Commencing the UK's leasehold reform legislation
The UK's new Leasehold & Freehold Reform Act 2024 could partially be brought into force. I'm not convinced by the goverment's implied claim that no further measures can be commenced without consultation.
And so I've made a nice colour-coded list of the LAFRA measures
The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 ("LAFRA") was enacted in May 2024, but mostly has not yet come into force.
The stuff in orange looks like it could be switched on just by the minister deciding to do so. The stuff in red is legit the stuff the previous Tory government left unfinished. Note that this is about whether any detail has to be specified before bringing parts of the law into force.
The 0.1% retroactive ground-rent cap on existing leases requires no further detail, but it's already the subject of a lawsuit - so that's a different impediment. Comparison with the government's statement of 21 November 2024 reveals that there is no timetable for bringing many of the measures in LAFRA into force:
It is concerning that the government has excluded the following LAFRA measures from its timetable for the current parliament:
- new leasehold house ban
- the redress schemes in part 6
- the non-financial reforms to enfranchisement, such as mandatory leasebacks
The minister gives no reason *at all* for not timetabling those and other such measures.
The statement is 2400 words long; they give good reasons for delaying other measures (complexity and unspecified statutory flaws). Were there good reasons for other delays, they'd say so.
(originally published on my gemlog)