Leasehold is the legal mechanism that makes the Community Land Trust model work. Without an exemption for CLTs, the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill risks unintentionally undermining one of the few proven models for permanently affordable, community-controlled land and housing.
In the slow march to end feudal property arrangements since 2017, community-led and cooperative models have been largely overlooked. That’s a mistake, as these models could better achieve some of the Government’s aims.
Governments have been consulting and legislating on this since at least 2017. The Law Commission undertook a major study on leasehold from 2018 to 2020, and the Competition and Markets Authority looked at private estate management in 2023 and 2024.
The reform aims are right – to ban “feudal” arrangements in which homeowners are subject to unaccountable gouging by third-party landlords and managing agents.
But the Government’s solutions are narrow.
In its draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, the Government wants to replace leasehold with commonhold for blocks of flats. Separate consultations propose moving to resident management companies (RMCs) for estates. Both hand ownership and control back to homeowners. It sounds good, but there are other models that are also resident-controlled and which should be considered.
A better model for democratic local stewardship
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are already taking ownership of, and managing, blocks of flats and estates. Like commonhold they are resident-controlled and owned, and their statutory definition goes further to ensure they must be non-profit and act for the wellbeing of the community. They decommodify land and buildings in a co-operative structure.
But unlike commonhold and RMCs, their membership includes the whole local community in the neighbourhood, not just the homeowners in the block. Renters can have equal power and voice as owners. CLTs can take ownership of multiple developments across a neighbourhood, instead of setting up dozens of tiny companies and boards, one for each block of flats or new estate.
CLTs balance the interests of current occupants and future generations, ensuring that current occupants pay fair fees and that assets are looked after, while also protecting affordable homes and community assets from carpetbagging. They enable communities to act as wise stewards of their place. Many devolve day-to-day management of the homes and communal spaces to occupants, sometimes leasing them to resident associations or companies, while acting as a steward that can step in to help.
CLTs also have purposes broader than simply maintaining assets. They almost always leverage their ownership of homes and community facilities to proactively develop more, contributing to the Government’s growth and housing agendas. This in turn helps to attract more directors, make them more financially sustainable, and furthers the interests of the wider local community.
The benefit of this model over RMCs became very apparent in the CLT Network’s work on a major Ofwat-funded innovation project looking at ‘water smart communities’. We need to build more water-efficient homes with site-wide rainwater harvesting and flood mitigation. But it would be a tall order to ask small site-by-site RMCs to take responsibility for managing these complex assets, as well as the relationships with the Highways Authority, water companies and other stakeholders. It would be much more viable to do this at a town or neighbourhood scale, through adoption of potentially dozens of developments by a single local authority or CLT.
None of this is to say that commonhold and resident management companies are bad models. They’re just not the only resident-controlled model available, and have risks.
Why Community Land Trusts depend on leasehold
But the Government has largely ignored the CLT alternative. In its Draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill risks ruling them out. Leasehold is the legal mechanism that makes the CLT model work. By retaining the freehold of the land and granting long leases over individual homes and other assets, CLTs separate land value from building value and hold that land in common ownership for the long term. That legal separation is what enables the CLT to lock in affordability, prevent speculative windfalls, and steward assets for future generations.
Take two models common in the USA, There, CLTs buy the freehold of land which they lease to condominium associations (like commonhold associations), enabling occupants to self-manage under their stewardship. They also often buy flats in condominium blocks built by others, selling or renting them as permanently affordable homes. The homeowners and renters can all join the CLT, and a third of board places are reserved for them. Commonhold and CLTs could co-exist.
Ministers should protect CLTs in the Bill
In the two acts of legislation on leasehold reform to date, previous governments have recognised the value of the CLT model and enabled it by exception. CLTs have been exempted from the ban on leasehold houses and residential ground rents. But the draft Bill currently fails to carry this forward and would not permit the two co-existence models common in the USA.
The Government’s consultation on reducing the prevalence of private estate management arrangements similarly focuses on RMCs as a solution and gives little attention to community models like CLTs, though officials have shown interest.
The opportunity here goes wider than ending the feudal leasehold and estate management practices.
The Government is wrestling with the right way to help communities take back control. With the Pride in Place neighbourhood boards, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill’s unspecified neighbourhood governance arrangements, and now with commonhold and RMCs, the Government risks creating a disjointed patchwork of community voice and control. At the neighbourhood level, communities struggle to stitch these together into something like a coherent approach.
Models like the Community Land Trust offer one solution, creating a general-purpose community stewardship body with a statutory footing that can stitch together new development, regeneration funding, saving existing assets, etc. It would embed democratic, accountable resident control across these priorities with a consistent, understood and robust model. Ministers should look again at a co-operative solution that communities themselves are championing.
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One reply on “England’s Leasehold Reforms Risk Harming Community Land Trusts”
Really interesting discussion!
The abolition of feudal property rights in Scotland missed a similar trick in my view. Before abolition, all the land was legally the ‘Sovereign’s’ and anyone with title to the land merely had ‘custody’ of it by the Sovereign’s grant. I felt that we should have modified this from the sovereign to ‘the people’. We could have kept the legal framework that defines ‘owners’ as ‘custodians’ or ‘guardians’ as long as the sovereign people agree…. not an outright owner with Whig/Enlightenment absolute ownership rights. Andy Wightman’s book ‘The Poor Had No Lawyers’ is an excellent history of this process. It was therefore a bit of a mystery to me why he took the view on feudal land law reform that he did. I fear that well meant changes made by the Scottish Parliament merely completed the 18th century Whig capture of the commons for private ownership. Your ideas around insisting on continued leasehold style rights for community land trusts seems to be attending to some of these issues. Marvellous work!