Secretary of State tells newspaper over the weekend that he intends to ban leasehold ownership and developers who don’t replace cladding on at-risk towers.

Housing secretary Michael Gove admitted over the weekend that wishes to see the leasehold ownership system through which most apartments and many houses are sold, abolished.

“I don’t believe leasehold ownership is fair in any way. It is an outdated feudal system that needs to go. And we need to move to a better system and to liberate people from it,” he told the Sunday Times.

He has also said that the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy was in part the fault of ‘faulty and ambiguous’ Government guidance.

His comments came during a wide-ranging interview with the newspaper during which he also revealed a major policy initiative to give the landlords of at-risk properties just six weeks to sign a contractual commitment to replace cladding on their properties or face being banned from the housing market.

£2 billion

This will see an additional £2 billion cost put on developers and other owners of newbuild towers with cladding issues, in addition to the £3 billion ‘developer levy’ announced last year.

Gove says this will policed via a ‘response actor scheme’ that will see those unwilling to fix cladding prevented from building new homes via planning system and/or building control blocks.

The secretary of state went on to ask why, if a developer or landlords can’t “maintain that which you have already built in safe conditions for those within those homes, then why should . . . you [be] granted permission to carry on with your line of business, with the development of new homes?”.

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