User:Cattwil2

 National Leasehold Campaign (NLC) was created in January 2017 by Katie Kendrick a children's nurse in the North West. She has two co-founders Cath Williams (university lecturer ) and Jo Darbyshire (business woman). All three purchased new build leasehold houses between 2011 and 2015. The freehold of these properties were sold on by the developers (Taylor Wimpey & Bellway) to investors who saw the annual ground rent paid by tenants as a lucrative investment.

Ground rent provides no benefit to the tenant and is pure profit for the new freeholder who does not provide any service for this payment. In addition to this the leaseholder does not own the property - they have purchased a lease and the right to live in the building for a fixed period of time when they will hand the property over to the freeholder. This is a feudal system now abolished in most countries including Scotland and Northern Ireland. It favours the freeholder over the leaseholder with modern leases containing onerous terms such as doubling ground rent and ground rent premiums more than 0.1% of the property value. Lenders will not approve mortgages on such properties. All three NLC founders were not made aware of these facts when "buying" their properties and this gave impetus to create the campaign group.

The NLC aim is to abolish leasehold and promote commonhold tenure for flats. It has 13000 members (Feb 2019) in an extremely active Facebook group and represents leaseholders on many government forums such as the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for leasehold & Commonhold reform. NLC has raised awareness of feudal leasehold practices through the media resulting in a statement from Sajid Javid ( the then housing minister) in Dec 2017, banning future new build leasehold houses. Although welcome this does not help existing leaseholders and the campaign has continued to encourage government to look at retrospective action.

Through 2018 the NLC has worked closely with the N|Law Commission in their 13th review of leasehold law by encouraging members to complete consultations on leasehold practices to provide evidence for the review. The Law Commission has been tasked by government to make Enfranchisement - the formal purchase of freehold or extension of a lease, cheaper, easier and faster. Alongside this the government has carried out its own investigation of the #leaseholdscandal through a series of Select Committee inquiries. NLC gave evidence on behalf of its members to one of these events and more recently (Jan 2019) were invited to a round table discussion of leasehold issues with James Brokenshire  Secretary of State and Heather Wheeler  MP Housing Minister.