Tomorrow, I will meet my constituent Luke Thomas, who is attending a drop-in in Parliament to raise awareness about the skin cancer melanoma. Luke first contacted me in 2020. He has stage 4 skin cancer, diagnosed after he had bought his first home, a shared ownership leasehold flat in my constituency. Knowing that his cancer is now incurable, Luke decided that he wanted to move back to Wales, to be able to enjoy more precious time with family and friends and to draw on their support when he needed it.
However, Luke is one of many, many leaseholders to spend years effectively trapped by a system, the deficiencies of which were further compounded by the cladding scandal following the horrific Grenfell Tower fire. Luke’s flat has been effectively unsellable, and he faced the dreadful and unacceptable situation of precious, limited time slipping away, unable to move forward with his life. Two and a half years later, Luke’s housing association
has finally agreed to an exceptional buyback, but that is not a system, and Luke should never have been placed in that situation.
Luke’s story is heartrending, but it is not unique. I have many constituents who are still living with the consequences of the interaction between the feudal leasehold system and the scandal of building safety exposed by the horrific Grenfell Tower fire. Many have been trapped by the inability of their freeholder to undertake intrusive surveys and fire safety works in order to secure an EWS1 certificate, without which their home is effectively worthless. Some constituents, such as Luke, need to move for compassionate reasons; others, because their job has changed. I have constituents who have had a family and are now overcrowded in their leasehold homes, who have been unable to move for many years because of the lack of an EWS1 certificate or the completion of fire safety works. What started as the fulfilment of a dream—the security and stability of their own home, and the first rung on the property ladder—has become a living nightmare.
The Government’s delay in bringing forward leasehold reform is inexcusable. I was on the then Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee in 2019 when we published the report referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Committee’s Chair. On a cross-party basis and on the basis of the evidence, that report set out recommendations, including that Government should make commonhold the predominant form of tenure for flats, ban the most egregious practices and introduce some protections against catastrophic costs for leaseholders.