[2025] EWHC 2751 (Admin)

Fecha: 24-Oct-2025

The legislation

The legislation

311.

There is nothing in the LFRA 2024 itself which suggests its object is solely to benefit owner-occupier tenants, rather than tenants more generally. The long title contains no reference to owner-occupiers nor, to pick up language which features prominently in the claimants’ submissions on this part of their case, “homes”, “homeowners” or “consumers”. Rather it provides:

“An Act to prohibit the grant or assignment of certain new long residential leases of houses, to amend the rights of tenants under long residential leases to acquire the freeholds of their houses, to extend the leases of their houses or flats, and to collectively enfranchise or manage the buildings containing their flats, to give such tenants the right to reduce the rent payable under their leases to a peppercorn, to regulate the relationship between residential landlords and tenants, to regulate residential estate management, to regulate rentcharges and to amend the Building Safety Act 2022 in connection with the remediation of building defects and the insolvency of persons who have repairing obligations relating to certain kinds of buildings.”

312.

It is also accepted that those provisions of the LFRA 2024 which are in dispute are not restricted in their application to owner-occupiers.

313.

In terms of those aspects of the legislation which were said by the claimants to support their case as to its object:

Reference was made to the inclusion within the category of permitted leases (i.e. those exempt from the general prohibition on the granting of long leasehold interests in houses) of “shared ownership” leases (sched.1 para.7), a shared ownership lease being a lease in which, in effect, a tenant buys a share of a property and pays rent on the remaining share. While it may well be the case that in practice, “the overwhelming majority” of shared ownership tenants are owner-occupiers (as the claimants submit), it does not follow from the exemption of this category of lease (among others) from a completely separate aspect of the LFRA 2024 that the object of all of the legislation, including the three measures subject to challenge here, is limited to benefiting owner-occupier tenants;

ii)

Reliance was placed on s.49, which increases the limit of internal floor space used for non-residential purposes before a building ceases to be susceptible to right to manage claims from 25% to 50%. However, this section is concerned with the purpose of parts of the floor space within a building (residential or non-residential). Accommodation owned by tenants acting as private landlords and sub-let for others to live in is still “residential accommodation” for this purpose. Section 49 draws no distinction between floor space used for residential purposes by the long leasehold tenant themselves (i.e. “owner-occupiers”), or for such purposes by someone sub-letting from such a tenant.

iii)

Sections 53-58 addressing service charges deal with a matter of obvious relevance to all types of tenant (e.g. buy-to-let tenants will pay the same charge as owner-occupiers and have the same lack of control over the service charges incurred). The suggestion that these provisions can be seen as aimed at benefiting one set of tenants rather than others receiving the same demands is untenable;

iv)

The same applies to insurance costs covered by ss.59 and 60 (a single insurance cost for the building being charged in relevant shares to all tenants with long leases in the building, whether or not they are occupiers);

Similarly, redress schemes allowing for the independent investigation of complaints made by tenants against the landlord or an estate manager is a matter of obvious benefit to all classes of tenants, and is not suggestive of a distinction between them as regards the objects of the LFRA 2024, or more particularly the three measures under challenge.

314.

In short, there is nothing in the LFRA 2024 itself which supports the suggestion that the object of the Act is concerned only with one particular category of tenants, namely owner-occupiers, and a number of the provisions relied upon by the claimants in support of that narrower object if anything support the contrary proposition. We accept, however, that the language of the LFRA 2024 is not determinative.