The alleged flaws in LAFRA 2024

The Conservatives' Leasehold & Freehold Reform Bill of 2024 passed its last stage in the House of Lords on the final sitting day of Parliament before the general election. It quickly received royal assent and became enacted as LAFRA 2024.

Under its own terms, only a few of its provisions came into force that day. The rest are subject to secondary legislation for "commencement". The government announced in November a timetable for some of the measures to be commenced. But that statement blamed "flaws" in legislation for the inablity to commence some of it.

This led parliamentarians to focus on whether there needed to be a review into the performance of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, who draft the bills. For some context, here are the relevant links:

You'll note in the third link that the text shows a corrected and original version of the answer, which appear to be identical. The fourth link has the actual original. I think the third link is in error, despite being Hansard(!)

Changing answers

Here's the difference in the corrected version:

"As outlined in the Written Ministerial Statement on November 21st, the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act contains a small number of specific but serious flaws. Given the nature of the flaws, no review into the performance of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel is needed."

versus the original:

"As outlined in the Written Ministerial Statement made on 21 November 2024 (HCWS244), the Leasehold and Freehold Act contains a small number of specific but serious flaws which would prevent certain provisions from operating as intended. We intend to rectify these via primary legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows."

So what they changed was:

"[...] flaws. Given the nature of the flaws, no review into the performance of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel is needed."

to

"[...] flaws which would prevent certain provisions from operating as intended. We intend to rectify these via primary legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows."

The reference to actually fixing the problems was removed. This might not be significant; they were really trying to answer the question about whether the buck, which had been passed to the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, really stopped with that office. The position is now that although counsel must have screwed up, nothing needs to be done about it.

Recent development: government enumerates the flaws

To be fair to Matthew Pennycook MP, he did finally enumerate the flaws here:

and they are that primary legislation will be needed to

• Fix two flaws regarding a loophole in the valuation scheme set out in the Act, and an omission on shared ownership lease extensions.
• Allow third parties to leases, such as resident-led management companies, to recover contributions toward their process costs in some instances. Without this change, these companies may be at risk of insolvency, which would be an unintended outcome of the reforms requiring landlords to pay their process costs;
• Correct an unintended constraint on landlords’ existing redevelopment break rights that applies in certain limited circumstances; and
• Correct technical cross references and make consequential amendments to ensure the smooth implementation of the Act.

(the above is a near verbatim copy of what was announced).

The thing is, the minister was asked both for the flaws, and for the *reason" for the flaws. And the first of those has been answered, but with inadequate specificity. We don't really know what those two loophole-related flaws were. Another parliamentary question will be needed.