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John Murray talks about his recent training event on leasehold issues
This week I have been delivering some training to a local authority in East Anglia. This Authority has a high proportion of leasehold property amongst their housing stock as a result of the Right to Buy scheme.
As a result they are fortunate to have a knowledgeable, specialist department who deal with leasehold issues on a daily basis.
The training, on leasehold interpretation and statutory regulation, was rolled out workshop style, with three sessions over two days for both leasehold officers and technical staff.
There are a number of tensions that exist between the Right to Buy scheme and the general law of leasehold; public contract procurement (OJEU), statutory consultation and statutory regulation. All credit to this organisation for getting all their staff together to understand the systems their counterparts need to operate in.
I think they all left the training with a greater understanding of the legal environment they operated in; I hope they all developed a greater understanding of how the needs of their role meshed with that of others. There was certainly some lively discussion!
Too often Registered Providers fail to properly address the enormous differences in property management between residential secure/assured tenancies and long leases. If an organisation has a relatively small number of leasehold property, it is sometimes put low on the list of priorities, and responsibility for management becomes an “add on” to an existing workload.
That can sometimes prove to be an expensive mistake – and the nature of the work is that it may take some years for resulting problems to come to light. This organisation are working hard to address such problems before they reach them.
