 are there.