Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 (LAFRA)

The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 (LAFRA) was enacted on 24 May 2024, the legislation was passed shortly before Parliament was dissolved, following announcement of the General Election. The act is intended to improve the rights of residential long leaseholders in England and Wales, and it also ammends certain aspects of the Building Safety Act 2022 relating to building defect remediation.

At bill stage its long title was decribed as a bill '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.'

The Act indicately changes or extends the definition of “relevant defects” in section 120 of the Building Safety Act 2022 to include a definition for “relevant steps”, which means works aimed at preventing or reducing the likelihood of fire or structural collapse as a result of relevant defects, or reducing the severity of any such incident. As such this change also impacts Remediation Orders (RO) in that landlords can be required to take specified relevant steps to remediate, which includes preventative, mitigation works and remedial works. In turn this also impacts the powers relating to Remediation Contribution Orders (RCO) to also include the phraseology of relevant steps.

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