ALEP's PR campaign on leasehold reform, Chick's "chicken and egg"

Recently there have been two articles circulated in the UK trade press from Mark Chick, head of the Association of Leasehold Enfranchisement Professionals or "ALEP". The overall vibe is that someone thinks the new government is biddable on watering down the proposed reforms.

Ultimately he proposes to "allow leasehold for new flats in the short to medium term, but with strengthened protections for leaseholders – while undertaking pilots in the passage towards commonhold adoption". It would be interesting to know whether he would have supported Lord Bailey's unsuccessful amendment to the 2024 legislation, which would have put in place the sort of protections he commends in his first article.

ALEP is a trade assocation of solicitors, surveyors and so on who help you buy your freehold or extend your lease. I'd assume that they can't make their entire living from doing this and all have other areas of business. ALEP is pretty open, to the extent that I once even received an invitation to their annual golf weekend just by being on their mailing list. I don't play golf. I'm not even, like, Protestant.

Here are Mr Chick's two recent articles:

Leasehold is not broken so why replace it (29 Mar 2025)

Will leasehold reform scupper the growth agenda? (13 May 2025)

They gallop through a handful of different issues. The first one proceeds as follows:

• After recounting the recent policy development on the default tenure for new flats, the article then takes a sudden turn to "Control of property management", which is expanded out to "proper *regulation* and control". Regulation of property managing agents has been a long-standing threat, and would provide the industry with a way of mitigating the accountability portended by a shift to commonhold

• "In the circumstances in which residents agree to collective management, the option for commonhold is already available.", well yes, and of course no ... you need not just the residents [sic] to agree, but also have to have the agreement from the landlord, its mortgage lender, and all the mortgage lenders for any of the flats.

• "But the fact that there are currently more books on commonhold than there are instances of it should raise alarm bells.", and Chick is back on firmer ground, which he follows with:

• "It is worth considering that flat owners who own their own freehold through a share in a freehold owning company with a 999 year lease at a nil rent are in as good as or better position than those owning within a Commonhold structure." and he goes on to list three examples

• The final example is certainty of lease terms; unfortunately he gets the details slightly wrong: "With a commonhold, variations can be made on a majority vote to the Commonhold Community Statement which will then be binding on all." ... which is true but irrelevant since the parties are also bound by the articles of association of the company comprising the commonhold association, and those can be amended to require unanimity before variations. It's still a very important point, particularly with regard to airspace development.

• "We all understand the need to build more homes" ... the Overton Window on that one probably has a sell-by date.

• "As ALEP, we would be pleased to work with government to improve the current system, while also exploring how commonhold can work in some circumstances." ... this sounds like pitch-rolling for delaying and/or watering-down a ban on new leasehold flats.

Chick's other much more recent article goes the same way, with the headline blaring about the "growth" agenda. In the context of the UK, the "growth agenda" seems to mean population growth, rather than, say, growth of GDP per capita. For whatever reason, we are said to need to increase the UK's population, which entails a net increase in the number of dwellings, and an assumption that the bulk of the new dwellings will be constructed by the private sector.

(Full disclosure: I have a modest investment in Barratt Redrow plc)

There's always going to be a reserve army of foreign flight capital to buy up British housing. So building more dwellings won't make residential property cheaper, without some additional policy intervention on who is allowed to buy it. But so long as the goverment thinks it's dependent on volume housebuilders to increase the UK's population, UK housebuilders will keep getting away without accountability. If they say they can't be arsed with commonhold, commonhold won't happen.

So back to Mr Chick's second article "Will leasehold reform scupper the growth agenda?"

• He starts by clarifying what he'd written in March about banning new leasehold flats: "the government has already stated its intention that all new properties will be sold as commonhold (where they would previously have been leasehold)"

• But now he hits us with the growth agenda: "However, another key government pledge is that of significantly increasing housing delivery"

• After pointing out that a lot of new housing will need to be flats, there is then a monumental non-sequitur "So the question of whether new developments comprising a large proportion of commonhold units go ahead will depend in part on developers’ attitudes towards commonhold."

• This might read like Chick is saying the government has handed a veto on its commonhold legislation to the housebuilding industry: that Parliament won't legislate without permission from the HBF. But what it actually means is that developers simply won't build flats if the legislation goes ahead, either as a boycott or because it's genuinely unworkable. "It will also require there to be a viable and working system of commonhold."

• That latter "viable and working" precondition sets up Chick's chicken-and-egg problem: we can't mandate commonhold because we haven't seen it working yet, and it doesn't work yet because it hasn't been mandated.

• Ultimately, he insinuates that if mortgage lenders don't have confidence in commonhold then developers won't make commonhold units at scale, meaning either few new flats or few new flats available to own, new flats subsisting instead on a Build-To-Rent basis.

The second article concludes with a bunch of questions that need to be answered:

• How control is handed over as a development is built out.

• How will development finance be structured when there's no freehold reversion to secure against?

• How will developers recoup upfront costs of amenities or manage complex phasing on multi-block schemes?

Those are of course big issues on new build estates today, and not typically thought of as leasehold issues.

It's really not clear why commonhold or even share-of-freehold would make a difference to them.

Lord Bailey's mandatory share-of-freehold amendment (at 8*)

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