It is a pleasure to open this debate on behalf of the Opposition. Let me say at the outset that we do not intend to oppose the Bill today. Simply, it is better late than never. May I associate myself with the Secretary of State’s comments at the start of the debate, because many people have contributed and campaigned on this issue over the years that it has been spoken about? Many have long needed this overdue Bill, and they need it to be improved. Leaseholders across the country have been waiting for years—six years, to be exact—to see the Government’s flagship Bill to end leasehold and to break free the millions of people trapped in what the Secretary of State himself describes as a feudal and absurd system of home ownership.
If this is the Secretary of State going in a hurry, I would hate to see his normal pace. It was back in 2017 that his fifth predecessor as Housing Secretary pledged action. He talked a good talk today, and he is theatrical. I love the passion—it is really there—and I love the “squeeze”. We want to see the squeeze, but frankly I have lost count of the number of times Ministers have promised to finally put Britain in line with other developed countries across the world that have all ended this medieval system. To be fair to the Secretary of State, none of them has said it is an assault on leasehold and a squeeze on income, so he is going a little bit further, but after all that time and all those promises and after that theatrical squeeze, we still have a Bill that does not actually abolish leasehold. I suppose that that is no surprise, as it comes alongside a Bill that pledges to ban section 21 no-fault evictions that does not ban no-fault evictions and a Bill to stop the small boats that does not stop the small boats.
It is all well and good for the Secretary of State to say that the Government plan to amend the Bill in the usual way, but is it too much to ask for the Government to include a clause that bans leasehold in a Bill whose stated purpose was to ban leasehold? Why make those promises, only to produce a Bill that does no such thing? In a word, it sounds like chaos. Even the day before it was published, the Department’s press release said that the Bill would ban developers from selling new houses under leasehold. Given the tiny proportion of leaseholds that are houses, rather than flats, it is hardly an ambitious pledge, but the Bill does not even introduce that ban.