My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I will come to ground rents shortly. I declare an interest as a long-standing leaseholder.
The Bill before your Lordships’ House today is, in my view, profoundly disappointing, as one or two noble Lords have said. As the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove, said in the other place, leasehold is a “fundamentally unfair system”, and his aim is the effective destruction of the leasehold system. Leasehold is, in his words, “outdated” and “feudal”, although I know that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, does not like that word. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, that leasehold has no place in the 21st century. The Bill falls a long way short of its objective of the destruction of leasehold, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, also said.
As it stands, the leasehold system is virtually globally unique—in a bad way—to England and Wales. It perpetuates a property market where around 10 million leasehold dwellers are at the mercy of freeholders and associated freehold professionals who sponge off them. Leasehold codifies and preserves, in the modern age, the medieval relationship between the serf and the lord of the manor, because that is historically where leasehold comes from. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, on this. As a historian with three degrees in history, I can assure noble Lords that it is quite the historic pedigree. There is a gap between those who own property outright and those who do not. This applies not just to the great estates that still own huge chunks of prime London and other areas but our country as a whole.
The Secretary of State, Mr Gove himself, said in the other place that the Government would destroy the feudal leasehold system:
“We will do so by making sure that we squeeze every possible income stream that freeholders currently use, so that in effect, their capacity to put the squeeze on leaseholders ends”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/12/23; col. 659.]
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, repeated this. We hear that Mr Gove is having trouble fulfilling the Tories’ election manifesto pledge to reduce all ground rents to peppercorns. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to this. But Mr Gove is being opposed by the Treasury, Downing Street and freeholder interests. Meanwhile, as noted in the debate, the Competition and Markets Authority has ruled that there is no legal or commercial justification for ground rents. Ground rents provide no service and are purely rent-seeking.
I have very little sympathy for the self-serving arguments of vested interests that want not only to water down the Bill further but to emasculate it completely. The effect of reducing ground rents to peppercorns is exaggerated by the pension industry and freeholder
lobby groups. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on this point. Some are hiding behind the European Convention on Human Rights and the right to property. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referenced this. Apart from this making an excellent case for an opt-out from the ECHR, which I would have thought the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would welcome, I point out that the rights of leaseholders need protecting too.
We were told that marriage value was to be abolished under the Bill—