28 March 2024
The Levelling up, Housing and Communities Select Committee has published a report on shared ownership today outlining many of the problems that shared owners face.
The report shows the problems around the cost of repairs, building remediation costs, selling issues and the problems around leases.
One of the recommendations in the report is that Homes England “should also make sure it is clearly signposting to existing advice and guidance services that may be helpful to shared owners in understanding their leases, such as the Leasehold Advisory Service.”
The report also mentions “there may be a lack of awareness that LEASE exists to provide advice and guidance on their leases”.
LEASE will be contacting Homes England to help make sure they include links to the relevant guidance on the LEASE website and will be reaching out to the shared ownership campaign groups to see what more we can do to assist.
LEASE has also written to the Chair of the Select Committee to ask for a meeting to explain the new mandate that LEASE has from the Secretary of State.
LEASE joint CEO’s Sally Frazer and Alice Bradley said, “The LEASE shared ownership advice guide was visited over 12,000 times last year – but we do agree with the report’s findings in relation to the visibility of the Leasehold Advisory Service. There is still not enough awareness of the service and support our organisation can offer. We are committed to fixing that. We look forward to working with The Department of Levelling Up, Homes England and wider campaign groups to improve information and support for shared owners and leaseholders more generally”.
The report also made the following recommendations:
- Government to review shared ownership leases to ensure fairer service charge payments based on ownership share
- Investigation of Rent to Buy schemes to assess their affordability and effectiveness compared to shared ownership
- Revise eligibility calculators to project long-term affordability
- Older Persons Shared Ownership should be reformed, as owners with less than 75% share are unfairly burdened with rent. Legacy service charge liabilities for inheritors should also be addressed.
Other information you might find helpful:
