Housing policy has toxified the Tory brand and voters will have their revenge

The centre ground of British politics is moving too fast for one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world – the Conservatives – to keep up. Beyond the highly publicised anger towards their HS2 rail project, which was the main driver of voting behaviour in last month’s Amersham and Chesham by-election – where my party triumphed despite ministerial visits and a cameo appearance by Theresa May – the Tories’ relationship with property interests is also toxifying the party brand.

Developers, freeholders, managing agents, surveyors, lawyers and corporate lobbyists seem to be steering housing policy in a sinister, anti-consumer direction. This has to change.

Leaseholds in social housing and private developments have taken over my borough of Tower Hamlets, with people facing extortionate service charges, while hundreds of buildings are affected by fire safety defects.

Peter Wilcox, writing in The Telegraph, explained why he defected from the party he has voted for and trusted all his life to vote for the Liberal Democrats. He sought to give the Conservatives a bloody nose as a voter in the Chesham and Amersham by-election on 17 June because of the Tories’ disastrous handling of the post-Grenfell building safety crisis and the “preservation of the leasehold system governing existing flats that sucks money from flat owners like my daughter”.

Homeowners have been devastated by unexpected cladding and fire safety bills of up to £150,000 per leasehold flat. Bills that the so-called party of home ownership likes to pretend don’t exist.

Conservative ministers mouth platitudes and point to a gimmicky grant scheme (which MPs on the housing select committee say doesn’t go far enough) while promising forced low-interest loans for leaseholders in dangerously-clad blocks of under 18 metres. The powerful who have vested interests want to ensure that the law continues to deny homeowners of the rights and protections that are the mainstream of other jurisdictions’ housing sectors.

Anyone with an ounce of human decency is recoiling at the thought that housebuilders, who have already made life-changing profits since the financial crash, will be given the green light under No 10’s headline-chasing planning reforms to cash in on overdevelopment and ride roughshod over the countryside with inadequate builds.

Meanwhile, the very same housebuilders are getting off scot-free for their existing blighted sites, while leaving leaseholders and the taxpayer high and dry to foot the £15bn bill to pay for fireproofing tower blocks.

If I buy a car with faulty brakes, I would expect the vehicle to be recalled at the manufacturer’s expense. There would be no fuss. Thanks to our dysfunctional feudal leasehold laws, flat owners in death-trap apartments are mere tenants with no control over costs or contractors. Freeholders, developers and ministers have, in the past four years, hidden behind the creaking and deeply unfair leasehold system to get the innocent consumer to pay for collective state and market failure on building standards.

The Right to Buy scheme gave social housing tenants the opportunity to get on the housing ladder, but now it is the time for the leasehold system to be reformed and modernised. David Lloyd George, a great Liberal reformer, had it right when, in 1909 in Limehouse – my community – he declared that the leasehold system “is not business, it’s blackmail”.

Lloyd George talked of all the mouths to feed under the bafflingly complex leasehold regime, with the exploited leasehold tenants paying the freeholder, the managing agent, the surveyor, the contractor, “and then, of course, you cannot keep the lawyer out – he always comes in. And a fee to him”.

These issues cut across class and race. The leasehold system does not care if you are an oligarch, a naive overseas buyer, a middle-class grafter or working-class riser. It preys on those who have the home-ownership dream, keen to avoid the precarity of renting.

All leaseholders’ homes, including those in social housing, must be made their own. Britain must get rid of this morally wrong system, bringing England and Wales into line with the rest of the world, whose flat owners enjoy being in the driving seat with commonhold, a system that allows people to own the freehold of individual homes, with shared responsibility for communal areas and services.

Rabina Khan is a Liberal Democrat councillor for Shadwell in east London