Category: The Buzz

On Wednesday 18th July, HorNet reps joined the National Leasehold Campaign demo outside parliament and later walked with them to 10 Downing Street where they handed in their petition to abolish leasehold. It was great to join such a spirited and well organised demo and to meet with people face to face.

A number of MPs came out to see us all in support including Sir Peter Bottomley and Jim Fitzpatrick co chairs of the All party Parliamentary Group on Leasehold and Common Hold reform. That great champion of exploited home owners, Justin Madders, John Healey, Shadow Housing Minister, and Catherine McKinnell who is very supportive of her HorNet member constituent.

Since our campaign is about estate management, you might wonder what we were doing there when it was a leasehold issue. We believe that all these ways of monetising land and property are interlinked, and that ordinary home owners are being exploited in a number of ways. Many leaseholders also live on managed estates, so even when successful in purchasing their freehold in most cases it will be “fake freehold” with charges attached. They will still not be free of a landlord and own a true freehold.

Stealing a phrase from the NLC campaign “don’t polish – abolish!” we who live on privately owned estates with public open spaces should be demanding compulsory adoption of these areas. Apart from resolving all the injustice and extra hidden costs for the home owners, this would also drive up standards of estate construction, which are currently abysmal and will eventually lead to blight.

So

• Adoption for estates with public open spaces
• Common hold for exclusively private estates
• Abolish leasehold across the board in favour of common hold

Are the things we should be demanding!

 

We are supporting our friends at the national Leasehold Campaign at their London Demo on July 18th.

HorNet co-ordinators are going and if you are able to attend it would be great to meet you. Meet between 11.00am and 2.00pm at Old Palace Yard Westminster.

Home owners are subsidising infrastructure provision in their local authority area. How?

Section 106 of the Town and Country planning act allows developers to contribute to local infrastructure where planning permission would otherwise have to be refused. The original intention was to facilitate development of more new homes and provide road improvements, school places, affordable homes and leisure facilities for the new population. In recent years local planners have been using section 106 to provide more and more local infrastructure, arguably not always of direct benefit to the development under question. It is being used almost as legalised bribery to extract as much cash as possible from the big house builders.

It is acknowledged that the commercial house builders are driven by profit and shareholder value, so they are going to do everything they can to retain their profit margins including:

• Cost cutting on home quality.
• Cramming as many houses as they can onto the development.
• Skimping on estate amenities preparation.
• Not offering estate grounds/amenities/roads up for adoption.
• Implementing the private estate model with unregulated management companies we all know and love!
• Unjustifiable sale of leasehold houses with onerous ground rents and onward sale of their freeholds to offshore investors.
• Not providing affordable homes via commercial viability assessments.

Home buyers on these estates are therefore purchasing a sub standard home on a sub standard estate and pay unregulated estate charges – effectively a private tax. There is no doubt that future saleability and value of these homes will be affected.

For leasehold houses with high ground rents and doubling clauses, the homes are unsaleable right now.

A HorNet member has researched the topic, and if you are interested, there are links in this document to articles about section 106 use and its damaging effects: S106 Articles Links

The bottom line is that we, the new home buyers, are getting a raw deal as a direct result of the way local planners are utilising section 106.