Another blow to the Right To Manage a block of flats

What The Powers That Be give with one hand yet they take away with the other.

The latest catastrophe befalling leaseholders of flats in England and Wales is a new impediment to exercising the Right To Manage: when a flat is being sold, it may be difficult to ascertain whether it is the outgoing or incoming owner who must be issued with a Notice Inviting Participation in a Right To Manage claim. Without the correct owner being notified, the whole claim fails. This has now been laid down by the Court of Appeal, after some litigation in the tribunals:

What this means in practice is that an RTM company making a claim needs to be certain that none of the flats is being sold or has recently been sold. Once the new owner is registered at the Land Registry, which may take months or years, then the situation is settled, but until then, the RTM company must somehow establish contact with all the owners of all the relevant flats, not just a majority of them, to make sure they're not being sold.

For a large site of dozens of flats, this will simply be impossible and claims will fail or never be attempted.

The whole thing is scandalous; the government is not going to fix the Land Registry's turnaroudn times, and it doesn't have the policy bandwidth to keep reverting Landmark's attacks on a system its predecessors invented as a bandaid for a tenure it basically doesn't believe in the first place. So relief will be a long time coming.