Britain's New Property Nightmare

8 August 2012

The economic downturn has made buying property outright harder than ever to achieve but our obsession with owning a home has led three million of us to choose the apparently cheaper option - leasehold properties. But purchasing a home in this way can come at a cost - leaving those owners vulnerable to excessive and unfair charging - to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds.

Dispatches reporter Morland Sanders investigates allegations of private landlords, councils, and housing associations overcharging leasehold homeowners for housing works and maintenance - which in some cases are also claimed to be unsatisfactory and unnecessary.

Leasehold homeownership is booming, 40 per cent of new builds are now classed as leasehold, but whilst it can enable more people to get onto the property ladder - this form of homeownership enables the freeholders, who own the land outright, to charge the leaseholders for managing and the upkeep of the property. With no comprehensive regulation in the leasehold sector, these owners can be hit with expensive charges and have no way of knowing if they are fair or if the companies engaged to carry out the work are reputable.

Sanders travels across the country to meet homeowners who are up in arms about the enormous bills being imposed on them for service charges - and discovers cases where the relationships between landlords and contractors are working to the detriment of the leaseholder and the tax payer.

But it is not just private business that stands accused of excessive or unfair charging - Sanders meets leaseholders who say they have been asked to subsidise large scale renovations by their own local council. Whilst the council tenants on council-owned estates do not have to pay for maintenance and improvement works, the leaseholders have to pay their share of what the council spends overall. In one case, Sanders meets an elderly pensioner who simply cannot meet the repayments for an unexpected bill of tens of thousands of pounds and may be forced to sell the property back to the council. Another couple tell Sanders that bills imposed on them for planned work to improve the property - not vital repairs -  could land them with a growing debt which could end up being passed on to their children.

With complaints and cases disputing costs on the increase, Dispatches investigates the government's reluctance to impose greater regulation on the leasehold sector which is making two and a half billion pounds a year in service charges for maintenance and repairs.

 

Exec Prod: George Waldrum

Prod Co: ITN Productions

Comm Ed: Siobhan Sinnerton