DD has a 999 lease on her property and can buy the freehold, whenever she wishes for around £1,000. She says she can't be bothered. The ground rent is £30 a year and will never increase.
Many older leaseholds are like this, effectively freehold with a minor charge. Many of them, like DD's, are in towns or neighbourhoods where the houses were built as part of an integrated community and the ground rents are spent to benefit the community as a whole
She lives in Letchworth Garden City, the very first garden city and the non-profit company that owns it and also the town centre spends much of its money maintaining town amenities, and after a lot of the design ethos of the houses was lost between 1945 and about 1980, (much of the damage done by the council with cheap and nasty plastic windows) they have done a lot to draw up design guidelines for the conservation areas. She got a 40% grant from them towards replacing the horrible windows in her ex-council house with good quality plastic double glazing, providing the window pattern echoed the original wood windows.
So there is a good side to leasehold property and I do think if leasehold is abolished, there will need to be arrangements to allow for community ownership in these circumstances.
What is iniquitous is the way developers have taken the leasehold system and distorted it to their profit by making houses leasehold where there is no discernable reason why the houses should not be freehold, with punitive ground rent rises, intended I am sure to force house purchasers to purchase the freehold of their houses, thus adding to the price they pay for their house and increasing the profits of the house builders
