Starmer's TikTok stunt can’t hide the truth about Labour’s leasehold plans

He expects us to believe this single measure will actually go live at the end of 2028, perilously close to the next general election.

Starmer seems to think a sugar-rush video will convince those of us trapped in leasehold that liberation is just around the corner.

But a good social media game and sickly sweet press coverage are no substitute for detail and delivery from government.

We know his Labour government has already caved to Big Money interests.

Starmer’s ground rent cap is part of what is being billed as a wider crackdown on leasehold, a mysterious, exploitative system controlling over five million households. Leasehold makes England and Wales international pariahs.

Leaseholders, usually flat buyers, are at the mercy of landlords, or freeholders, who have the whip hand and can impose service charges that make their property unmortgageable or unsellable.

Ground rents can be aggressive too, but unlike service charges, which are at least theoretically linked to the upkeep and insurance of a block, they provide nothing to the leaseholder and exist solely to enrich faceless freeholders.

Less than 48 hours on from the announcement, Labour’s long-awaited plans for leaseholders are sadly unravelling.

While in opposition, Matthew Pennycook, now housing minister, urged the Conservatives to “be courageous” and smash ground rent exploitation by restricting ground rents to a peppercorn, or zero financial value, immediately. After all, if you are paying for nothing, you should be paying nothing.

But now in power, Labour has lost courage. By protecting money-for-nothing ground rents through a £250 cap that will only reach zero after 40 years, the government is keeping money-grabbing outside freeholders embedded in our homes.

It is darkly ironic that flying cars will arrive before we banish leasehold, a legacy of serfdom which Parliament has sought to abolish since the 1880s, before working men and women even had the right to vote.

With the Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill still only in draft form, and its delivery promised for just before the next general election, this Labour government appears set to repeat a familiar pattern. From Thatcher to Major and Blair, no British government has ever introduced draft legislation on leasehold and commonhold that went on to become an Act of Parliament within a single term.

When did democracy become an exercise in government second-guessing what rich lobbyists might do in the courts?

Housing Secretary Steve Reed admitted that the £250 cap was chosen to “minimise the risk of any protracted legal wrangle”.

But it appears corporate lobbyists for freeholding interests have not just won on ground rent.

In a U-turn the government would rather you didn’t notice, the draft Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill tears up another manifesto commitment that was even repeated in the King’s Speech.

Oven-ready from 2020, long-awaited Law Commission recommendations on “enfranchisement” and “Right to Manage” have been quietly junked from the draft Bill.

By banning leasehold on future flats, Labour are putting a nail in the coffin of leasehold, but leaving existing leaseholders to lie there with it.

Without these reforms to make it cheaper to buy out a freeholder or claim the Right to Manage, existing leaseholders won’t be able to “take back control”.

With the Greens and Reform UK looking to cause trouble over leaseholder betrayal, Keir Starmer can channel his namesake Keir Hardy to end leasehold for good, and sooner.

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Harry Scoffin is a housing campaigner and the founder of Free Leaseholders, a pressure group promoting leasehold reform.

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