Harry
Norma Cohen
The purchase of a leasehold flat is NOT a property purchase. It’s buying a right to occupy subject to fees and charges which can be unlimited and which occupiers have very little ability to challenge. https://t.co/cKVi5DOPCx
— Norma Cohen (@NormaCohen3) June 3, 2026
Thanks to Norma and thanks To Harry Scoffin.
It is not likely to get much better without people listening to Harry Scoffin, I’m with Norma in this (and much more)
For a start up Lobby Group , Free Leaseholders is doing pretty well! It’s down to one young man;- Harry Scoffin
I have tried to explain what little I know of the English leasehold system to South Australians. People just shook their heads in bewilderment.
Mind you, it gets the same reaction in Scotland. Or maybe I should say “it used to get”; so godawful is devolved government that it’s conceivable that the thieves and buffoons have buggered up Scottish property law without my knowing about it.
Maybe that’s why they need absurdly expensive “motorhomes”, eh?
It’s not that Scots (or South Australians) are easily bewildered — it’s that English leasehold genuinely sounds like a historical curiosity that somehow escaped the museum.
“You own your home, except you don’t own the land, you pay rent to someone you’ve never met, and you might need their permission to change your own front door” isn’t a system so much as a legal ghost of feudalism that forgot to die.
Scotland, inconveniently for some of your assertions, got rid of its feudal hangovers in 2004. Most people own their homes outright, and flats are managed collectively by the people who actually live in them.
No ground rents, no distant freeholders, no elaborate rituals to extend a lease on something you thought you already owned.
It’s all rather dull and functional — which may explain why it doesn’t generate the same level of outrage.
As for devolved government having “buggered up” property law, you may be disappointed to hear that it hasn’t reintroduced anything resembling English leasehold.
If anything, the direction of travel elsewhere in the UK has been to edge closer to the Scottish model, not flee from it.
So when people shake their heads, it’s not at Scotland — it’s at the idea that paying perpetual rent on your own home is still considered normal (in England).
As for criticism of the Scottish Government, it exists, of course, but tying that to a supposed decline in property law—especially when Scotland avoided the worst features of the English leasehold system—is a stretch. Perhaps you no longer live in Scotland?
Other opinions here also exist, particularly if you’re prepared to look and listen beyond mainstream media, with its overwhelmingly pro-Union and/or anti-devolution biases, and other (confirmation) biases.
“Scotland, inconveniently for some of your assertions, got rid of its feudal hangovers in 2004.” But they didn’t matter a hoot anyway.
“…flats are managed collectively by the people who actually live in them.” And so they were under the old Scots system; I know since I was once the nominated manager for a major set of roof repairs for our block.
“So when people shake their heads, it’s not at Scotland”: nor did I suggest it was – you’ve simply missed the point.
But you did say “so godawful is devolved government that it’s conceivable that the thieves and buffoons have buggered up Scottish property law without my knowing about it.”
I think you may have missed my point (too).