I refer the hon. Member to answer given to Question UIN 103549 on 14 January 2026.

Balancing speed with care, the government continues to implement the provisions of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.

The Government will act quickly to provide homeowners with greater rights, powers, and protections over their homes by implementing the provisions of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, including those designed to increase service charge transparency.

Over the course of this Parliament, the Government will further reform the leasehold system. We will enact remaining Law Commission recommendations relating to enfranchisement and the Right to Manage, tackle unregulated and unaffordable ground rents, reinvigorate commonhold through a comprehensive new legal framework, and ban the sale of new leasehold flats so commonhold becomes the default tenure.

The Government has made clear it intends to publish draft legislation on leasehold and commonhold reform in this session so that it may be subject to broad consultation and additional parliamentary scrutiny. We will announce further details in due course.

In cases in which a property owner seeks the return of a property leased to a local authority, the local authority should endeavour to return the property as soon as possible, whilst ensuring that the occupant is rehoused in line with any statutory duties.

Government supports local authorities to support homeless households into settled accommodation. We are investing over £1 billion in the Homelessness Prevention Grant over three years, including a £109 million top-up to the Homelessness Prevention Grant this year, and additional funding of £120 million to help councils address Ukraine and homelessness pressures in 2024/25. Further to this, the £1.2 billion Local Authority Housing Fund includes funding for local authorities to obtain better quality temporary accommodation which helps alleviate rough sleeping and homelessness.

The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill announced in the King’s Speech will make it easier for leaseholders to scrutinise costs and challenge the services provided by both freeholders and property managing agents. The Bill will also make it easier for leaseholders to take on management of their buildings themselves where they can directly appoint or replace agents.

The government recognises that pets can bring joy, happiness, and comfort to their owners, as well as supporting their mental and physical wellbeing. The ability of a leaseholder to keep a pet will depend on the terms of individual leases.

We are due to bring forward further leasehold reforms later in this Parliament. Whilst we cannot set out the precise details of a bill at this stage, we have been clear about our commitment to addressing the historic imbalance in the leasehold system.

Developers and freeholders have a responsibility to remediate buildings to eliminate life-critical safety defects and the Government continues to work to ensure they do so. Where developers remediate buildings pursuant to a developer remediation contract entered into with the Department, they will do so on a whole building basis and the distinction between qualifying and non-qualifying leaseholders will not apply.

Where 11m+ buildings do not fit into this category, Parliament considered this policy issue in 2022 and, through the Building Safety Act, determined that a threshold of owning three properties should apply for qualifying lease status. We continue to monitor the overall framework for building remediation and implement our approach based on the decision of Parliament last year.

Longstanding independent safety advice is clear that height is a crucial factor in assessing risk. The Building Safety Bill will deliver improvements across the entire built environment, including for buildings under 11m.

Our £5 billion investment in grant funding for cladding remediation on buildings of 18 metres and above will protect hundreds of thousands of leaseholders from the cost of remediating unsafe cladding on their homes.  It is right that we have focused grant funding on the tallest buildings - this is in line with longstanding expert advice on which buildings are at the highest risk - and cladding remediation also represents the highest costs.

We are also stepping in to provide a generous finance scheme for the remediation of unsafe cladding on residential buildings of 11- 18 metres, where the risk is lower.  We are working to develop the underpinning details of the finance scheme to ensure that it protects leaseholders, prioritising affordability and accelerating remediation, where required.  Further details on the finance scheme will be made available as soon as we are in a position to do so.

The Government believes very strongly that service charges should be transparent and communicated effectively. The law is clear that service charges and any increase in costs must be reasonable and, where costs relate to work or services, the work or services must be of a reasonable standard. A summary of leaseholders’ rights and responsibilities must also be provided with the demand for charges. The Government believes that there should be a clear route to challenge or redress if things go wrong. Leaseholders may make an application to the First-tier Tribunal for it to make a determination on the reasonableness of their service charges.

We established an independent working group chaired by Lord Best to raise standards across the property sector, which also considered improvements to the transparency of service charges. The working group published its final report to Government (available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulation-of-property-agents-working-group-report) and we are considering the report’s recommendations.