Leasehold Reform: Can we have one good thing please?

When I was born my parents lived in a small, 1 bed flat. They only moved out and into a house a few years later and from what I have been told the time in between was not easy to say the least. With another child on the way they just about managed to scramble to an ex council terrace without needing to deal with a family of four in the flat.

But, living in that flat meant being on a mortgage rather than renting and if it wasn’t for that they would not have been able to get the house. so it was necessary. They simply didn’t have the money for a house initially.

One of the reasons why it took years between me being born and moving from a place that clearly wasn’t a graeat place for raising me in was leasehold. If it wasn’t for problems with the lease they wouldnt have had nearly as much trouble.

In brief, you have the property and you have the land. If you buy a freehold property, you own it and the land it sits on. If you buy leasehold you own the right to use that land/property for a period of time. The lease determines that. Generally there are rules in place that mean you can extend the lease, it would be exceedingly rare for the lease to run out completely, but you still have to do that renewal. The freeholder, who you lease from, also has a number of other powers over you, they can charge a ground rent for that property, they can charge a service charge (common in, say, leasehold blocks of flats where the freeholder owns and maintains communal areas between the flats). They can also enforce rules on what is an isn’t allowed in the leasehold property. Often screwing you over if you want to have, say, an extension or outbuilding but some even go so far as to, for example, ban pets. Hope you knew of that restriction before you bought the place.

As someone who tends to write from the perspective of a single man you can imagine why this interests me. most small flats are some form of leasehold in the UK, so almost all the single people I know who own own leasehold.

The renewal of the lease was what hit my parents, they had a fairly standard at the time lease and as the lease got shorter the value of the property decreased. Leaseholds with <80 years on the lease are a pig to sell and the closer you get to that the tougher things become. They had to renew the lease which, guess what, was a pretty chunky bill for a family that was living in a 1 bed flat.

one thing our current government has been looking at doing which I think is genuinely good (bloody hell, that must be a rare thing to say) is reforming leasehold. and now that is apparently dying.

The bit that has happened which I am very happy with is the push for far longer, (990 year) leases. This massively reduces the need to renew that lease. Consider that 990 years ago was before the battle of hastings, that is the new timescale. The other part of renewal is people on older short leases should be able to renew to longer ones. Also the plan was to reduce the cost to renew these leases by removing the need to pay a sum of money known as the ‘marriage value’. I wont delve into that here but suffice to say it adds a lot of money paid from the leaseholder to the freeholder during a lease extension. If my parents had had those reforms moving from the flat to a house would have been so much less hassle.

Added to that the idea of the bill was to push for peppercorn ground rents (that is, ground rent, the money paid each year from the leaseholder to the freeholder, would be reduced to a pathetically small amount). As I said earlier, I know a few single people who own leasehold flats and while it isn’t horrificly bad, paying a few hundred pounds a year in ground rent is just an annoying extra cost, which you essentially get nothing useful back from.

The big bill for leasing however is often the service charge and there the bill did aim to push for more clarity in how the charge is calculated. which considering there are people I know who pay over £1500 a year in service charges that is something useful. Transparency should at the bare minimum show where people are being ripped off.

Back to the perspective as a writer about being a single man, the leasehold system sucks. As I say, almost all single people I know who own, own leasehold. Only one of them has the new very long lease so all the rest will have to pay a fat fee for someone to do nothing but own the land. ground rents continue to be an annoying cost each year and service charges a hefty bill with little in the way of meaningful explanation as to how it came to that much. Old leases still have shit ground rent clauses that make the properties a pig to sell on.

I wont say the reform was that great, but like, can I please have just one good thing, one little crumb of satisfaction from our government. It seems like the sort of thing a conservative government should be doing. Its no political secret that conservative politics is more popular among people who securely own their own home and that idea has been a big part of their appeal. Its also obvious that alternative right wing parties like reform support the idea of reforming leasehold. but no dice I guess.

House and Home (a little extra)

this is an extra, more politically angry response to the June 2022 carnival of aros. Thank you to Sennkestra for the prompts.

One recent bit of news that caught my eye was this. Cheap block of housing, refused by the council.

You see, I often talk to people I know about how much of a pain it is to get a decent place to live as someone who is single and will quite happily stay single for the forseeable future. Almost every time I do I get the same response that the reason is that the market wants to build homes for families, so of course I should expect things to be bad for me.

This is yet another example of why this idea is rubbish. ‘The Market’ is controlled by councils who can prevent new development which does not fit the supposed character of their area. guess what, people looking for cheap housing never fit into an area’s character. young single men generally do not fit into an area’s character. ‘The market’ sounds like I should listen to a lecture by Milton Friedman to understand how it works, actually I should listen to this.

Another wonderful piece of reasoning can be found here.  ‘I appreciate that they’ve changed it, but it will still be clearly visible from the rear gardens of Hornby Road.’ was the comment on a planned development in manchester.

My favourite though is this one. Developers want to build a load of new homes on a site they own. Council refuses.

The proposals had been recommended for refusal by Trafford council’s officers due to the potential harm the development could have on the Longford Park Conservation Area nearby.

Other reasons for the recommended refusal included the fact that the building would ‘dominate’ over nearby Lancashire Cricket Club, had ‘poor design’ and insufficient affordable housing, alongside concerns over the size, scale and mass of the development.

I find it intensely funny that the council puts insufficient affordable housing in their complaint, when the council’s own plan was to compulsory purchase the land and turn it into a leisure centre with no housing at all. Also as an aside, fuck cricket.

Getting any new housing past the councils is a fight. Some types of housing are basically not built now and I suspect the reason is less about what the market wants and more about what is likely to get through the planning process.

Now, this could be made up for if councils were building houses themselves to make up for the rejections. But that isn’t going to happen in any great numbers.

A bit of British history for those who don’t know. We have a scheme called ‘right to buy’ for tenants of council housing stock. I will simplify massively and there are of course restrictions to who benefits from this, but the short is, britain used to have loads of council housing. Then there was set up a policy to sell that off to tenants at a large discount (often 30%+ and sometimes up to 70%). Labour got in power later and reduced the discount but in general a lot of people can buy their council house at a discount. On the one hand this worked really well, a lot of people my parents age bought a house for massively less than market value. Home ownership in Britain rose a lot. On the other hand, councils weren’t going to keep building houses because if you keep building and selling at a loss then guess what, you keep losing money*. Now this is in principle not a problem if you are Margaret Thatcher because part of her political ideology is that the state shouldn’t build all these houses. But it does have a long term problem if you then also prevent the private sector from picking up the loss in house building.

*(Honestly the other trouble here is that the council would have to fight the same fight to get anything of there’s to be built.)

Fast forward to now though and we have decades of very little council built housing combined with severe limits of what private developers are allowed to build. If the number of buildings to live in grows slower than the number of households trying to buy them, up goes the price.

And to be honest, the UK is at least not in the position of the US, where vast amounts of land are so restricted that only detached homes are allowed to be built. Things could be more of a pain for people like me trying to buy a house.

I suppose this is what housing means to me though. Its a constant reminder that I am not wanted. The honest reason developments like this don’t get through the councils is that the people who have influence in the local area tend not to like them. Any new housing gets complaints by existing residents because it replaces something that might be of use to them, like a field or a potential business site, with something of no use to them, which will bring in new people and likely lowers the value of their own property.

The thing that is really not wanted is the thing that attracts people like me. Single young men are not going to get any support in the council meetings. The area has a tone and that tone is families and fences and definitely not me.

Men Writing About Singleness

One thing I was reading recently was an article in psychology today by a man named Lucas Bradley. It’s called Single Manhood Is So Much More Than the Stereotypes and there is a lot in it I think is worth discussing. There is also a longer compiling of his thoughts on Medium under the name The Deliberately Single Man.

But one thing that stood out to me immediately was the point made before the article even started, in an introduction by Bella DePaulo. She says:

I’ve been studying singlehood for decades, and from the very beginning, I’ve been struck by just how many of the writings about single people have been written for, by, or about single women.

This is something that got me thinking, and I think there is a broader point here. It is not just that singlehood is dominated by women, but the whole field of writing about romance in general is seen as something by and for women.

An obvious example of this is the agony aunt. Think about it, when it comes to relationship advice, would you expect to find an agony uncle. Would you trust an agony uncle.

There is an obvious push for men to not write about their or others love lives. This flows into singleness as well.

Another example is the idea of celebrity relationship gossip being something clearly marketed towards women. Men might be targeted in a more base way, but talking about other peoples romance, that’s not a blokey thing to do.

This is in fact even broader, men are not expected to talk about emotion in general. The idea of taking suffering ‘like a man’. The idea of women as being more ‘emotional’ with all the derogatory intent in that word.

Another point is that men are not expected to define themselves in relation to their relationship status in the way women are. Think about the difference between Mr and Mrs or Ms, the distinction is there for women but not for men.

A man might be single or be a husband, but he is very unlikely to refer to himself as a husband. It’s just not the done thing.

So in writing, men are expected to not discuss this part of ourselves. But interestingly we are still expected to define our manliness by our romantic relationships. The ability to pull being a measure of a young man. Or the idea that men are expected to initiate the vast majority of romances, and make the vast majority of proposals.

Its an odd conundrum, we have a social setup where the people charged with creating and leading that form of relationship is also the one expected to be so fucking useless at it.

All in all, this sets up an interesting conundrum with those of us men wanting to write about being single. We need to break a large number of taboos just to put pen to paper.

Firstly we need to break the very common cultural norm that men should not define themselves by their singleness. That’s not to say it’s the only way I define myself, just that I am willing to write about myself as a single man.

Then we need to break the taboo of writing about emotion as a man. Again, if men aren’t supposed to even show a large number of emotions. If men are not supposed to even admit to feelings of loneliness, or of our fears, how easy do you think writing these down and putting them out for the world to see feels.

On top of all of that in order to discuss singleness we need to be able to discuss its alternatives, to ask why we wish to be single. That gives yet another social norm to break, to talk openly and honestly about these sorts of relationships and how we feel or don’t feel about them.

With all that in mind the majority of writing about single living being by and for women is not unsurprising. Hopefully I can play my small part in changing that.