[2025] EWHC 2751 (Admin)

When it became apparent that the claimants (in particular) wished to place passages from Hansard before the court in support of their arguments, permission was given to the Speaker of the House of Commons to intervene in the case. Constructive engagement between the Speaker’s legal team and the parties led to a significant narrowing of the issues as to what material the court could properly look at, and for what purpose. For those few passages which remained in issue, we had submissions from Ms Hannett KC and Ms Sheridan on the Speaker’s behalf, to which we have paid “careful regard” (R v Chaytor [2011] 1 AC 684, [16]).

Having reviewed that material, we do not consider that this is one of those cases where resort to Hansard is necessary to identify the objects of the LFRA 2024 for ECHR purposes, or that the Hansard references add materially to the information available from other sources as to the object of the LFRA 2024. We derived some limited assistance from the statement by the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, when introducing the Bill to the House of Commons for its second reading on 11 December 2023 (Vol 742 col 655-656). He identified the purpose of the legislation as being to “liberate leaseholders from many of the unfair practises to which they are still subject”, stated leasehold “is essentially a deal where someone invited to buy a home and then, instead of becoming a full homeowner, they are treated, or can be treated as a tenant”, and described leasehold as “a fundamentally unfair system and a fundamentally inequitable tenure.”

The claimants relied upon a number of other statements, including those of Ms Rachel MacClean MP, who until November 2023 had been Minister of State at the relevant Department with responsibility for the Bill, but who was not in Government in December 2023. She stated at col.674 that the Bill would “restore true home ownership to millions, end rip-off charges and introduce fairness to the leasehold market”. Elsewhere she referred to “nearly 5 million homes” (i.e. a reference to the 4.98m leasehold properties in England, of which 57% were owned by owner-occupiers). This passage did not assist us in identifying the object of the LFRA 2024. Nor was there any passage which assisted in the speech of Mr Lee Rowley MP, Minister for Housing, Planning and Building Safety, in closing the debate.