Nicholas Roberts & Gary Bennett outline the Law Commission’s proposals for putting commonhold back in the spotlight
The Law Commission has now published its consultation paper Reinvigorating commonhold: the alternative to leasehold ownership. Its brief is ‘to reinvigorate commonhold as a workable alternative to leasehold, for both existing and new homes’. The consultation paper seeks views on a range of provisional proposals which, it is hoped, will address perceived shortcomings in the existing legal framework: shortcomings which may have contributed to fewer than 20 commonhold developments being established since its creation in 2004. The commission issued a call for evidence in February 2018 to ascertain from practitioners and other interested parties, including the general public, why commonhold had failed to take off. The responses to that call determined the scope of the consultation paper.
Incentivising or compelling the use of commonhold
It is hoped that the various proposals to reform commonhold will, of themselves, make it sufficiently attractive to be used. The Law Commission’s terms of reference with government do not extend to whether the use of commonhold
