They’re not laughing now. They said leasehold could never become a top-tier political issue. It was too technical. Not sexy like planning reform. Westminster didn’t care. That’s what they told me when I set up the campaign in 2023. Yesterday, the prescribed rates for extending a lease or buying the freehold (!!) became a national political talking point on Laura Kuenssberg’s show on BBC One, with @AngelaRayner struggling to bat back the detail. There we go. An issue supposedly too technical for Westminster to care about is now being put directly to the Housing Secretary and a former deputy prime minister on the biggest political show in the country. Those of us in the five million households living under leasehold are not here to be smirked at or palmed off. Service charges are soaring and more and more leasehold homes are becoming unmortgageable and unsellable because of the greed and corruption of feudal-style freeholders and their managing agents. The old politics of spin, silence, word salad and cosy relationships between journalists and those in power doesn’t work like it used to. In this new information age, traditional media gatekeepers are being forced to respond to campaigners like us. And if they don’t cover the story, we make our own with vertical videos and briefings. So, Secretary of State, can you give leaseholders a cast-iron guarantee that the costs of extending their lease or buying their freehold will fall under the government’s reforms? Labour is abandoning its manifesto promise to end the leasehold system. In opposition, Labour warned that governments could be “lobbied by vested interests” into setting enfranchisement rates “that will be punitive for leaseholders”. @mtpennycook himself tabled amendments to the legislation that became the 2024 Act, seeking to make premiums “as cheap as possible for leaseholders”. Yet in a consultation that Ministers had refused to publicise, and which closed on Wednesday, we find the U-turn buried in the detail: “... it is not intended to use prescribed rates in and of themselves, as a means of further reducing premiums for leaseholders”. The policy on enfranchisement rates is now merely to: “... reduce the potential for dispute and provide certainty for leaseholders, freeholders and professionals as to what to expect from this part of the enfranchisement process.” How convenient for the freeholder lobby. This is a huge political story, picked up last week by The Times, POLITICO and Guido Fawkes. No wonder Pennycook has taken to X to dismiss scrutiny of the government’s quiet betrayal of leaseholders as “misinformation”, as though The Times were some Russian bot account. They said leasehold could never become a major political issue. We’ve made it one. And we’re not going away. Every attempt to water down reform, every delay and every broken promise will face fierce scrutiny and carry an ever-higher political cost until they @FreeLeasehlders.

“Ending 40 years of neoliberalism” latest: protecting developers’ superprofits to peddle more leasehold debt traps 🥴